The Importance of Being Furnished, with Tripp Evans and Erica Lome (episode 308)

Transcript

Introduction to the Importance of Being Furnished

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the universe. This is episode 308. The importance of being furnished with Erica Loam and Trent Evans. Hi, I’m Jake. This week, I’m talking about four decorators who helped revolutionize interior design as the new aesthetic movement brought beauty and artistic sensibility to homes that had previously been dedicated to reinforcing traditional morality.

Jake:
[0:38] In the wake of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour focusing on the house, beautiful outlandishly decorated bachelor households became an aspirational style that helped define American homes. From the Gilded age to the jazz era. Charles Gibson, Ogden Codman, Charles Pendleton and Henry Sleeper. And of course their homes in Boston’s Back, Bay Gloucester, Lincoln and Providence are the subjects of an exhibit at the Eustace estate in Milton. At the time, all four men would have been known as Bachelor A thees born into privileged families, but hiding their queerness to greater or lesser degrees in an era when it was still criminalized. In this interview. Exhibit, curators, Tripp, Evans and Erica Lo will tell us how these men took inspiration from their personal lives in decorating their own homes and how they leveraged those lavish homes into careers in decorating for everyone from Robber Barons to Hollywood stars. But before we talk about these four designers and the importance of being furnished, I just want to pause and say thank you to all the generous sponsors and make it possible for me to make up history. I love that. I have an excuse to have conversations with smart people like Erica Loeb and Tripp Evans and to learn aspects of Boston history and architecture that I never knew before. I’d never have a chance to do stuff like this without the podcast. And I couldn’t make the podcast without a little help from my sponsors.

Jake:
[2:07] Whether you choose a one time contribution on paypal or monthly support of $2.05 dollars or even $10 or more, your support goes to offset the expenses that go into making hub history. Knowing that I can rely on my supporters means that I can invest in web hosting and security, podcast media, hosting A I tools and online audio processing. Even at a time when I’m carefully watching expenses while I try to find a job, to everyone who’s already supporting the show. Thank you. If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com/hubor or visit hubor.com and click on the Support us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Meet the Curators: Tripp Evans & Erica Lome

Jake:
[2:54] I’m joined now by Tripp Evans and Erica Lome. Erica Lome is the curator at Historic New England. And Tripp Evans is a professor of art History at Wheaton College and the guest curator of the importance of being furnished, which is now on view at historic New England’s Eustace estate in Milton, Erica and Tripp. Welcome to the show.

Jake:
[3:18] We are gathered here today to talk about an exhibit. I almost had a new exhibit, but it’s been on view for a month or two now at the Eustace estate in Milton and it’s called the importance of being furnished. So just to set it up, it’s an exhibit that focuses on four homes, four houses that were furnished by four designers and collectors in the decades, sort of immediately surrounding the turn of the 20th century into the 19th, beginning of the 20th. And it’s four designers who might have been known as confirmed bachelors at the time. We probably think of them as gay today before we really get into their houses and their sort of design philosophies. Can we talk for a minute about what it’s like to research LGBT Q people in an era when homosexuality was a crime here in Massachusetts, punishable by imprisonment?

Tripp:
[4:11] Well, it’s, it requires some real patience and sometimes some creativity and how you approach your subjects because in some ways, no one wanted to sort of cover their tracks more so than the subjects themselves. Um So what we’re faced with as researchers, often of LGBT Q plus subjects from the late gilded age and and early 20th century are really telling absences, sometimes of private correspondence of anything related to relationships. And for that reason, researchers sometimes have to approach topics obliquely, you have to approach topics through other subjects, sometimes who may know more about your subject than your subject, who’s telling you himself or herself. And I think sometimes just starting with a telling absence or a telling silence, um speaks volumes about what needs to be found um within these because in the, in the records of most, you know, heterosexual historical figures, it’s not so hard to reconstruct people’s private lives and relationships. But when you encounter folks who either were known to be gay within their own lifetime or suspected to be, I think that is one of the biggest red flags in the beginning is that suddenly you may have all their business correspondence

Researching LGBTQ Lives in History

Tripp:
[5:31] and it’s as if they had no private lives at all but it’s not impossible to reconstruct. It just take some patience.

Jake:
[5:37] That’s interesting. It’s almost the opposite of what historians are usually looking for that you’re looking for the documentary, you’re looking for the letters, you’re looking for account books, you’re looking for any documents that they specifically created. And here it’s almost, you’re, you’re looking for a black hole where there the documents should be. There’s no love letter, there’s no private journal, there’s no, no private life revealed at all in some ways.

Tripp:
[6:01] Yeah. The, the metaphor I always use, you know, those, um, those bodies that they reconstruct from Pompeii where the body, the body has disappeared. But like the cavity where the body once existed still is. So, it’s the, it’s the historian’s job, I think in some of these cases, to be the one who pumps the into that cavity, you know, the, the cavity is there, the, the life, you know, didn’t disappear. Um It’s just that you’ve got to use detective skills and other sources in order to recreate that void, but the void itself is still there. And I think very telling.

Jake:
[6:36] I’m sure for, for some folks there is chatter from other people speculating about the private lives of, of somebody you might research. So it’s hard to know how much weight to give to something like that versus the photographic negative of a private life that’s, that’s missing from the record.

Tripp:
[6:52] The chatter can be very important. I mean, as, as Erica knows, the, the Codman family manuscript collection at historic New England is vast, um almost so vast as to be kind of paralyzing for a researcher. But to give you a specific example from this project, one of my subjects uh Charlie Gibson for, you know, 100 plus years, rumors had swirled around his same sex relationships. There’s no evidence of it within his personal archive. But if you go to the Codman archive who lived at the same time period and sort of swam in the same circles, suddenly you find letters between Ogden Codman and his colleagues, Ogden Codman and his mother that give us, you know, everything we need to know about what Charlie Gibson was was was up to. And that provides I think very useful evidence from a curatorial perspective because this was a challenge for us. How do you, how do you make that kind of evidence feel material and kind of alive for viewers?

Erica:
[7:53] Well, I was thinking as you were talking trip about how we operate 38 house museums and the philosophy of historic New England from the start has been to make those homes feel as authentic as possible for our visitors to walk in and say themselves, oh, I, I could see myself living here. I feel that people lived here once. And the irony is you, we can create those spaces and we can interpret those spaces. But the subjects themselves, the previous owners can still be a mystery to us and for, you know, to have these private spaces and still feel as though you don’t understand the private lives of their occupants is I think the challenge of and goal of interpretation to bridge that gap. And I think what the exhibition succeeds at doing is combining the material lives of these men, the interiors that they sunk their, their money, their passions, their experiences into and then connecting that with the archival material, the letters, the ephemera, the photography and trying to reconstruct a way of thinking a way of living that to our modern eyes. We could assign a letter on the alphabet. But for these men who, you know, lived in a different time, you know, they might not have regarded themselves as such or they might have bristled by anyone calling them gay or calling them straight or, you know, however the terminology we want to use, so it’s trying to be as.

Erica:
[9:19] Transparent as possible with what we know and what we don’t know and leaving the in between to not necessarily speculation but to allow the visitor to sit in that space and think about their own experiences and relate it to the experiences of these men and try to create that connection.

Erica:
[9:38] So it’s difficult as a curator, you, you don’t wanna feed, you don’t wanna shove answers down anyone’s throats. You know, there’s stuff that we believe trip, especially as the expert and the biographer of these men’s lives. But, you know, we, we’re not necessarily going to, tell visitors this person was this way, but we can present an accumulation of stories of objects, of letters of perspectives and then persuade folks to sort of think differently about a subject that they thought they knew or didn’t know anything about.

Tripp:
[10:13] And I think one of the easiest ways to do that and the thing that we’ve tried to do organically with this show is just as you say, Erica, rather than speaking in terms of broad categories, say the lived experience for this man was that he was in love with this other man, you know, and this and had this great relationship with this person. I think that gets closer in some ways to, to capturing the texture of what their lives felt like for them. They may not have imagined themselves as part of a larger kind of queer community. I think that’s probably not the case, but certainly for them, they, the, the truth of their lives was that for the majority of the four subjects that I cover in the book in the exhibition, their lives were primarily connected to same sex relationships that they would have recognized in terms of the individual rather than a category. Probably.

Jake:
[11:01] While these men may not have left documents to examine, they did leave behind the houses that are the subjects of the exhibit, the importance of being furnished

The Aesthetic Movement Unveiled

Jake:
[11:09] just to sort of lay the groundwork. Before we talk about the specifics of each of the homes and each of the men’s lives. This is a period again, sort of spanning a couple of decades on either side of the turn of the century, when the aesthetic movement was becoming predominant in, I guess, art and architecture. For listeners who like me, aren’t super familiar with this era of, of decorating and architecture. What was the aesthetic movement? How is it different from sort of preceding trends?

