Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Speaker: Today we're traveling to the Gilded Age in New England, and this is a love story.
Speaker: You might not know it, but your home and the way you live might well be influenced by it.
Speaker: Imagine a world where the act of decorating and collecting becomes a means of expressing unspoken desires.
Speaker: Our story today centers on Henry Davis Sleeper, a Gilded Age confirmed bachelor, as they used to say, with a lifelong crush on his neighbor, who happened to be a world-renowned economist and a total heartthrob.
Speaker: Sleeper's home called Boport, and you know it's a serious house if it has a name, but Boport was more than just a house.
Speaker: It was Sleeper's canvas.
Speaker: And also, as one of my guests put it, an architectural geisha performance.
Speaker: And if you want to find out exactly what that means, keep listening.
Speaker: Now, I said one of my guests because we have three for you today.
Speaker: Curious Objects is partnering with Historic New England to bring you this episode, and Historic New England has just opened an exhibition called The Importance of Being Furnished for Bachelors at Home.
Speaker: The exhibition is open now at the Eustace Estate in Milton, Massachusetts,
Speaker: where Historic New England and guest curator Trip Evans have assembled an extraordinary range of furnishings and design work and personal artifacts.
Speaker: At the heart of the story this exhibition tells are four Gilded Age gentlemen, each creative and eccentric and passionate and driven.
Speaker: There's Ogden Codman Jr., Charles Gibson, Charles Pendleton, and of course, Henry Davis Sleeper.
Speaker: And our story today is about art and design and decorative arts.
Speaker: But more than that, it's a poignant story of forbidden love in the Gilded Age.
Speaker: So Henry Davis Sleeper, really fascinating figure and someone who looms kind of large in American interior decoration.
Speaker: He did not start out as a decorator.
Speaker: He started out as kind of a Boston Brahmin collector.
Speaker: He...
Speaker: lived in Boston's Back Bay with his widowed mother in his 20s, and the two of them were kind of antique hunters together.
Speaker: That's Tripp Evans, the exhibition's curator and author of the book by the same name, which, just in case you missed it, I don't mind saying again, it's The Importance of Being Furnished.
Speaker: He was the youngest of three, and his older brothers went into, you know, real estate and diplomacy and really had kind of public careers.
Speaker: But
Speaker: he he stated henry davis sleeper his his health was not always great um and so he never actually even received a formal education he was educated at home for really the entirety of his life um and lived at home with with his mother maria westcott sleeper um in back bay and and fondly recalled you know all of these years of sort of antiquing with her and filling
Speaker: their back bay home with all kinds of sort of aesthetic movement kinds of collections.
Speaker: So I think it's fair to say the ingredients for a great collector were there.
Speaker: A misfit youngest son close with his mother inheriting her love for decorative arts.
Speaker: But great collectors need something more.
Speaker: And this is a cliche, but tell me it's not true.
Speaker: They need passion.
Speaker: There's something deep inside making them tick.
Speaker: And for Sleeper, that passion came in the form of Pyatt Andrew.
Speaker: In 1906, he meets this Harvard professor, A. Pyatt Andrew, at a dinner party in Boston.
Speaker: And Pyatt Andrew invites him out to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where his, you know, kind of year round sort of
Speaker: you know, kind of coastal home was.
Speaker: And from that point forward, Sleeper's life, and I would kind of argue even like the trajectory of like American interior decoration changed.
Speaker: Sleeper was instantly kind of smitten by Piot Andrew and immediately decided that he needed to buy his own property in Gloucester on Eastern Point.
Speaker: And so within about a year and a half of his meeting Piot Andrew,
Speaker: And as I said, really kind of falling head over heels for him.
Speaker: He buys the property two doors down and builds a small kind of arts and crafts bungalow that he called Little Beauport that he completed in 1908.
Speaker: And this is the small cottage that over the course of the next, I don't know, couple of decades would become a 45 room home on Gloucester Harbor.
Speaker: Not so little after all.
Speaker: So if we want to understand Henry Davis Sleeper and the effect he had on American decoration and design, we really need to understand Beuport.
Speaker: And if we want to understand Beuport, we need to follow Sleeper's relationship with Piatt Andrew.
Speaker: Or maybe I should call it courtship.
Speaker: But first I want to set the stage and talk about what it is that makes Beuport so special.
Speaker: So I was reading this article in Antiques magazine, actually, from 2009, which is about Boport and sort of an interesting article.
