This week, Erica Lome and Tripp Evans join the show to discuss a new exhibit at the Eustis Estate called “The Importance of Being Furnished.” 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. The new Aesthetic Movement brought beauty and artistic sensibility to American homes, replacing conservative styles that reinforced traditional morality. “The Importance of Being Furnished” introduces four decorators who helped revolutionize interior design during this period: Charles Gibson, Ogden Codman, Charles Pendleton, and Henry Sleeper, as well as their homes in Boston’s Back Bay, Gloucester, Lincoln, and Providence. In their own time, all four men were known as bachelor aesthetes, born into privileged families but hiding their queerness to greater or lesser degrees in an era when homosexuality was punishable by jail time in Boston. In this interview, exhibit curators Tripp Evans and Erica Lome 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.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/308/

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R. Tripp Evans is a professor of art history at Wheaton College, specializing in American art and architecture, with a focus on the material culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the guest curator of The Importance of Being Furnished and wrote the book that the exhibit is based on.

Erica Lome is the Curator of Collections at Historic New England, specializing in American decorative arts and material culture. Her work focuses on the material culture of New England and the contributions of immigrant craftspeople to that body of work.