Tripp:
[11:38] If I had to put it in a nutshell, the aesthetic movement is a visual arts based movement that begins in England and spreads to the United States and elsewhere in the late 19th century. And the radical kind of platform of the aesthetic movement as espoused by people like Oscar Wilde, um James mcneil Whistler and others was that art needed to be removed from having any sense of a kind of moral mission. Victorian notions of the purpose of art was that it was didactic in nature. It was always meant to have a kind of an underlying moral purpose. And their radical notion was that art was for art’s sake, that was their motto. And the idea was that art existed only for uh a sense of beauty alone. And that led to the equally radical notion for say, the American home or, you know, domestic decoration, which was a big part of the aesthetic movement.

Tripp:
[12:32] That the home itself had no moral purpose that the homes decoration was about uh a reflection of a visual agenda that could be that of a family, it could be that of a married couple. But for Oscar Wilde, as you might imagine, ideally, it was the vision of a single person, um a unified artistic vision. And that’s what led into this radical idea that a bachelor could actually create a home that was worthy of emulation. Because prior to the 18 eighties, the very notion of the home in the absence of marriage or family or say the inculcation of Christian virtue, just didn’t even make any sense to anyone. Our modern notion that our homes are supposed to reflect our individual taste, which feels so natural to us now was a really unnatural idea in the late 19th century. And we can thank the aesthetic movement for it. Their whole notion was that homes are really just about visual vehicles for expressing personality.

Jake:
[13:37] Well, speaking of Oscar Wilde is one of the people who popularized this new idea. I read at the exhibit that he gave two talks on the house beautiful in Boston or around Boston? Do we know if any of the designers who are profiled in the exhibit actually attended one of his talks or do we know what their entry point into this movement would have been?

Tripp:
[13:56] Well, we, we don’t have strict evidence that there was a direct link between these talks and the older of the groups, Charles Charles Pendleton and Ogden coin would have really been the only two of the four that would have been old enough probably to attend these lectures. But Codman does mention quite a bit about Oscar Wilde. He is connected to the aesthetic movement as an early designer even in his late teens. Um But what’s more important in some ways is that Oscar Wilde kind of reshaped

Oscar Wilde’s Influence on Design

Tripp:
[14:29] or reframed the world that all four of these men inherited. So he hangs over this project, kind of like a patron saint, even if we can’t imagine them physically in the seats in those lecture rooms because I think you cannot underestimate the impact and the power that that lecture series and that the movement itself had on the ways that people thought about American interior decoration generally.

Erica:
[14:53] He, he provides a sort of thematic umbrella for understanding this exhibition and the ways that each of these four men had very different design aesthetics, but they were united by this sort of shared goal of creating homes that reflected their own, unique individual tastes. And that is something that you can make a direct connection to Wilde’s theories and philosophies of beauty and art.

Tripp:
[15:16] That’s one of the reasons why I think it was very useful for me to choose four subjects who are from the same region, the same class, the same time period, roughly the same kind of calling professionally because one would expect them to have all created kind of a cookie cutter kind of similar environment to one another. Certainly you see that say in Gilded Age, Newport, every one of those houses starts to look exactly the same from that period. But these four guys, uh you cannot imagine four environments more different than each other. And that’s quite surprising given the fact that they were from virtually the same mold and it’s precisely due to that aesthetic movement call to reflect your own individual personality.

Erica:
[16:00] Just to give a concrete example. One of the things that appeals to me about Beauport as a house and as a case study. So Beauport, the Sleeper mccann House in Gloucester, Massachusetts was the home of Henry Davis Sleeper, one of the subjects in the exhibition and Sleeper was such a fascinating person. His design aesthetic drew from many different sources. He was a collector. He thought about color and tone and mood and theme in his rooms. He collected and decorated with a lot of antiques, but he was not necessarily a faithful colonial revivalist or preservationist, but he saw history and uh antiques as inspiration. But when he was decorating and building his house and you know, in successive phases of construction, he built dining rooms, he built bedrooms, he built spaces for entertaining his close circle of friends on Cape An, but he did not build family rooms and it wasn’t until he passed away. And the mccann family took ownership of the house and they were advised to keep the house entirely the same to, to preserve Sleeper vision as faithfully as possible. With one exception, they transformed what Sleeper had constructed as the sort of China trade room, this elaborate.

Erica:
[17:18] Shinui fantasy space and they turned it into a family parlor, a drawing room for their home, for their Children. And that is sort of the one exception in the house where we can see the sort of functions of family play a role in how the space looked. And that seems to me the most telling example of an individual who was not building or decorating his home towards a sort of domestic ideal of family life, but towards his own pleasures and whims and you know, his, his own circle of friends and you know, no one else. So that is, I think the most concrete example of how these spaces reflected the nontraditional or non normative lifestyles and aspects of these subjects.

Jake:
[18:07] Let’s stay focused on Henry Sleeper and Beauport for a minute. Then Beauport is a home, uh an estate, I guess in Gloucester up on Cape Ann and specifically in an area of Gloucester known as Eastern Point. I had the opportunity to wander through the, through the exhibit last week and read some of the interpretive material and it says that he was drawn to the site. He was so driven to keep expanding and improving the home and adding to it and redecorating it by his obsession with one of his neighbors. I’m not sure the pronunciation might be Pet Andrew, maybe Pitt Andrew. Pet who was Pet Andrew.

Tripp:
[18:44] First, I want to thank you Erica for the whole point about fam no family rooms at Beauport. I, you know, all the years I’ve been working on this, that never occurred to me. But that’s, that’s I think a brilliant way to think about the difference between

The Romance of Henry Sleeper and P. Andrew

Tripp:
[18:54] the bachelor owner and subsequent uh ownership. The, the story of Henry Davis Sleeper and P Andrew is one that I believe is really at the center of the creation of Beauport. So what happens is that in April of 1906 P Andrew who was this incredibly handsome and charismatic and brilliant, Harvard economist was seated at a dinner party next to Henry Davis Sleeper. They’d never met before. P Andrew invites Sleeper subsequently to visit him at his home on Eastern Point called Red Roof later that month.

Tripp:
[19:30] And really for Henry Dave Sleeper, there was no looking back, he was head over heels in love with Pied Andrew as just about everyone who met Pied Andrew was and really lost no time buying the property as close as he could get to Red Roof, thereby sort of cementing his presence on Eastern Point. You know, it’s my belief that this romantic passion was probably a one way street between Sleeper and Pied Andrew. Pied Andrew uh conducted really only same sex affairs throughout his life. But Sleeper appears not to have really been his type, but they uh they, they remained very close friends. And as the development of Beauport kind of unfolded over the decades, I really do believe that its articulation had so much to do with Sleeper’s fascination with PT Andrew and his wish to, to maintain his attention in the, in the book, I call Beauport an architectural Geisha performance. It’s kind of this elaborate visual strategy to keep P Andrew interested.

Jake:
[20:36] In the exhibit. There are some objects from the 1921 octagon room and then some photos and views into what the octagon room looks like at Beauport. The whole thing is furnished in red. There’s a red railway signal lamp. There’s a taxidermied scarlet ibis. There’s a knife box that was a gift from Isabella Stewart Gardner. There’s all this over saturation of red and it’s referred to as, as Sleeper’s greatest love letter to Pet Andrew. Why did he think that the room or the house or the architecture essentially was how he was going to keep Andrew’s attention?

Tripp:
[21:09] That house at Beauport since its construction in the 19 twenties has almost always been singled out as kind of the jewel in a very studded crown. It is seen as sort of the highlight of his practice as an interior decorator. But the way that people have talked about the octagon or souvenir de France room, it goes kind of by two names. Um Was this concentration on its red color palette? Now, critics from the 19 twenties forward have had pointed to this beautiful color harmony. Um and even the name of the room, the souvenir de France room while scratching their heads thinking, huh, we’re not quite sure how he came up with all of this. And to me, all the evidence has always been there that this is a room that is almost kind of like a shrine to the owner of Red roof. Pie. And Andrew was associated with the color red, not just because of his house but certainly in the central way it was, but he was born a couple of days before Valentine’s Day. Friends competed with one another to make kind of inside jokes about the color red. They would write to him in red ink, they would use red, you know, writing paper.

Tripp:
[22:18] At one point, Sleeper said, you know, the time without you, Pied Andrew is so boring, but I have to remember that thousands of years of compression create not diamonds but rubies. So there was always this sense that red was his color. And significantly by calling it the souvenir de France room. He was recalling not say some general notion of like Franco American relations as the Beaufort’s guidebook in the 19 fifties, you know, insisted. But instead, he was recalling the one year that Pied Andrew and Sleeper shared together in Paris during World War one. In fact, much of the collection in that room came from that year when they were together in Paris for the war effort uh in 1917 to 1918, um the shape of the room, even the octagonal shape of its uh you know, space refers to a, a kind of folk art artifact that Sleeper collected called a Sailor’s Valentine. He collected these, he gave one to Pied Andrew. They are octagonal shell craft uh creations that were supposed to be um something that a sailor would give to his sweetheart when he came home from a voyage.

