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.

R. Tripp Evans is a Professor of the History of Art at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where he specializes in American material culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He earned his B.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, where he was named the Henry S. McNeil Fellow in American Decorative Arts. He is the author of three books, and in 2010 received the Marfield Prize for his biography of the artist Grant Wood. His latest book, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), explores the private and professional worlds of men whose homes defined American style from the Gilded to the Jazz Ages.