Overview

Exploring the fascinating lives of four gay contemporaries, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home traces the advent of professional interior decoration in America against the backdrop of the homes these men created for themselves. All now public museums, these fascinating sites not only reflect the intimate lives of their owners, but also serve as monuments to the Queer shaping of the American home as we know it today. Readers will encounter Charles Leonard Pendleton, (1846-1904), one of the greatest furniture collectors of his age and the first to create the “period room” in an American museum (a recreation, in fact, of his own home); Ogden Codman Jr. (1863-1951), whose successful 1897 manifesto, The Decoration of Houses, co-authored with novelist Edith Wharton, summoned his family’s 18th century Massachusetts home – and the ancestral ghosts it contained; Charles Hammond Gibson. Jr. (1874-1954), whose domestic embodiment of the elite “Boston Brahmin” evolved into a camp persona that shocked this very milieu; and Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934) who established his national design reputation through Beauport, the eccentric home he created for himself, and as tribute to the man he loved. Fully illustrated with color plates and period photographs, this book pays tribute to Oscar Wilde’s “gospel of beauty,” a cause these men promoted in a dazzling range of designs. Readers will feel they’ve stepped across these once-private thresholds as guests – and as witnesses to the birth of the contemporary American interior.

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9781538173954

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"Tripp Evans's The Importance of Being Furnished offers a fresh, important perspective on the interest in the past at the turn of the 20th century. In contrast to the female-oriented ""cult of domesticity"" of the mid-19th century, Evans explores the male-driven ""cult of curating"" that prized the individual expressiveness of personal taste in the bachelor house. Eschewing the Christian virtues of the nuclear family in which the home was retreat, he uses case studies to demonstrate how non-marriage freed some males to explore collecting and furnishing. This study provides the foundational history for the glorification of the bachelor pad in the 1960s, when the single professional man projected tasteful consumption and pleasurable entertainment through modern design and gadgets. --Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University"

Author Information

R. Tripp Evans is an award-winning historian of American art and design. He is a frequent public lecturer, professor of the history of art at Wheaton College, and serves as a collections consultant to historic house museums. In his more recent work, Evans has focused on the contributions gay men have made to the development of American style. His biography of the American painter Grant Wood considers the roles that Wood's sexuality and family life played in his art, and the complicated way his work--particularly, his iconic painting American Gothic (1930)--became a powerful vehicle for nationalist expression. Grant Wood: A Life won the National Award for Arts Writing.

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