Jake:
[23:26] I saw at least one of those in the exhibit and then like a carved wooden witch, several folk art elements that seem to be mixed right alongside high end English porcelain, Japanese housewares. So it wasn’t all one style by any means. What does that sort of conglomeration mean?

Tripp:
[23:42] Two things he mixed high and low, an awful lot. Um So really valuable things next to kind of almost throwaway items. He was really attentive to the ways in which an object can inform a room. He almost always started with an object first and then let the object tell him what the room needed to be. So when I say that, you know, that dining room is an elaborate sailor’s Valentine. It makes sense from his perspective that you would start with something small that gives you an idea of germ for a larger space. And Eric as a curator, you can probably speak, you know, more eloquently than I can to his collection. I mean, it really is a range, isn’t it?

Erica:
[24:21] It’s an eclectic collection. And as I mentioned, he was not a devotee necessarily of the colonial revival. There were a lot of his peers and contemporaries who were collecting Americana with the broader goal of telling a story of American exceptionalism and connoisseurship who were concerned with an object’s provenance and its quality. Sure Sleeper was concerned with those things too. But for him, it was really about the ability of an object to tell a design story within the room.

Erica:
[24:51] So he had no qualms about painting over a Windsor chair to help it match the sort of sea foam green aesthetic of a space. Or to when he could not find the exact historic style he was looking for, he had his carpenter create something that looked historic but had no direct historical precedents.

Eclecticism in Sleeper’s Design

Erica:
[25:12] So he could do that in a room but also have incredible antiques of exceptional rarity. And that is why you could spend a week just looking at one room peeling back the different layers and every time you re enter that space, you’d notice something different. I think that’s why our visitors enjoy coming back time after time because he delighted in whimsy. He delighted in creating moments encounters between human and object, human and space and it rewards repeated viewing and close looking. And I think that’s what sets him apart from his peers who might have had more traditional aims of collecting and decorating.

Jake:
[25:57] I have to say one of my favorite objects that’s on display right now stands almost exactly in opposition to that idea that he wasn’t really collecting Americana and trying to create this, this idea of the American exceptionalism. Because over the, the mantle of the sleeper room is a white flag emblazoned with the pine tree, the motto we appeal to heaven. Uh It’s at least in the style of the flags that flew on some of the first American ships in the Revolutionary War. Is that an original from, from that era?

Erica:
[26:28] It could very likely be an original from that era. The trick of Beauport is that Sleeper did not keep a lot of records about where he acquired his objects and he destroyed a lot of his records right before his death or a lot of records were destroyed after his death. However, he was very attentive to history and to Americana in particular, but he always collected and decorated with sort of a wink to the audience and has a wonderful way of saying this. I’ll try to paraphrase there, you know, when you encounter that banner in the book tower room at Beauport, it’s a two floor, it’s a two story room that is very vertically oriented and the banner hangs down from the second story balcony. And it’s almost a joke we appeal to heaven. You’re looking up heaven, words to regard this banner. And sure, I think he enjoyed the historical significance of it, enjoyed the way it conjured up associations with other parts of the house where you have George Washington’s face appears uh like a little scavenger hunt throughout the house. Ben Franklin appears throughout the house. He was certainly enamored with the iconography of the founding fathers and of that era. But I don’t think he was necessarily collecting in order to preserve history in that sense, the way that many of his peers were.

Jake:
[27:53] I love seeing it there because lately that flag has become associated with sort of right wing movements. It was just in the press because Justice Alito was flying it in sort of a protest move after January 6th. So I, I just, I wonder how he would take the news of how it was displayed at Beauport.

Erica:
[28:10] What’s fascinating is that even in the 18th century context, it was already a symbol that had been appropriated, right? The, the pine tree symbol was an indigenous symbol of peace and it was used by the indigenous forces and then co opted by Washington and his, you know, associates. And then as this sort of second life in the 19th century, as this revival of patriotism. And obviously Sleeper might have known about some of these associations, might maybe he knew and disregarded them or maybe for him, it was more of like how it looked in the house suited him. And it has continued to transform and take on new meaning in the 20th and 21st centuries. And so it will be interesting to see in the future what visitors associate with that flag and with that symbol when they come to Beauport, uh and it’s going to remain at Beauport because it kind of gets folded into this larger conversation about history and how we encounter the past, it changes every day. Um But Sleeper vision remains in some ways uh frozen in time. Uh and, and not necessarily static, but when you go into that house, it is exactly as it was when he lived there and was decorating it.

Tripp:
[29:25] And you know what we, we selected that flag for the exhibition long before it was so visibly adopted by the right. And you know, and at first, I was a little horrified by thinking, wondering if people thought historical England was going to be making some kind

The Controversial Flag at Beauport

Tripp:
[29:40] of political symbol, you know, sort of, you know, signaling with this. But in another way, I’m really kind of glad that we used it because I feel like it allows, allows us to reclaim this as Sleepers and to reclaim it as something that is in its own way, a kind of winking. And I even think kind of a campy sensibility of like using American history in ways that are, you know, kind of revealing their sense of humor. I find that entire book tower kind of hilarious. So it was built right after or not long after uh Pet Andrew created his own library at Red Roof. And you can almost see Sleeper saying, look, I’m I’m into books too. I I love books and he created this Bonkers Library. I mean, who creates a round library to begin with? Like, it doesn’t even make sense the way that you display the books, it is tiny and compressed. And so just almost as symbolic of a library than really being a library itself. And then he flies his pennant at the very end saying we appeal to heaven and he was appealing to heaven for all kinds of reasons. With that library.

Jake:
[30:46] Beauport had to be more than, you know, his own space. And an appeal to Pet Andrew Sleeper was a working decorator. So it was also a calling card, a showroom. How did he use his house and press coverage of his house to further his career?

Tripp:
[31:03] I kind of part company in some ways with what has become kind of a traditional interpretation of Beauport where people talk about its many eclectic themed rooms as kind of a catalog or a showcase for him to use as a professional interior decorator. The problem that I have with that theory is that he really doesn’t hang up his shingle in a professional sense until most of those rooms were already completed. So, you know, many of them were already in place before he becomes a kind of high profile decorator. Certainly he’d been decorating for friends and others on cape an kind of informally for many years. So certainly clients were able to see, you know, in the 19 twenties and early 19 thirties, uh his kind of look, but it was such an unusual blend of ideas and objects that.

Tripp:
[31:50] In many ways, I, I feel like as a professional interior decorator, he never pulled off for clients, what he was able to do for himself. I think they didn’t have kind of the courage to, to pull off the kinds of things that, that he did having said that it really is those rooms though, that gets the attention of people like architect Arthur Little who right after Beauport was completed, he writes Sleeper and says, you’ve got to do this professionally. I mean, people would kill for this kind of eye or these kinds of rooms and he’s,

Beauport as a Personal Showcase

Tripp:
[32:19] he’s quite flattered by it and really sort of encouraged and true to form. What does he do as soon as he gets that compliment as he writes a letter to Pied Andrew and says, can you believe someone thinks that I’m good enough to be a professional interior decorator? When in fact, all the pains I took here were because of you. And he says explicitly at one point, Beauport would not have existed but for you. So it’s not to say that his kind of unrequited passion for Pied Andrew is the sole driving factor of Beauport that’s not mutually exclusive with other interpretations of those rooms. He certainly does become quite a successful professional interior decorator. I just, I think I, I approach with caution, the idea that the house itself um is a catalog meant for clients because I think most conservative clients would look at some of those rooms and, you know, run for the hills. They wouldn’t, they might think that’s, that’s great for you. But I, I can’t pull that off.

Jake:
[33:12] And Sleeper does end up designing for celebrities like Joan Crawford. He does some work for the Vanderbilts and that might be a transition to talk about another one of the subjects of the, the exhibit who also ended up doing

Transition to Ogden Codman Junior

Jake:
[33:25] some work for the Vanderbilts. At one point, if you don’t mind, can we shift gears and talk about uh Ogden Codman Junior a little bit. I I’ll admit that only one of these men had I ever met in the archives or anywhere before uh getting ready for this interview and, and going to the the Eustace estate to see the exhibit. So I was greeted walking into the, the room that serves as, as Ogden Codman with two giant John Singleton Copley portraits. Uh There’s a John Cobman the third and then there’s some of the Ogden has come to refer to as bad Uncle Richard. Um So can we start with who bad uncle Richard would have been or who these, who these portraits are often? And then how Ogden Junior came to, I guess, identify with his bad uncle.

