Today William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) may be best known as the model for the media mogul portrayed by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane; the inventor of “yellow journalism”: the publisher of 28 newspapers, including the New York Journal and the flagship San Francisco Examiner, and of such magazines as Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan; and the builder at San Simeon of Hearst Castle, a 115-room residence that is now a popular tourist site in California, welcoming up to 5,400 people a day.

That he was also a prodigious collector of art, furnishings and objects—his New York Times obituary estimated that during the 1920s and ’30s he accounted for a quarter of the world’s art market—is less well known. And even those aware of his passion give him little respect for it. During his life and the half-century since his death, the cognoscenti have written Hearst off as an indiscriminate cultural vacuum cleaner, sucking up more dross than gold. When he was forced by long-term financial reversals to liquidate a substantial portion of his holdings, in the late 1930s, a New Yorker writer covering the sale sniffed that “the catholicity of Mr. Hearst’s taste sap[s] my strength.”

Now, however, Mary Levkoff, a curator of European painting and sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art— to which Hearst was the greatest individual donor from 1946 until his death—has organized an exhibition that reassesses his achievements as a connoisseur and patron of architecture and design. Hearst the Collector is the catalogue of that exhibition, a lavishly illustrated and judicious apologia that aims to set the record straight on an “extravagant, amusing, intuitive and voracious” man who, Levkoff says, simply “loved to collect” and loved to construct environments to house the treasures he found. She points out that Hearst owned “the greatest number of great tapestries in private hands,” as well as a collection of arms and armor “surpassed only by [that of] the financier Clarence Mackay.” He also amassed a remarkable hoard of silver and what Dietrich von Bothmer, the former chairman of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has characterized as the 20th century’s “biggest private collection of ancient pottery.” These holdings alone should have put him on a par with the Fricks, Mellons, Morgans and Gardners of this world, but—Levkoff believes—he gets short shrift because his collections were weak in easel painting, “which hold[s] top billing in the hierarchy of the arts.”

To be sure, there are some magnificent paintings in both the book and the exhibition: a sumptuous 1633 Van Dyck portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria dressed in indigo taffeta and pensively fondling a monkey; Thomas Lawrence’s circa 1791 portrait of the brooding but self-confident schoolboy aristocrat Arthur Atherley; some nacreous Bouchers and Fragonards; and a Lorenzo Lotto Madonna with a boisterous Christ child on her lap. But paintings play a supporting role. The spotlight is on tapestries, sculpture, decorative and sacramental objects, pottery, armor, cassoni (large, richly ornamented chests) and out-of-context architectural elements—altarpieces, painted ceilings, wooden paneling. This is probably how Hearst would have wished it. The man who wired his managing director “Want buy castle in England please find which ones available,” and fussed over every detail of his architects’ plans for his many houses and seemed most to enjoy constructing elaborate, fully decorated stage sets in which to play out the drama of his life.

So it’s perhaps inevitable that Levkoff has chosen to tell the story of Hearst and his collections through accounts of six of his residences: his Georgian Revival Santa Monica beach house, a Welsh castle, a Long Island Gold Coast château, a Bavarian-style forest retreat in California, a baronial New York quintuplex and Hearst Castle, which its owner called “the ranch.” These weren’t neutral backgrounds for carefully edited art; they were multimillion-dollar nests to be feathered with the finest plumage. And the narratives of their construction and embellishment show Hearst at his expansive, engaged, insatiable best.