The EX LIBRIS program series from the Providence Athenæum features an array of humanities scholars, authors, historians, and thought leaders, illuminating fascinating topics and inspiring the intellectually curious. EX LIBRIS programs take place at the Athenæum in front of a live studio audience and are simulcast via Zoom, as well as recorded. This is the VIRTUAL event. Members can purchase $5 in-person tickets here.

In The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, art historian R. Tripp Evans invites readers into the private worlds of four New England bachelors, men who transformed their homes - now all public museums - into personal artistic statements.

Spanning the Gilded to the Jazz Age, these fascinating interiors reflect the intimate lives of their owners, men whose personal stories have, until now, remained in the shadows. They also serve as monuments to the Queer shaping of the American home as we know it today.

Meet Charles Leonard Pendleton (1846-1904), the reclusive gambler who built one of the greatest furniture collections of his age, all for a house ultimately built on sand. Explore the aristocratic interiors of renowned interior decorator Ogden Codman, Jr. (1863-1951), whose ancestral home served as a laboratory for his enormously successful 1897 manifesto, The Decoration of Houses, even as it transmitted his forebears’ vices. Join the literary salon of writer Charles H. Gibson, Jr. (1874-1954), who made his Boston home a monument to personal ambition and his own, once heralded beauty – all while transforming himself into a campy caricature of his own “Boston Brahmin” class. And last, fall under the spell of Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934), the nationally recognized decorator who created his fifty-room seaside masterpiece, Beauport, for the love of the man next door.

Fully illustrated with color plates and period photographs, this book pays tribute to Oscar Wilde’s “gospel of beauty,” a cause these men promoted in a dazzling range of styles. By turns poignant, outrageous, and inspiring, the stories of these “surprisingly domestic bachelors” (as the press dubbed them) reveal the complicated depths beneath their homes’ brilliant surfaces.

R. Tripp Evans is 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 two previous books, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915 (University of Texas Press, 2004) and Grant Wood: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), the latter of which received the National Award for Arts Writing.

*Virtual* EX LIBRIS: The Importance of Being Furnished

Virtual EX LIBRIS: The Importance of Being Furnished