Tripp:
[34:11] From a purely curatorial perspective. I was so excited to finally put these two Copley portraits together as pendant portraits. Um They both hang at the Cobon estate today, but in different rooms. And so the two brothers painted within a couple of years of one another, um have never kind of faced off in, in terms of their their portraits. The reason why I wanted those at the center of the Codman Gallery, which is entitled to Double vision of the Codman estate was to give a kind of graphic representation of the two poles that really defined Cod’s life. So Ogden Codman Junior revered and really worshiped these two ancestors. One was his great great grandfather, John Cogman the third and the other was Richard Cogman, who was his great, great uncle. You cannot imagine two brothers more different than these two and yet the DNA of their personalities really sort of combines within, Ogden Codman Junior, John Codman the third was an incredibly successful businessman. He was a family guy, he was religious, he was home loving everything that you would expect of a good conservative patrician Yankee.

Tripp:
[35:20] Richard Codman was dashingly handsome, a bachelor. Uh He goes into business partnership with his brother, which was one of the dumbest business decisions his brother ever made. Um He sends Richard over to revolutionary France in the 17 nineties to establish trade ties with the revolutionary government. Instead, Richard gets over there and his first notion is French chateau are so cheap right now, you know, like nobody seems to be living in them. So he picks up 1234, ultimately, almost five different chateau in and around Paris. Um He is liquidating the, the family’s, you know, company stock basically to pay for these. Uh he’s installed his mistress at one of them. He is living this incredible expatriate life of excess and kind of francophile.

Tripp:
[36:12] Those two strains, the, the good patrician conservative Yankee on the one side and the dashing flashy expatriate LCM regime, you know, sexual liberty um side of the family really do come together in Cadman’s person as well as in his decorating. I mean, his, his decorating style was very much a combination of New England Meats, uh sort of continental excess and certainly within his life too. That was true. One of the, one of the cases in that uh gallery that I think is garnered more attention than most uh is pointing to the fact that all the while that Cogman is collecting historic kind of academic images of chateau in the late 18 nineties, he’s also putting together a pretty sizable pornography collection. Um And so you know, I’ve, I’ve nod to that in the exhibition only to show again that notion of excess and propriety sort of standing side by side that you can take all the way back to his ancestors, but it goes forward into his own time period.

Jake:
[37:18] I guess there are at least two periods in Ogden Junior’s life when he, he lives in France for kind of extended periods. And the first one I think is when he’s a kid or maybe an adolescent and it’s indirectly at least a result of his father, Ogden senior’s investment in Boston insurance companies. How did the Ogden Senior’s investments in a way end up leading to, uh Ogden Junior’s obsession with France.

Tripp:
[37:43] Ogden senior had reclaimed the family house, the Codman estate that had been sold out of the family by his father. So there was a little period that Codman junior called the inter anum um between Codman ownership. Uh So his father, like much of the Cogman family were heavy, heavily invested in the insurance industry. So when the great Boston fire of 1872 happened, the insurance industry collapsed along with, you know, many of their downtown investments. So the Codman family in order to retrench and rebuild their finances end up.

Tripp:
[38:18] Uh in the mid 18 seventies, renting out the estate and then moving to France, France was a very cheap place to live after the Franco Prussian War. They were able to go over there and sort of live relatively in the style to which they were accustomed while saving a lot of money. So Codman really from the age of 10 to 18 is away from the family home and in fact, never comes back to live at the family home permanently. It just is, it becomes kind of like a mirage for him, of the place where his family had, you know, ended their first kind of golden era later in life really beginning in the 19 teens and then starting permanently in 1920 he’s an expat permanently. I mean, between 1920 his death in 1951 he’s living abroad. I mean, his only connection to the family house and it was still a strong one was letters back home to his siblings insisting on furniture, finishes upholstery, you know, floor wax, you know, demands that they go to Aunt Fanny’s estate sale and grab as much furniture as they can. Um He’s really, he’s, he’s not only insistent, but he’s also insisting that they send him Kodak as proof. Um Kodak images that they have carried out his his wishes, but that French taste that runs throughout really all the generations of the cogman, you know, becomes real when we’re talking about cogman himself, who for I would say almost the majority of his life spent in France.

The Codman Family Home and Legacy

Jake:
[39:46] That’s an interesting point to pause and look at that family home. So the, the one that his father repurchased uh after it had been sort of sold away, it was a already an old home. By the time Ogden is growing up in it, it’s a, a 17 forties, I want to say, estate in Lincoln Mass.

Erica:
[40:05] Yes, it’s this incredible English style home plopped onto the hills of rural Middlesex County at a time when I think nothing else, nothing else in the county looked like that. Uh And that kind of establishes the reputation going forward of both the house and the family as being slightly elevated and above everyone else and very tightly uh constrained an insular too. I mean, it’s, it’s a family home as we interpret it. You know, several generations live there. Not all at the same, not all consecutively but the Codman family story and that house are so deeply intertwined that when you walk in, you can feel the weight of that history and that wonderful layered effect from room to room with all the subsequent additions that were made. But also, you know, objects from the 18th century, 19th century, early 20th century. That house is so full of stuff. We like to joke. Uh They never threw anything out which is the uh opportunity and challenge of the curator.

Jake:
[41:18] Building on something you said trip that a lot of what we know about the house is from Ogden’s letters home to his siblings. It was interesting to learn that, you know, he was, I think the oldest of six, and he was the only one as an adult who lived outside that family home in Lincoln. The other five siblings basically lived out their adulthoods without marrying, without working and without really leaving home.

Tripp:
[41:42] Yeah. So there were six in all, the 11 brother died in infancy. So there were really there were four unmarried siblings living back at the estate. There were periods in which sometimes the siblings would have like a pie, a terre in Boston, but primarily as adults. Uh his, his two sisters and his two brothers really were centered in Lincoln and part of that had to do with the very, very strong personality of their mother. Ogden Kman Junior really does appear to be the the lone sibling that was allowed to work for a living, um who was kind of allowed to escape the confines of the family in the estate. Um And that’s partly because the very special relationship that Ogden Codman Junior had with his mother. Um his father was largely absent from the picture for the last decades of his parents’ marriage. Um and Codman in some ways kind of stepped in as a kind of a surrogate spouse and father to his, in some cases, much younger siblings.

Tripp:
[42:41] So well into their forties and even into their fifties, the siblings were on allowances, they were essentially barred from any kind of profession. It was Mrs Cog’s preference that they stayed close to home. Um And it did lead to this kind of Gray Gardens effect of these unmarried siblings kind of rattling around this house. Um And to give you a sense of, of the span of that generation, which is just incredible to me. If you go from the birth of Ogden Codman to the death of his youngest sister, you’re talking about a span from the battle of Gettysburg to the Beatles White Album. I mean, that is one generation. Um and very little changed. Eric is absolutely right that the house when you go inside it is this.

Tripp:
[43:24] You know, kind of, there are these almost archaeological layers of 18th century, 19th century, 20th century. But what is fascinating to me is the ways in which the Codman kind of insisted that nothing could change um that, that, you know, time sort of stopped at the house. And in fact, even in periods when John Codman the third or Ogden Codman Senior or Ogden Codman Junior are significant, expanding or altering the house, they do so in ways that are kind of retro, they evoke earlier periods. So it’s almost as if their expansions are intended to kind of time travel back to say the house was always bigger than people realized, the house was always grander than people realized. Um And to do that, they would rely on earlier styles so that when people showed up, they would think, oh, it was ever thus, in fact, it was this incredibly uh kind of dynamic process of retreating into time. And in fact, if Ogden Kuben Junior had gotten his brothers, he had planned an a really drastic colonial revival makeover of a colonial house that would have significantly changed its appearance. But again, would have made it look as if it had been a much grander 18th century house than it ever was in the 17 forties.

Erica:
[44:41] I think you’re kind of keying in on such a wonderful connective tissue between all four subjects is their homes were sort of all based on illusion and memory

Nostalgia and Illusion in Design

Erica:
[44:53] and nostalgia and playing around with time. It’s so fascinating to continue to think about how these ideas come out even after we’ve installed the show.

Jake:
[45:04] There’s this illusion of things being frozen in time, but you can tell that they aren’t from two chairs that are being displayed right next to each other in the exhibit. And one’s labeled as being a bought in 1882. Ogden is a teenager. He’s collecting the sort of English arts and crafts style and right next to it is a French chair that he installed in the home or asked, I guess demanded to be installed in the home in 1898. No. What’s that? 1617 years later, what does it tell us by seeing these two pieces next to each other about Cadman’s evolution or journey as a designer from sort of a teen years into his middle.

Tripp:
[45:41] Well, one of the things we want to do in all four of the galleries to bring a, a through line to this show was to use chairs in particular to sort of tell stories. And those can be stories about stylistic evolution. They are sometimes stories about relationships with family members or, you know, you name it. Um But the chairs are one of the through lines in the Codman Gallery. The juxtaposition of those two chairs is in some ways to shake up the, I think the public perception of who Ogden Codman junior was as a designer. He’s easily the best known of all four men in terms of his design practice. And he’s always associated with this kind of gilded age. Um Louis the 16th French style, which is really typical of that Louis the 16th chair. That’s in that gallery.

