“Decorating is autobiography,” the artist and writer Gloria Vanderbilt once said. R. Tripp Evans’s banquet of a book, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, and the complementary exhibition of the same name currently on view at Historic New England’s Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, magnifies her comment four-fold, forensically examining the lives and lairs—all of them now museums—of a quartet of tastemakers, three of whom were alive when The Magazine ANTIQUES published its first issue and likely were subscribers: architect Ogden Codman Jr., collector Charles Leonard Pendleton, decorator Henry Davis Sleeper, and poet Charles Hammond Gibson Jr.
Aesthetes to their fingertips, each man constructed highly personal worlds grounded in scholarship, admittedly some more strictly than others. Perhaps just as importantly, each of Evans’s subjects was gay, with Codman being the only one who walked down the nuptial aisle, though it was a mariage blanc built on a foundation of money (hers) and taste (his). “It was Oscar Wilde who rolled out the red carpet for the bachelor designer, a designation that would have been understood by everyone,” Evans, professor of art history at Massachusetts’s Wheaton College and a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design, told me. “It was a way to say that not only did men have a legitimate reason to create their own homes, but that gay men may have been, in fact, the best suited of all to do it, though it’s difficult to say how open Codman, Gibson, Sleeper, and Pendleton were in their times. Friends certainly knew, and they were comfortable in their sexuality.” Evans adds, “It was a great privilege to enter into their lives and study the ways their interiors did and still do reflect who they were, not just as decorators, but as decorators who were so thoughtfully engaged with what their interiors meant.” He says, with a laugh, “A gay man obsessed with his house? Guilty!”
The Importance of Being Furnished, a title that wittily plays off Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a play riven with gay subtext, is a romp through four consequential if largely obscure lives. Codman may be the best known of the four, thanks to his work at The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, his extravagant south of France getaway La Léopolda, and The Decoration of Houses, which he testily co-authored with Edith Wharton. It is his ancestral home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, that loomed largest in his mind and his life, what Evans dubs “Codman’s Rosebud.” The author fine-tooth combs its chambers, documenting Codman’s classicizing improvements in the late 1890s, when he banished his parents’ and grandparents’ Victoriana in favor of his own ennobling and plainly superior (to his mind) cheerful toile de Jouy and Louis XVI chairs. That story has been oft told, namely in Pauline C. Metcalf’s pioneeringOgden Codman and The Decoration of Houses (1988), but not as candidly or insightfully as in The Importance of Being Furnished. Evans deep dives into the architect’s personal papers, amusingly documenting his catty personality, financial shenanigans, and homoerotic gossiping, as well as the fact that La Léopolda, later owned by Fiat magnate Gianni Agnelli and the Safra banking family, was a money pit whose origins can be traced to Codman’s apparent romance with his dashing young secretary.
Gibson, Sleeper, Codman, and Pendleton’s personal lives make The Importance of Being Furnished a rare read: a scholarly book that is also satisfyingly spicy, with pit-falls, poignancies, foibles, ambitions, dreams, and lapses reflected in the acquisition of every table and placement of every vase. Pendleton’s late eighteenth-century house in Providence, Rhode Island, was a Potemkin village, a paneled paradise where the antiques—some genuine, others atmospheric assemblages—and what Evans calls “third-rate old masters” gave the occupant an assumed air of gentility and fortune, “so no one would look too closely into his four bankruptcies and failure to graduate from Yale.” A Boston Antinous (architect Arthur Little once leeringly described him as “the juiciest looking boy I ever saw”), Gibson turned his family’s Beacon Street town house into a memory museum, preserving the deluxe Victoriana with such curatorial zeal that, although Gibson was no decorator, Evans deems it “a creative act.” As for Beauport, Sleeper’s atmospheric Gloucester-by-the-Sea folly of recycled architectural details and color-coordinated collections, Evans admiringly shorthands it, with rapier accuracy, as “camp and theater.” The laird of Beauport has had no biography devoted to him, yet, but the house, like the other riveting realms featured in The Importance of Being Furnished, is as revelatory as “the pages of a diary,” Evans said to me. Anderson Cooper’s grandmother would surely agree.
