The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, by R. Tripp Evans

Join Wheaton College professor R. Tripp Evans for an exploration of his latest book, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, which examines the private worlds of four “confirmed bachelors” – men whose homes defined American style from the Gilded to the Jazz Age. They include Charles L. Pendleton (1846-1904), the reclusive gambler who built one of his era’s collections of eighteenth-century furniture; renowned interior decorator Ogden Codman, Jr. (1863-1951), who inherited his ancestors’ vices along with their aristocratic pedigree; writer Charles H. Gibson, Jr. (1874-1954), who transformed his family’s Back Bay home into a personal literary shrine and monument to his own beauty; and Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934), who created his Eastern Point masterpiece, Beauport, for the love of his extended coterie of friends – a circle that included painter Cecilia Beaux, Harvard economist Piatt Andrew, and collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. The stories of these “surprisingly domestic bachelors” (as the press dubbed them) reveal the complicated depths beneath their homes’ brilliant surfaces.

Please join us for a wine & cheese reception and book signing following the lecture.

This event is hosted by an ICAA Chapter. Please check the Chapter website or contact the Chapter directly for the most up-to-date details including dates, times, and pricing.