WaterFire Symposium: Author Discussion with Tripp Evans
Event Details
A WaterFire Symposium, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home with Author Tripp Evans
Join us with our partners at Symposium Books as Professor Tripp Evans of Wheaton College MA discusses his book, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, an exploration of masculinity in the home, and its cultural significance through time. Tripp explores four historical bachelor designers and their impact on style. The book will be available for purchase at the event in the WaterFire Store.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WINNER OF THE 2010 NATIONAL AWARD FOR ARTS WRITING
Tripp Evans is a Virginian by birth and Rhode Islander by adoption – hence his love for bourbon, Gothic storytelling, and stuffed quahogs. He majored in architectural history at the University of Virginia and received his Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. Since 1997 he has taught in the Art and Art History Department at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, specializing in American art and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Evans’s books examine how and why American artists evoke national character in their work – from U.S. explorers’ fanciful representations of the pre-Columbian past (Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915) to Grant Wood’s deeply personal use of national iconography (Grant Wood: A Life). Biography – whether of nations, institutions, or individuals – is his favorite genre, and artists’ creative deception his greatest fascination.
In his most recent project, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, Evans takes these themes indoors. Exploring the private lives and spaces of four bachelor-designers – men inspired by Oscar Wilde’s “gospel of beauty” and driven by private compulsions – this book reveals the complicated depths beneath their homes’ brilliant surfaces.
HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND EXHIBITION
The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home will be on display this June at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts.
Historic New England invites you to explore the 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. R. Tripp Evans, Professor of Art History at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, is the guest curator of the exhibition. Evans is a specialist in American material culture and historic preservation.
The Importance of Being Furnished explores how these men used their homes as both expressions of their personal identities and to create a sense of belonging. It sheds light on the pioneering role the “bachelor decorator” played in early twentieth-century historic preservation, collecting, and interior design. In deeply creative and personal ways, these men used their homes to forge identity, foster relationships, and create lasting design legacies.
The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home at the Eustis Estate, 1424 Canton Avenue, Milton, Mass. The Eustis Estate is open from Friday to Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The grounds are open from dawn to dusk. The exhibition is on view from June 21 to October 27, 2024.
ABOUT WATERFIRE SYMPOSIUM
WaterFire is pleased to partner with Symposium Books to host and co-curate this series of public dialogues that are presented for free and are open to all.
The WaterFire Symposium is a series of public lectures, readings and conversations about vital and timely issues from the arts to the sciences, from history to the climate crisis. WaterFire’s mission is to inspire our community. Bringing us all together in cordial discussion about the issues impacting our community helps us better understand the issues of the day.
**The views and opinions expressed by speakers/presenters at the WaterFire Arts Center are those of the speakers/authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of WaterFire Providence or any of our partners, sponsors, or supporters.**
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