Tripp:
[46:31] The reason why we put the 18 eighties William Moore’s chair next to it is to show that early on, you know, as a late teenager and in his early twenties, he’s really fascinated with the English arts and crafts movement, which almost nobody would have expected in some ways, the English arts and crafts movement was moralizing, it was cozy, it was um not about grandeur or display, it was about hand craftsmanship. These, none of these are things that you associate with the mature style of, of Ogden Cogman, who was all about um flash and a kind of aristocratic sensibility, um which has nothing to do with William Morris. And so we put those two together partly to show the evolution of a very young designer, to a mature designer and to, you know, to, to highlight the fact that, you know, his career did have an evolutionary and kind of dynamic change.

Erica:
[47:24] I think one of the essential collaborations for him was with Edith Wharton together. They wrote the Decoration of Houses in 1897. And this was very much a, a treatise about what they considered to be good design, very classically inspired. It was a rebuttal against Victorian excess. It was a road map for how to bring harmony proportion into the home. You know, again, it’s the way that the home can reflect the ideals of the owner, but also inculcate good behavior and habits in the owner as well. If you, if you decorate your home accordingly, not necessarily in a moral way, but in a way where a beautiful home creates a beautiful person and they had some disagreements. Uh They were too strong willed personalities and especially in the construction of Wharton’s own home in Lenox, Massachusetts. I think that was one of those projects that ultimately drove a wedge between them. They could not settle on the other’s vision, but it was one of those moments in his career. I think he was, he was a young man when uh decoration of Houses was published where he, he, you could see his design priorities kind of settle into place and I think that helps inform the trajectory of his career after that.

Jake:
[48:48] Expand on that if you don’t mind, what does this book that he co writes with Edith Wharton? What’s that mean for his career? Because I know up until that point he had maybe done some professional design to be designed at home. He’d had some training as an architect. I know his architectural drawings are on display. But is that book really? What catapults him into sort of the public eye as a designer?

Tripp:
[49:08] I would say two things about that. I, I think that book which was extraordinarily popular when it first came out and has never gone out of print. I feel like the book has cemented his legacy, you know, kind of long term. I think that’s, that’s what people think of when they think about, you know, who Ogden Codman was as a designer. I don’t know necessarily that his authorship of that book was what was bringing clients to his door. I think in some ways, it was more, you know, if we think about the cause and effect, it’s almost the uh the clients were driving the popularity of the book because everyone knew how well connected he was. So for the Vanderbilts and, and Asters and others that he’s designing for. Um they really wanted the aristocratic kind of stagecraft that he was selling. Um And that’s really at the center of that book. It’s interesting when you read the Decoration of Houses today, you almost kind of wonder how it was as big a best seller as it was because it seems to be speaking to a very small portion of the one percenters. Um It is talking about ballrooms and staircases and proportions of houses that were wildly outside the economy of really any American reader.

Jake:
[50:19] The commissions he’s getting are for places like the breakers, like the big Newport.

Tripp:
[50:23] Absolutely. And you know Wharton, who we think probably was more responsible for much of the text than, um, than Codman. Codman was really doing a lot of the research around the chateau. Wharton said at one point, if the Rich Man gets good design, then everyone else will too. There was this sort of notion that there was a trickle down idea that if, if the ballrooms are done perfectly at this guy’s house, then eventually the parlor of a middle class person will reflect that sort of trickle down taste. But what is so interesting to me and what we tried again to sort of reflect I did in the book and in the gallery is that.

Tripp:
[50:58] All the while that he and his Wharton are writing this frosty treatise on architectural decorum and the proper way to create spaces in which, you know, you can behave as a lady or a gentleman. I mean, everything that you associated with sort of stiff gilded age manners. This is exactly the time period when you look at coin’s letters that he is carousing. Boston, Paris Rome, he’s collecting porn, he’s going to gay bars in New York. He’s writing his, uh his best friend, Arthur little about the best, you know, kind of cruising spots uh in different, you know, countries. You know, I often point out this excess versus propriety. To me, it is never starker than when he’s writing this, like rules manual about how to live. Like a gentleman in a house. On the one hand and on the other hand, he’s acting in a manner that certainly for his time would have a baseline been illegal. And in terms of, if there had been broader knowledge of his activities, I don’t think he ever would have been the success that he was.

Jake:
[52:05] That’s why it comes as such a surprise. And one of the last panels in that part of the exhibit to learn that on top of this, you know, exuberant lifestyle on multiple continents that he’s living. Then he gets married in 1904.

Tripp:
[52:20] Yeah, I mean, when so when he marries in 1904 to Lila Griswold Webb.

Marriage and Wealth

Jake:
[52:21] Well, can you tell us about?

Tripp:
[52:27] Who was a very, very wealthy widow and a client of his in several years, his senior, um, everyone in New York knew exactly who Oin Coin was. Um, and what circles he ran in so that the, the headlines did not read necessarily, you know, Mrs Webb to marry again. Um But there was one New York Times headline that simply ran New York society astonished period. Um, because everyone sort of knew what the story was and I have every reason to believe that Lila Griswold Webb herself knew, um the, the real score about the husband, she was marrying.

Tripp:
[53:00] What you learn from their letters with one another and from his letters to others about Lila is that it was, I think a profound love match in the sense that they had really sort of profound shared interests in decorating chateau, research, shopping and traveling. In fact, when she dies in 1910, many of the condolence letters that were written to Ogden Codman Junior were from friends who said I’m so sorry about Lila. I remember how much she loved shopping with her and antiquing with her and there’s no sense that this is a romantic relationship in any sense. Um, but I do think, you know, I, I don’t want to dismiss Lila as a, you know, a kind of a joke or just a beard. I, I do think that she was a profoundly important person to him in some ways. And certainly financially she became a really important person to him because it, you know, her estate effects effectively fuels the rest of his life. He stops being a professional interior decorator and he can just start building houses for himself.

Jake:
[54:03] Shifting gears to another one of our designers. If everybody in New York knew who Ogden was at the time that he, he married Lila Charles Pendleton was very different. He seems almost like an enigma and trying to, to get a read on him, at least through what’s presented in the exhibit, which points out that there’s basically no documentation in his personal life after the 18 sixties when he was still a very young adult. Uh The only surviving photo that’s reproduced in the exhibit is taken when he’s just 15 years old. And yet today his home is recreated as a museum at Risd. So who was this guy Charles Pendleton to deserve a museum at Risd?

Tripp:
[54:45] That is a very thorny question and it’s, and it, and it is one that is, uh, that I think we wrestled with in terms of how to tell the story in this show. So in a nutshell, Charles Pendleton was born to a wealthy farming family in Westerly Rhode Island.

The Enigma of Charles Pendleton

Tripp:
[55:01] We have a lot of documentation about his private life until college. Um, he goes to Ando, um, he goes to Yale, he is expelled his first year at Yale and that’s where all of the like private material and scrapbooks and everything just kind of disappear. So we don’t know anything about his, uh, his life personally from that expulsion from Yale forward. Um, the reasons for the expulsion themselves are, are a bit murky and unclear.

Jake:
[55:29] Because what’s captured in the in the documentation from Yale is improper conduct in relation to a female, right? But we, but what does that mean?

Tripp:
[55:36] Exactly. Who knows? Um We have no idea if this is, uh, was a hazing incident. If this was, it doesn’t seem to be an assault because assault certainly were recorded in those faculty records. It’s unclear and a lot of historians have hung on that one line uh to claim that Pendleton can never be sort of seriously considered as primarily a gay man because it seems to be that there was some kind of sexual scandal involving a woman on the other side. You have a man who, from that point forward, never sustained any relationship publicly that we know of, of any kind. Um, certainly, you know, there was no bar to his marrying or even conducting affairs, you know, in those, those, those periods.

Tripp:
[56:23] Um, here’s a man who is obsessed with antiques devoted to his mother and who destroyed all of his private papers. This is exactly the kind of absence I was talking about at the beginning of the show that that to me is an enormous red flag. Had this been just a very secretive heterosexual man. You know, I would still need a lot of explaining to go along with who he was. But to answer your question about sort of how does he merit a museum? He became one of the greatest 19th century collectors of 18th century furniture. And so when he dies in uh in 1904, before his death, he surrenders all of his collection to the Rhode Island School of Design with the caveat that at their museum, they will recreate the house that he’d been living in and since 1897. Um so they would recreate the house, put the rooms together as uh period rooms. These were the first period rooms in any American museum and thereby forever memorialized this kind of golden moment of his home and his collection. But as Eric has pointed out earlier. So many of these guys, a lot of it is sort of smoke and mirrors. So as I came to find out in my research, something that even Risd curators were unaware of, he didn’t own the house that was being recreated. Um He was a renter who was probably about an inch away from being evicted. Given the fact that, you know, there was something like $50,000 worth of gambling debts on his estate at the end of his life.

