5 minute read
Bachelor’s Choice
by R. TRIPP EVANS
Tripp Evans is Professor of Art History at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where he specializes in American material culture and historic preservation.
Poet T. S. Eliot once wrote, “It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.” Each of the following works captures the time, space, and selfhood of a single man; together, they provide a glimpse of the dazzling range of works in Historic New England’s exhibition, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, open June 21 through October 27 at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts.
Ogden Codman Jr.
A prized possession of designer Ogden Codman Jr. (1863-1951), this striking John Singleton Copley portrait [above] of his twice-great uncle functioned like an ancestral talisman. The rakish “Bad Uncle Richard,” as the family remembered him, nearly destroyed the Codman shipping firm through profligate spending, sexual scandal, and a weakness for acquiring French châteaux—all proclivities he passed down to Ogden Codman Jr. Installed at Codman’s Château de Grégy, Richard’s image embodied the luxurious, Francophile tastes of Codman’s bestselling 1897 treatise, The Decoration of Houses (coauthored with Edith Wharton), while also inspiring the designer’s ruinous real estate ventures. Writing his brother while near bankruptcy in 1931, Codman sighed, “It is like poor Uncle Richard all over again.”
Henry Davis Sleeper
Octagonal Sailor's Valentines like this one, collected by interior decorator Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934), were marketed to sailors in the nineteenth century as romantic souvenirs for loved ones back home. Drawn to all forms of Victorian folk art, Sleeper often installed these works with a wry sense of humor. When he decorated the Pewter Room at Red Roof, the home of his neighbor and lifelong love, A. Piatt Andrew, he installed a similar Sailor's Valentine at the room’s center. Years later Sleeper’s valentine inspired, in part, the most celebrated space at his own home, Beauport, overlooking Gloucester harbor. Decorated in pulsing reds, Sleeper’s octagonal Souvenir de France Room recalls the valentine’s silhouette as well as the signature color of Andrew’s home.
Charles Leonard Pendleton
When antiques dealer Charles Leonard Pendleton (18461904) bequeathed his valuable collection of eighteenth-century furniture to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in 1904, his gift included several items that, like the man himself, were not all they appeared to be. Pendleton’s personal bedstead reflects his love for the English Chippendale style, as well as his penchant for “improving” antique works with reproduction elements. The bed’s eighteenth-century posts surround a virtuoso example of carving he commissioned around 1900, drawn from Plate XXX in Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754). Fittingly enough, this centerpiece framed the deathbed of a collector who valued beauty more than truth.
Charles Hammond Gibson
Upon inheriting his family’s Back Bay townhouse in 1934, Boston writer Charles Hammond Gibson Jr. (1874-1954) placed the 1860 home under a virtual bell jar. Strictly preserving interiors last decorated in the 1890s, he altered just one space: his father’s former bedroom, which he renamed the Red Study and dedicated as a writing studio. Here Gibson installed this mid-Victorian armchair, a favorite of his father’s, in a gesture more defiant than sentimental. Opposed to Gibson’s calling as a poet and mortified by his son’s youthful same-sex affairs, his father had disinherited him in his 1916 will. When Gibson assumed ownership of the home eighteen years later, following the death of his mother, he replaced his father’s presence with his own.
Historic New England’s exhibition The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home is drawn from R. Tripp Evans’s book of the same title, a full-color examination of the four homes and their creators that publisher Rowman & Littlefield will release in June 2024. Please consider supporting this captivating exhibition, which will be free to members. The public can enjoy the exhibition with admission to the Eustis Estate. Special related programs and tours also will be available. Large exhibitions are not possible without support from members and friends. To learn more and make a gift, visit HistoricNewEngland.org/Furnished or send your gift to The Development Office, Historic New England, 151 Essex Street, Haverhill, MA 01832.
