Art Night Open House + Author Talk & REading with R. Tripp Evans — THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FURNISHED — June 27 at 6 PM & 7:15 PM
Exploring the lives of four bachelor designers, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home invites readers into the private worlds they created.
Spanning the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, these fascinating interiors not only reflect the intimate lives of their owners—men whose personal stories have, until now, remained in the shadows—but they serve as monuments to the Queer shaping of the American home as we know it today. This book accompanies a major Historic New England exhibition of the same title, held at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts (June 21-October 27, 2024).
Event Details
Join us for an open house from 5:30 to 8:30 PM during Bristol Warren’s Art Night, featuring two different author talks by award-winning historian of American art and design R. Tripp Evans, each drawn from his new book, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home.
At 6 PM, hear how collector Charles Pendleton (1846-1904) and architect Ogden Codman Jr. (1863-1951) harnessed eighteenth-century design to forge new identities for themselves, despite considerable odds.
At 7:15 PM, find out how writer Charles Hammond Gibson (1874-1951) and interior designer Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934) found love—and made it—in their homes.
Books will be for sale and signing between 5:30 and 8:30 PM.
About the Book
Meet Charles Leonard Pendleton, (1846–1904), the reclusive gambler who built one of the greatest furniture collections of his age, all for a house ultimately built on sand. Explore the aristocratic interiors of renowned interior decorator Ogden Codman, Jr. (1863–1951), whose ancestral home served as a laboratory for his enormously successful 1897 manifesto, The Decoration of Houses, even as it transmitted his forebears’ vices. Join the literary salon of writer Charles H. Gibson, Jr. (1874–1954), who made his Boston home a monument to personal ambition and his own, once heralded beauty—all while transforming himself into a campy caricature of his own “Boston Brahmin” class. And last, fall under the spell of Henry Davis Sleeper (1878–1934), the nationally recognized decorator who created his fifty-room seaside masterpiece, Beauport, for the love of the man next door.
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 styles. By turns poignant, outrageous, and inspiring, the stories of these “surprisingly domestic bachelors” (as the press dubbed them) reveal the complicated depths beneath their homes’ brilliant surfaces.
Praise
“A fresh, important perspective on the turn of the 20th century. . . . Evans explores the male-driven ‘cult of curating’ that prized the individual expressiveness of personal taste in the bachelor house.” —Edward S. Cooke, Jr., the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University
About the Author
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.
At the Event
Make Ink Fish Books a downtown destination as you enjoy the vibrant art scenes in Warren and Bristol during Art Night. Visit open studios and galleries to see talks with artists, art demonstrations, and more!
Ink Fish Books is a proud participant in Art Night Bristol & Warren.
Books will be available for purchase at the event and in store.
Or preorder online below.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FURNISHED. Available beginning June 4.