Tripp:
[57:51] So, does he merit a full museum? I mean, that’s, that’s a museum wing. That’s kind of a question that’s still open in some senses. Yes. The, the collection is extraordinarily valuable, but what it purports to represent, I think in some ways is not a fully accurate reflection of who he was and what his collection was.

Jake:
[58:12] The first thing you see when you walk into the room at the Eustace estate that’s dedicated to Pendleton right now, is this almost life size reproduction of a black and white photo of Pendleton’s? I think it’s his entry hall, maybe a great hall. Is that in his lived in home or is that from the reproduced house at, at RISD?

Erica:
[58:32] So the sort of mural sized image is of his home. And what is interesting is that if you turn to the right, you’ll you see another black and white image of what the space looked like after Ris D reinstalled the gallery. And you’ll see that Risd stripped away the Turkish rugs, they stripped away a lot of the sort of minor European paintings. They kind of took the aesthetic out of the aesthetic movement home and installed it more as a didactic gallery of American decorative arts. And so the humanity that you glimpse in those pictures of his home, the humanity that we cannot find traces of anywhere else because like Tripp said, we don’t have photos of him. We don’t have any of his personal letters.

Erica: [59:21] Uh You must encounter him through that space that no longer exists that is, has been recreated as sort of a stripped down, streamlined version of a person who himself was somewhat of an illusion and a self construction.

Pendleton’s Legacy and Museum

Erica:
[59:40] So there are layers to that interpretation that I think the gallery teases out quite well. There are most where if you stand uh looking at one of the English gilded mirrors, the mirror reflects the black and white image behind it. So it’s almost like you’re looking into a portal that transports you to his space, which was one of those happy accidents of installation that we did not mean to do. But I think it speaks to the ways that Pendleton.

Erica:
[1:00:13] The Pendleton space is the most in some ways constructed but also easily deconstructed space because it, it, it lends itself to this larger message of the show about how these men fashion themselves and fashion their homes to put out a certain way of being that was not, normal, not normative within their social and economic milieu, which I think speaks to again while we don’t have conclusive evidence of his sexuality or romantic orientation. The point being made here is that he had the choice to live within the restrictions and confines of society of finding a wife, raising Children. He could have still collected many of his peers did like HF Dupont down in Delaware. But instead he chose not to, he chose to devote himself singularly to the construction of this collection and of this base that uh ended up being his legacy in a way that a family might be someone else’s legacy. So I think that’s why he is, he is part of this grouping of men uh who all the three other men. We have more tangible evidence to make some sort of claim or speculate about their uh romantic or sexual orientation. But with Pendleton he, I think he was a mystery even to himself.

Tripp:
[1:01:37] Project to, to uh the the lost in translation kind of sensibility of his private home to the public museum, I think becomes its own kind of visual metaphor for the way that the closet works in some ways, right? So he uh here’s this guy with a bit of a murky reputation, given his expulsion from Yale, given his many bankruptcies, given his gambling problem, we haven’t gotten into like he was unbelievable, uh you know, kind of compulsive gambler. Uh and someone who sold antiques that were not always on the up and up, that gets translated to the museum where instead of, you know, entering the home of a problematic reclusive gambling, you know, sort of their do well. Instead you are entering the generic home of a generic 18th century gentleman. And, you know, it’s one of those things of be careful what you wish for because he wished to be erased personally from his collection. And Ris D was only too happy to erase this problematic donor. Um And instead talk about the collection and to talk about it in ways that he never would have talked about it himself as a patriotic reflection of colonial America, which is absolutely not what his aim was.

Jake:
[1:02:54] But when you put yourself in that front hall that’s reflected in that mural sized photo in the exhibit. What would you have been surrounded by in Pendleton’s actual space before the re the early Rizzy curators made it something more wholesome and worthy of being displayed. What, what were the objects, the colors, uh What would you find yourself standing among there?

Tripp:
[1:03:14] Well, first of all, I mean, just standing in that hall would have been a feat in itself. He was so reclusive that just, just to get there would have been kind of a, a major feat. But if you’d walked in and in fact, at one point, uh we talked about turning that sepia image into a colored image, like sort of having it colorized. It just, it was impossible to try to do.

Tripp:
[1:03:34] But if you entered that space, you would have seen really sparkling jewel tones of Turkish rugs um against um dark stained floors. Uh The rugs were very much a part of the collection. Furniture was always his central interest. So the furniture was always of the highest quality. Everything else was kind of a stage prop to the furniture. So these beautiful rugs kind of uh b grade old master paintings that were there for effect and spectacularly colorful Chinese ceramics that were intended to be used as kind of foils to the mahogany of the tables. So he was an aesthetic movement guy. I mean, in his own way, he was a colorist like Henry Davis Sleeper. He loved juxtaposing colors and was really in it for the beauty of the pieces themselves rather than their provenance or their history. Um In fact, you know, he in his uh his will and the sort of inventory that he creates for RISD, he’s constantly talking about how beautiful the objects are. And in fact, he’s often about how handsome the furniture is. I’ve often seen sort of the Chippendale style as a very sort of stereotypically masculine in the way that it’s been interpreted. Um, people talk about uh, the sort of muscular style of, of the Chippendale. What I loved was in his inventory. He actually makes a Freudian slip at one point and types in instead of handsome secretary, he writes Mansson secretary, which I just loved.

Jake:
[1:05:03] Our fourth bachelor designer is someone who seems like he could not be more different than Pendleton. All the reclusiveness and privacy of Pendleton.

The Charismatic Charlie Gibson

Jake:
[1:05:15] Charlie Gibson is a very public and out there figure. And I’ll admit that he’s the only one of our four that I was at all familiar with before we started here when I walked into the room devoted to Char Charlie Gibson. The first thing that you’re greeted with is over the mantelpiece in this room. There are three portraits of Charles that would have hung, I think sort of in the arrangement they’re in in the museum over his own mantelpiece in his library at home. So before we get too much into the details of Charlie Gibson’s life, what do you think these three portraits were meant to signal to himself and then to visitors in his home?

Tripp:
[1:05:55] Well, you’re meant to chuckle. The minute you say Charlie Gibson’s name because he was, he was an extraordinary character totally out there. And when he inherits his family’s home at 137 Beacon Street, you know, today, when people visit the museum, they imagine this kind of seamless connection uh of, you know, his grandmother building it straight through to the grandson and trainning it as a museum.

Tripp:
[1:06:20] Those three portraits are something that he adds to the house after he inherits it in his sixties. Um He had been effectively banned from the house in some ways uh between 1919 16. Uh after a falling out with his father, his father disinherits him in 1916. Um he doesn’t inherit the house until his mother’s death in 1934. And when he comes in almost immediately, his thought is I want to preserve this house absolutely intact as it had been in his mother’s and grandmother’s time. But the two significant changes that he makes are one, he turns his father’s bedroom into his writing study. His father loathes the fact that his son was a poet. Um So this is him sort of shaking his fist from, you know, beyond the grave. But then he goes into his father’s library, his father’s other favorite room um takes down whatever had been hanging over the mantle, you can assure it was not pictures of Charlie um and installs a picture of me and then me and then me. Um and they’re all images of him as this, you know, I mean, I know this is an anachronism determined. He’s this hot young man, you know, and he knew it and the house becomes as much a shrine to his family’s elite status as Boston Brahmins as it is a shrine to his own vanished beauty. I mean, the house is the picture of Dorian Gray. I mean, the house becomes this placing an amber of handsome young Charlie Gibson while he kind of withered away in its rooms.

Jake:
[1:07:50] The house gives the impression of having that same trapped in amber effect that Charlie was trying to achieve with, with himself and his portraits. But what I didn’t realize until going in and looking at this exhibit was that there had already been changes to the decor before Charlie took over. So it contains both sort of high victorian furnishings, then later, more aesthetic movement stuff and maybe a symbol of that. There are two chairs on display in this exhibit that represent the sort of these two eras. Can, can you talk a little bit about whose chairs they were and how they sort of reflect the changes that may not be highlighted at the Gibson House.

Tripp:
[1:08:26] The chairs are a subtle or maybe not so subtle reference to his relationship with his parents. One is uh his father’s favorite chair from his bedroom. And another is the chair that is part of a suite of chairs that his mother received as a wedding present in the 18 seventies. The reason I put them together is just as you say, the house did go through a kind of stylistic evolution. It was built in 1859 60. So originally, it was very much a mid Victorian home, Rosin Gibson, Charlie’s mother lives there as a young bride and when her mother-in-law dies, uh you know, in the 18 nineties, you, you.

Tripp:
[1:09:03] Imagine there is this enormous sigh of relief from Rosin Gibson that she can finally get her hands on the house. She redecorates it from top to bottom and her, her style is much more of the kind of aesthetic movement as opposed to mid Victorian as she is redecorating. Her husband insists I am keeping my mid Victorian bedroom because that is my space. I don’t care if you think it’s outdated. I’m keeping this chair. So that’s the chair that his father insists on keeping what becomes, you know, the sort of the great irony is that chair becomes the center of Charlie Gibson’s writing studio. Um, Charlie Gibson when he moves into the house, and there’s this sort of almost kind of like a little bit of a Norman Bates quality to it. He takes his mother’s bedroom for his own. So the chair on the right, his mother’s aesthetic movement chair uh is really about her different taste. His uh sort of adoption of her role as kind of shadowing of the house.

