“It begins with Oscar Wilde,” writes R. Tripp Evans, art history professor at Wheaton College in Norton, in his new book, “ The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home ” (Rowman & Littlefield), which pulls the curtain back on a quartet of gay men who shaped the aesthetics of the home in America. Evans details a convergence of factors, “historical, literary, economic, and sexual — that, for the first time in the modern era, established the single man’s household as an aspirational domestic model.
” He looks at Henry Davis Sleeper, who created the sweeping mansion Beauport for the neighbor he loved; Charles H. Gibson, whose Boston home boasted deep trappings of wealth and taste; Ogden Codman Jr., author of the manifesto “The Decoration of Houses”; and furniture collector, recluse, and gambler Charles Leonard Pendleton.
All these homes are now museums open to the public, in Gloucester, Lincoln, Boston, and Providence. And these men were “acolytes of beauty whose collections, homes, and even whose very persons exemplified [Wilde’s] decree that ‘the secret of life is art.’” The book’s publication coincides with an exhibit that opens this Friday, June 21, at the Eustis Estate in Milton, with a selection of furniture, curios, and personal artifacts.
The Eustis Estate is at 1424 Canton Ave., in Milton. For more information, go to historicnewengland.
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