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Beauty and the Bachelor
Above: Jabot, France (1824). Silk (76” x 63 1/4”). One of a set of curtains and matching seating upholstery ordered by Charles Russell Codman from Paris in 1824. Museum Purchase with funds provided by a friend of Historic New England.
by R. TRIPP EVANS
Tripp Evans is a Professor of Art History at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where he specializes in American material culture and historic preservation. He is the guest curator of the upcoming exhibition The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts.
This summer Historic New England will invite visitors into the private world of four captivating bachelors – men whose homes defined American style from the Gilded to the Jazz Age, yet whose personal lives have until recently remained mostly in shadow. Opening June 21 at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home exhibition will examine the foundational role these “bachelor aesthetes” played in early twentieth-century preservation and interior design, showcasing an extraordinary range of furnishings, design work, and personal artifacts drawn from the men’s own homes.
Spanning the Aesthetic Movement and Colonial Revival periods, these homes – today all public museums – include Pendleton House (1906) at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum in Providence, built to replicate the Federal-era home of gambler-collector-dealer Charles Leonard Pendleton (1846-1904); Historic New England’s Codman Estate (c. 1741) in Lincoln, Massachusetts, home to five generations of the Codman family and redecorated in its final stage by renowned designer Ogden Codman Jr. (1863-1951); Gibson House in Boston’s Back Bay, an 1860 townhouse preserved by its final occupant, writer Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. (1874-1954); and Historic New England’s Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House (1907) in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the eclectic masterpiece of interior decorator Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934).
Each of these New England designer-collectors came of age when, for the first time in the modern era, the bachelor household had become an aspirational domestic model – a marked shift from the previous generation, which had believed the American home’s highest and even exclusive goal was to support family life. This development not only introduced a wider range of possibilities for non-traditional households, but it also led to a newfound fascination with interior design and individual expression in their own right – a phenomenon clearly seen in the wide range of styles these men adopted, both in their own homes and in others’. All four practiced professional interior decoration, and two in particular – Codman and Sleeper – shaped the emerging field in important ways.
The elevation of the bachelor household may be directly traced to Oscar Wilde. During his extraordinarily popular, year-long American lecture bottom right Edmund Willson, preliminary sketch for Pendleton House at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (c. 1904). Watercolor and pencil on paper. RISD Museum Archives, Providence, Rhode Island. tour in 1882, the writer professed the Aesthetic Movement’s “art-for-art’s-sake” credo, a message that profoundly reshaped the world that Pendleton, Codman, Gibson, and Sleeper later inherited. Insisting that artistic creativity should be divorced from moral purpose, Wilde claimed that beauty constituted an end unto itself. Translated to the realm of domestic design (Wilde’s most frequently delivered lecture in 1882 was “The House Beautiful”), this message sought to replace the home’s traditional aims – to nurture children and inculcate Christian virtue – with the presumably higher calling of individual artistic expression.
Addressing “the youth of the land,” a constituency that included neither women nor married men, Wilde proclaimed, “The passion for beauty engendered by the decorative arts will be to them more satisfying than any political or religious enthusiasm, any enthusiasm for humanity, any ecstasy or sorrow for love.” Not only was marriage non-essential to domestic style, Wilde’s argument ran, but it might even present an impediment. Homemaking, it appeared, was better suited to the single man of means, a figure who could collect, design, and entertain unencumbered by the demands of family life. Addressing both its married and unmarried readership, the popular Munsey’s magazine declared in 1899 that “the bachelor… has become master of the comforts and luxuries of a home of his own, with all the resources of capital and science to minister to his every need.”
Pendleton, Codman, Gibson, and Sleeper were the very men Wilde had in mind: acolytes of beauty whose collections, homes, and even whose very persons exemplified his decree that “the secret of life is art.”
In assembling his unparalleled collection of eighteenth-century Chippendale furniture, the reclusive Pendleton lived for visual perfection not only at the cost of his “enthusiasm for humanity,” to use Wilde’s phrase, but even sometimes at the expense of the works’ authenticity. Visitors to the exhibition will see examples of Pendleton’s extraordinary Chippendale collection alongside reproductions the dealer passed off as the genuine article, and even a monumental combination of both – a piece that served, appropriately enough, as the head of Pendleton’s deathbed. By recreating a tableau of Pendleton’s now-vanished private interiors, moreover, this exhibition will consider their translation to the “period rooms” of Pendleton House, a curatorial practice first introduced when this wing opened in 1906. By presenting these museum rooms as the fictional home of an eighteenth-century gentleman avatar, the collector managed to erase his own murky past as a high-stakes gambler and sometimes dubious dealer.
Codman was himself so enamored of eighteenth-century style, beginning with his ancestral Lincoln home, that he codified its principles in the authoritative 1897 treatise he co-authored with Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses. Drawn both to Yankee simplicity and Continental excess, Codman developed his successful decorating style by reconciling these seemingly opposing approaches; though generally conservative in his approach, he insisted that any false element in decoration (a faux finish, a dummy window) was acceptable as long as it provided visual pleasure. Through a wide collection of furnishings, plans, and personal materials from the Codman Estate and Historic New England’s Codman Family Papers, visitors to the exhibition will learn how the renowned designer’s family home served as his first design laboratory, emotional touchstone, and primary legacy and also how the opposing figures of his patrician and rakish ancestors informed his signature style.
For Gibson, no beauty matched his own gilded youth and poetic voice, and so he arrested these forever in his family’s Back Bay home, oblivious to his own aging body and the vicissitudes of literary and decorating taste. Beginning in 1936, when he formalized the scheme for his house-museum, Gibson created a kind of installation piece with himself as its primary exhibit. Until his death in 1954 he faithfully preserved the interiors of 137 Beacon Street, last decorated by his mother in the 1890s; he wrote countless unpublished sonnets in a romantic, Victorian mode; and when he received visitors, he dressed like a Boston “Brahmin” of the late nineteenth century. Using letters, manuscripts, furnishings, and the home’s ubiquitous examples of Gibson’s own youthful image, the exhibition will reveal the man as a kind of historical manifestation of Wilde’s Dorian Gray.
At Beauport, one of the best known of Historic New England’s properties – and certainly, one of the most widely published houses in America – Sleeper orchestrated beauty in a surprising range of forms. Using color, line, scale, pattern, and visual humor, he disregarded historical accuracy to achieve powerful visual effects. At the Eustis Estate galleries the nature of these strategies will be distilled to a dazzling collection of Beauport artifacts; even those familiar with the house will see new juxtapositions that illuminate Sleeper’s decorating strategies, and important objects that, given the house’s wonderfully distracting variety, have sometimes been overlooked. Here, too, visitors will consider the personal connections that drove Beauport’s development, a circle that included collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, painter Cecilia Beaux, and the dashing financial scholar and politician, A. Piatt Andrew, Beauport’s primary muse.
The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home presents a unique opportunity to see the New England home in a new context. Many of the Historic New England artifacts on display have never been seen outside their properties or the Historic New England archives, and none of the loan objects from RISD or the Gibson House Museum have traveled before. Together, this constellation of works will illuminate an underexamined story in the history of American interior design, all within the walls of a historic home that is, itself, an important example of Aesthetic Movement design. Wilde himself could not have chosen a more appropriate venue.
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 and 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 www.HistoricNewEngland.org/Furnished or send your gift to The Development Office, Historic New England, 151 Essex Street, Haverhill, MA 01832.