Tripp:
[1:10:00] Um And I’m glad you brought up this furniture because Erica I’ve often wanted to ask you this question. Um Did you think, you know, as a curator that there was a particular challenge with the Gibson Gallery in terms of uh the other galleries have such kind of flashy collections from which to be putting together a really, you know, kind of exciting visual experience. It’s a much more subtle story in some ways that we’re telling in the Gibson room. Did you find as a curator? Do you find yourself scratching your head? Thinking? Oh, what are we going to put in that room?

Erica:
[1:10:31] The challenge with each of the galleries was how do we extract the essence of these homes in the handful of objects that we can fit inside these galleries? And I think with, with Gibson, you’re right. It was a challenge because it is. So you when you walk into Gibson House, the home itself is dark, you know, there’s not a lot of natural light, it’s, it’s layered, it’s heavy, that’s the impression of that mid 19th century furniture. Um and it all that upholstery and all that carpeting and because it didn’t change too much, you know, under Charlie’s tenure, uh It does feel different stylistically so different from the other three homes which were, you know, contemporaneous with those men. So the challenge is how do you extract that sense of history? And that’s, you know, he hung family registered, he, he had coats of arms. He was very proud of his lineage, which stretched back to the Warren family of Boston. Uh And so.

Jake:
[1:11:33] I learned from this exhibit that Joseph Warren was descended from William, the Conqueror who knew.

Tripp:
[1:11:39] Maybe.

Erica:
[1:11:39] Right, so, so I think it was, you know, whereas the furniture did a lot of the talking with other galleries. I think what we really relied on with Gibson was what you know, the prints, the, the books, the hanging works because he really wanted people who entered his home to know exactly whose home they were walking into the, the weight of that history and of that family. So I think that was what we tried to bring out. Having the triptych of uh his portraits goes a long way to tell you about what his priorities were in addition to the family history, right? As, as uh Tripp said, it was about enshrining his own youthful beauty in that house. Um But it’s fascinating the and, and much like the other men, he, he constructed an identity for himself, an illusion of a poet and of an author. As much as you know, he could authentically assert himself as a Boston Brahmin. Uh other aspects of his life were more fictitious. And that’s I think what we tried to bring out in the assemblage of objects, including this wonderful contemporary reimagining of Gibson by uh a contemporary artist who was an artist in residence at Gibson House, which shows all the kind of pokes fun at Gibson while at the same time staying true to the way that he presented himself in his own lifetime.

Charlie Gibson’s Open Secret

Jake:
[1:13:08] Unlike some of the other characters we’ve talked about, I feel like Charlie Gibson’s sexuality was something of an open secret. By 1899 he’s kind of basically outed himself in a barely fictionalized version of himself in a novel. You are displaying letters sort of amongst his friends in his social circle from the 18 eighties, 18 nineties that are pretty descriptive of his romantic life with men. How do you think he was able to, you know, relatively live pretty openly?

Tripp:
[1:13:38] Until this book and project, at least in recent times, the stories of the kind of wide swath that he cut through. Boston were really just that we didn’t have much evidence. All there were, were these sort of rumors that kind of clung to his story and they have become part of tour legend when you go, you know, on a guided tour through the house. Um I found no real firm evidence looking at his papers because once again, you’re looking at a giant absence. What we found what I found in the in the archives was that uh Ogden Codman filled in a lot of what we don’t know. Um So just as you say, it, it does appear in the 18 nineties and now we have evidence for it that um all of Boston was talking about Charlie Gibson and his affairs. And in fact, Ogden Codman junior was trying to bed Charlie Gibson himself. He was in, in hot pursuit of um the then 18 year old um Charlie Gibson. Um You know, I gave a talk somewhere where somebody said, you know, does it, does it worry you that the 30 something year old Colman was talking about an 18 year old and said, if you have any idea how many relationships Charlie had already had by the age of 18, you know, you would not be too worried about this, this, you know, this young flower.

Tripp:
[1:14:53] I think it is partly a question of class, both for Codman and for Gibson that they felt their class shielded them from an awful lot of things. But, um, but for Charlie, you do find out that unlike for Cogman, he really did take some grueling punishment for his affairs. Um In, in terms of, you know, the, the kind of censure of his social circle. Um Writ large thinking of, uh sort of Boston society, certainly in terms of his relationship with his father who disinherits him. Um And we know from reading Cadman’s letters that it wasn’t just Gibson who was being targeted, it was the whole Gibson family that was being pulled down by these scandals and in particular, the scandal surrounding his, what appears to have been the affair of his lifetime. Um with Maurice De Moni, the self styled Count de Moni, which appears to have only lasted for a couple of years. Um And what’s fascinating is that it was probably between about 1894 and 1896 when they were together and all of Boston kind of knew about it.

Tripp:
[1:15:56] I knew this story just from anecdotes when I went into the Gibson House archives. And in their archives, the only correspondence that, that still exist between the two men. They are senior citizens writing to each other at the end of their lives and saying, like, remember, you know, you know, when we knew each other in Boston, but of course, they don’t really say much when you go back to coin’s letters, you realize this was a white hot affair, um, that, um, really sort of scandalized Boston and I think had real repercussions for him. I mean, Charlie was kind of a pariah for many years until he finally became kind of a lovable caricature at the end of his life.

Jake:
[1:16:38] I feel like the last couple of decades of his life, certainly by the, the 19 thirties or maybe a little bit later, he’s almost like a, a mascot of a bygone Brahman era for Boston. So, you know, people can sort of ignore the rumors and just embrace this almost silly figure of the guy who’s dressed in a 40 year old suit and his top hat and tails go into the, to the Ritz for, for cocktails. Despite, I mean, there are people around the same time, Prescott Townsend is basically a contemporary, maybe a little bit younger than, than Charlie and was arrested for being gay right around the same time. So it’s, and, and from a similar social class, so it wasn’t a bulletproof armor by any means. How did Charles Gibson used this those last couple of decades of reputation as sort of the throwback to a bygone era? How did he leverage that for his own own good, own good.

Tripp:
[1:17:28] Well, I think his age in some ways for, for better or worse, his age kind of de sexualized him to the sense that people thought he was just this sort of sweet old man. Um, so there wasn’t, you know, the same kinds of things that were swirled around him as a handsome young man were not, um, were not present. Exactly. So people began to focus on the really eccentric ways in which he had preserved an 18 nineties house straight through almost, you know, the 19 fifties, he dies, you know, in 54, and the way that he preserved that era in his own person as well wearing, um, in some ways, partly out of poverty, you know, he’s not buying new clothes partly because he doesn’t have the money to do it later on. He’s not replacing carpets in the house because he doesn’t have the income to do it. He’s living at the hotel Brunswick so that he can avoid heating the house because he can’t pay to heat the whole house. In fact, the story of all four of these men, I mean, it is a.

Tripp:
[1:18:24] I don’t know, maybe, uh, either. Uh uh a great example or a cautionary tale of you can create a great house despite the fact that you’ve got nothing in the bank anymore. Um None of these men had money really much to speak of at the ends of their lives. But Charlie Gibson really embraces this kind of Hammy character um of himself as a, like an unfrozen brahmin from the, you know, from the, the late 19th century. But as early as the 19 teens, mayor Curley of Boston thought he was this hilarious um figure when he was appointed to being the parks commissioner.

Tripp:
[1:19:02] Mayor Curly, who was, you know, the son of an Irish scrub woman who hated brahmins, um really loved this idea of this clownish figure, um who represented the class that he was more than happy to say goodbye to um in his administration. And yet, you know, to speak to your earlier point about, you know, how was he getting away with things or how cognizant was he of the dangers of his same sex relationships when he was Park’s commissioner. There was a, there was a real controversy surrounding of all things, a public restroom that he wanted to build on the public common. He wanted to build one in the style of Marie Antoinette’s Music Pavilion from Versailles. I mean, you know, forgive me, I can say this is a gay man. How gay is that? I mean, he wants to, you know, create Marie Antoinette’s Pavilion but the really telling thing is that he says, when uh when the counterclaim comes in, why don’t we just make a public restroom in the hotel terrain nearby? And he says, well, people will be more uh inconvenienced and more exposed to blackmail and I thought blackmail, that’s a funny thing to say about a public restroom in 1916. Um but he knew exactly what he was talking about as parks commissioner.

Transforming Home into Museum

Jake:
[1:20:16] I guess he did. I want to come back to something you, you mentioned that maybe.

Tripp:
[1:20:17] Yeah.

