A Sneak Preview of “The Importance of Being Furnished”
On Thursday, June 6, 2024 from 6:30 p.m. to 7:45 p.m., I watched a webinar about an upcoming exhibit at Historic New England’s Eustis Estate Museum: “The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home”. This exhibit was curated by R. Tripp Evans, an art history professor at my undergraduate alma mater Wheaton College, along with a material culture and historic preservation expert. The talk was introduced by public program administrator Moriah Illsley and site manager Karla Rosenstein. I first learned about this exhibition during Day 1 of Historic New England Summit 2023 and wanted to find out more.
Evans’ is based on his book by the same name, which was released on June 4 by Rowman & Littlefield. Both book and talk began with an anecdote about his grandmother’s house at 1821 Park Avenue in Richmond, VA. His grandmother moved into the house in December 1944, and his grandfather died suddenly only three days after moving in. Evans recalled being more interest in “moldings and mill work” at the house than in athletics at summer camp. In the 1980s, when the time came to sell the house, his grandmother was “consternated” that the new owners were a pair of unmarried men, although Evans believes the house had never been in better hands.
The four bachelors in the book, as mentioned at the Summit, are Charles L. Pendleton, a collector of 18th century furniture and decorative arts who lived in Providence, RI and had the RISD Museum make a recreation of his house; Ogden Codman, Jr., co-author of The Decoration of Houses with Edith Wharton and owner of HNE’s Codman Estate in Lincoln, MA; Charles H. Gibson, Jr., a writer and poet from the Back Bay whose 137 Beacon Street home is now a museum (and the only one on the list I have not visited); and Henry Davis Sleeper, an interior designer and architect who create HNE’s Beauport Sleeper-McCann House in Gloucester, MA. Evans chose these many because their many commonalities, including region, period, economic class, sexuality, and professional interior decoration.
Evans explained the period that led to the decoration of these homes, asking “What is the bachelor house?” In the 1882, Oscar Wilde toured the United States giving lectures about the aesthetic movement, “art for art’s sake”, and scandalizing the Boston Brahmin. In his speech, “The House Beautiful”, he “argued that bachelors were… best suited to creating… the perfect artistic American home”. Boston had no shortage of bachelors, accounting for nearly a third of all men in 1890. This sparked a literary phenomenon, “Bachelor Literature”, written by men and for men in an attempt to replace women from the center of the American home. My favorite quote on the subject was by Oliver Bell Bunce: “Daintiness in men takes an artistic form; in women, it assumes a formidable order, a fearful cleanliness”; I am worried that he never dusted or washed dishes. Another highlight from this section of the talk was humorist Guy Wetmore Carryl who named his shingle-style house Shingle Blessedness, which he dedicated to Henry Davis Sleeper.
Next, Evans described the galleries of the exhibit. Gallery I: “Double Vision at the Codman Estate”, centers around the John Singleton Copley portraits of brothers Richard Codman and John Codman III, the rakish great-great-uncle and stalwart great-grandfather of Ogden Codman, Jr., who idolized both of his ancestors. Gallery II: “The Ghost of Charles Pendleton” focuses on the Chippendale-style furniture of Pendleton, known for winning and losing huge fortunes when gambling, while his antiques deal was not always “on the up-and-up”. Gallery III “Love and Magic on Eastern Point” juxtaposes the portraits of Henry Davis Sleeper and A. Piatt Andrew, as “indoorsy”, often ill Sleeper built his masterpiece as a “love offering” two doors down from Red Roof, home of charismatic, athletic Andrew. Gallery IV: “The Bard of Beacon Street” highlights the work of poet and author Charles Gibson to preserve his legacy by turning his home, once the home of his parents, into a museum.
This fun talk struck a balance between conveying serious information and using light humor. I enjoyed the opportunity to add to my understand of the upcoming exhibit, and I am excited to visit in person once it opens, which will be on June 21 through October 27, 2024.