The Importance of Being Furnished

Enter the private world of four New England bachelors, men who transformed their homes - now all public museums - into personal artistic statements.
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 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.
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.

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.