Jake:
[1:20:21] We didn’t emphasize enough the idea that, that Charlie Gibson from a pretty young age, had this vision of turning the house that he grew up in the house. He eventually inherits from his mother into a museum. What if you could talk a little bit more about how he, I guess if we know how he landed on that idea. But then also what he did to make that into a reality besides, you know, writing labels for everything in the house himself.

Tripp:
[1:20:44] Well, I don’t know that it’s a project of his, of his youth. It certainly eventually enshrines his ruth his youth. We have the actual written epiphany in his diary, you know, from 1934 when he suddenly is like, hey, wait, museum, I could mark up everything I could turn this whole house into a museum. He’s in his sixties at that point. Um So, you know, and he has only recently taken up the house, but a lot of his writing does become effectively inspired by the house room guides, labels these kinds of things. And at one point he imagines that his house is going to be adopted into the profile of the society for the preservation of New England antiquities. Um Spania, which has become the current day historic New England. Um And I think people have different takes, Eric, I’ll be here curious to hear what you have to say. Like, why do you think Spin uh ran for the hills when he offered them the house.

Erica:
[1:21:41] I will say historic New England has had periods of inflation and deflation when it comes to acquiring and de accessioning house museums. So it might have been that it was too much for us to take on at the time. It would, it’s a very sliding door scenario, right? If we had a acquired Gibson House Museum, it would have been such a different house museum for us to maintain and operate where we have very few sort of urban dwellings of that kind in our portfolio. I don’t think we have anything comparable to Gibson House uh right now currently. So I, you know what I our reasonings for saying no, are unknown to me. And I would actually be interested in digging into the collection to figure out what, what if anything, you know, we used as, as our reasoning. But like I said, it would have been a very different historic New England if we had taken on Gibson House at the time.

Tripp:
[1:22:39] Yeah, I think part of it was that they were, they were leery of his project to turn it into a literary shrine to himself. He was not, he, his, his writing career did not let us just say, uh, you know, sort of translate directly into a literary shrine that he was sort of not writing at that level. And I think, you know, also, I don’t think that, uh, historic New England was uninterested in the Victorian period per se, but from some of the letters that were exchanged, you got this sense that, uh, they thought that they could get something better. They thought that, you know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t top drawer Victorian.

Erica:
[1:23:17] Right. I think too, I mean, this is the thirties. I think it’s so funny. Now, today we look back on the vanishing historic footprint of Back Bay and we think to ourselves, God, you know, we all of these homes, a lot of these interiors have been absolutely gutted by developers, you know, even as the historic facade is maintained, but in the thirties, I don’t know if we had that perspective just yet. I think, you know, maybe uh the trustees thought that these homes would continue on to be preserved into the future and that historic New England did not need to necessarily step in right then. But I also think trip to your point, right? I mean, it wasn’t, you know, the stories we we wanted to tell in the thirties were very much rooted in the colonial revival narrative of, you know, 18th century 17th century homes um preserve the architecture and material footprint. And perhaps Gibson House Museum was too, too recent a home for us to really commit to at the time. Although now you see, you know, again, it it stands today as a house museum to really preserve the historical memory of that kind of architecture and that kind of design. So thank God, it does remain a museum because everything else around it is vanishing.

Tripp:
[1:24:32] Yeah. And I think in the, in the thirties they were probably imagining that Back Bay was in its twilight and good riddance. You know, there was this feeling that, like, why preserve what, you know, nobody really wants. Um, they didn’t know.

Jake:
[1:24:44] I was just trying to do the mental math. That’s probably the time equivalent of saying today, oh, we should preserve this, you know, fifties ranch home. Uh And who cares? Just, you know, just another suburban tract home with fifties ranch house. It’s normal. Well, it’s a good thing then that now all four of the houses we’ve talked about are house museums open to the public. Can you remind listeners where each of these four properties are and how people could get some information about how to visit them if they want to.

Erica:
[1:25:13] Well, I’ll speak to the two historic New England properties. So, uh Codman estate is in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Uh It is open seasonally from June through October and you can go on our website at historic New England uh dot org to learn more about visiting hours. Uh Beauport, the Sleeper mccann House is in Gloucester, Massachusetts and similarly uh open, I think uh more days a week than Codman Estate is. But you can also find that information online. Uh I know that a Ris D museum is open, I think seven days a week. So the Pendleton Galleries can be viewed there. And Gibson House Museum is also open seasonally, I think actually, it’s open year round and uh it is a house museum in, in Boston’s Back Bay.

Jake:
[1:25:59] A strange aspect for listeners to wrap their heads around is that we’re talking about these, you know, the for owners and designers of these wonderful properties. But then the exhibit pulling them all together is 1/5 historic property. So if people want to see or want to visit the exhibit for the importance of

The Importance of Being Furnished

Jake:
[1:26:15] being furnished, where and how do they do that?

Erica:
[1:26:18] The exhibit is housed at the Eustace estate in Milton Massachusetts. The Eustace estate is itself an aesthetic movement home built in the 18 seventies and so it is a great venue to encounter these four men and their homes uh because it’s wrapped in this beautiful aesthetic movement package. The exhibit is open through October 27th and Eustace Estate is open Friday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Jake:
[1:26:46] This is probably the first time that the Eustace estate has had to have a, a nudity warning at the door to any of their, uh, any of their exhibition galleries. So this is a, a fun exhibit to go and see before I wrap up. Is there anything that you wish I had asked you about these four men?

Tripp:
[1:27:03] The only thing that I would say and that I often say before, like kind of public gallery tours is that because their approaches are so different. It is really intentional that every gallery you go into is meant to feel like its own little world. Um And it’s its own little world in the sense that it’s a mini biography of a, of a person and of a house. But it is also uh in the way that all biographies are a connection of their public and private lives. If someone were expecting just a an exhibition about these men as taste maker or as stylists, I think they’ll be surprised that what they’re gonna encounter is that plus, I think as, as layered a look as we have been able to give you about who they were as whole men.

Jake:
[1:27:54] With that in mind, if people want to learn more, if, if they wanna follow you or some of your work online, where would you steer people?

Tripp:
[1:28:03] They can purchase the accompanying book. The importance of Being Furnished For Bachelors at Home, published by Roman and Littlefield came out in 2024. You can purchase that at any of your favorite.

Erica:
[1:28:16] Well, I’ll just say if you enjoy the exhibition, uh we highly encourage you to make a, an appointment to visit Codman Estate and Beauport. And there are other house museums in our portfolio where we tell the stories of men and women who had same sex partnerships and relationships. And uh we are committed to bringing those stories to life and being truthful and inclusive and transparent in our storytelling. So, you know, this can be considered just one stop on your overall tour to learn more about the breadth and depth of history in New England through our beautiful 38 homes.

Tripp:
[1:28:56] And actually to that point, Erica, let me plug the program, the virtual program that historic New England will be doing, which I’ll be moderating. Uh on September 17th, it’s called a Museum of Her Own. And it’s going to put together a panel of experts and curators talking about the single woman’s home. Um So looking at the Sarah Orne Jewett House, uh Hamilton House in South Berwick Maine, uh and the Alice Austin House on Staten Island. So, uh in some ways to, to provide, um you know, a, a deeper idea than just an image of, you know, sort of uh bachelor homes in this period. Um We tried not to call it the Bachelorette Home, but uh all of these are public museums as well homes that were created by single women.

Jake:
[1:29:46] I will make sure I link to all of that in the show notes this week, Erica and Trip. I just wanna say thank you very much for joining us today, to learn more about the importance of being furnished and the four designers that we discussed today. Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/three 08. We’ll have a link to all the details of the importance of being furnished at the Eustace estate and how to visit the Eustace estate in Milton is open Friday through Sunday and the importance of being furnished will be on view there through October 27th.

Jake:
[1:30:21] I’ll also link to information about historic New England’s 38 historic house museums around the region and Tripp’s upcoming talk on September 17th, titled A Museum of Our Own. Plus his other upcoming talks and tours. And of course, we’ll have an affiliate link where you can support the show and local bookstores. When you purchase Trip Evans book, the importance of being furnished for bachelors at home. If you want to leave us some feedback, you can email podcast at hubor.com. We are hub history on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and still most active on Twitter. If you’re on Mastodon, you can find me as at Hubor at better dot Boston. But I’m not very good about posting there or for simplicity’s sake, just go to hubor.com and click on the contact us link while you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. We’re in all your favorite podcast apps including Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher Pocket Casts and now youtube to replace the now retired Google Podcasts. Don’t get too excited though. It’s just a static image while the audio podcast plays. You could also listen on your favorite smart speaker. If you have an Amazon Echo, just say, Alexa Play the Hub History Podcast or if you have a Google home, you can say.

Jake:
[1:31:58] Apple Podcasts is still by far the most popular podcast app. If you subscribe on Apple podcasts, please consider reviewing the show if you do drop me a line and I’ll send you a hub history sticker with our new logo as a token of appreciation.

Jake:
[1:32:16] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.