Speaker: But the thing that really caught me about it is that it described Boport as a seductive dream house.
Speaker: which I really enjoyed.
Speaker: It does have an aura of mystery and seduction and play to it.
Speaker: And that's all by design.
Speaker: When Henry Davis Sleeper purchased the land and built Beauport on it, he essentially created a home that...
Speaker: seems as though it had been around for centuries or that it had been plucked out of some European village and brought to Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Speaker: That's Erica Lohm.
Speaker: She's curator of collections at Historic New England.
Speaker: As soon as you walk in, it invites exploration.
Speaker: It invites closer looking.
Speaker: It feels at once nostalgic and historic, but it is in fact a contemporary and modern house.
Speaker: And inside that house, sleeper mixed and matched.
Speaker: objects from different eras, different nations, different cultures, in a way that fit his design eye and his design aesthetic.
Speaker: So when you visit Beauport, you kind of have to throw out any preconceived notions of what a historic house museum looks like, because once you head inside and start looking around, you encounter something completely different.
Speaker: It is at once historical and ahistorical.
Speaker: People started really taking notice of his house and by the, I would say by the late 19-teens, 1920s, he was beginning to take on professional clients.
Speaker: And by the 30s, he was designing for, you know, the Vanderbilts and Joan Crawford and various figures out in Hollywood.
Speaker: So it was really kind of through the house that he found his profession.
Speaker: So, Beuport was actually a wildly successful advertisement, and Sleeper was quickly becoming a sought-after figure in the design world.
Speaker: You know how they say the cobbler's children have no shoes?
Speaker: Well, for Sleeper, it was kind of the opposite.
Speaker: His own house was his masterpiece.
Speaker: One of my favorite rooms at Beauport is the China Trade Room.
Speaker: It began at life as what Sleeper called the medieval hall.
Speaker: He had this idea for creating in his 20th century home that had all these sort of Tudor-esque flourishes.
Speaker: He wanted to recreate a medieval style hall like it was some sort of English hunting lodge.
Speaker: And at some point in its development, Sleeper got distracted by the discovery of this beautiful hand-painted wallpaper that was in the attic of some Marblehead home.
Speaker: And this was late 18th century painted wallpaper imported from China.
Speaker: And the wallpaper depicted the creation of porcelain in China.
Speaker: And he was so struck by this find that he decided to redecorate the entire room around this wallpaper, which he had installed.
Speaker: in the space.
Speaker: And so it went from this very traditional medieval inspired medieval revival interior to a sort of Chinese Chippendale parlor.
Speaker: So he even had installed a pagoda inside the room that he probably had some theater company make.
Speaker: The wallpaper itself is still there and it is absolutely stunning.
Speaker: So the entire room changed around this one object.
Speaker: One thing I love about Sleeper's idea for Beauport is that it wasn't just a house in the sense of walls and a roof.
Speaker: It was a collection, almost a personal museum, built largely around the objects he was collecting.
Speaker: Sleeper was one of the early interior decorators slash collectors who purchased antiques with the intention of installing them in a way that was meant to be admired and looked at by visitors and outsiders.
Speaker: He was a
Speaker: a friend and somewhat of a contemporary to H.F.
Speaker: DuPont, who did something similar at Winterthur Museum down in Delaware, inspired by what Sleeper pulled off at Beauport.
Speaker: But whereas a lot of these other collectors were collecting with the aim to tell a very traditional story of sort of American decorative arts history, of, you know, a story of triumph,
Speaker: and exceptionalism in American decorative arts.
Speaker: That is very much the tradition that's established in the early 20th century by many of these so-called colonial revivalists.
Speaker: Sleeper took a detour and he decided it for him,
Speaker: Fidelity to his artistic vision, fidelity to the material and color and themes of the room were more important or more of a priority to him instead of doing something by the book, something traditional.
Speaker: I think Sleeper belonged to a cohort of aesthetic movement devotees who were
Speaker: collectors, they were designers, they were makers, they were critics, who all subscribed to this idea that art and the home should go beyond its traditional domestic purpose.
Speaker: you know, it is not only making a home for a family, it was making a home purely for one's own desires and tastes and whims.
Speaker: Okay, see, now we're talking my language.
Speaker: This novel idea of the home serving as an aesthetic project is so interesting to me because there are a lot of misunderstandings around it.
Speaker: It's not that Henry David Sleeper was the first person to want to live in a beautiful home, but he was one of the very early generations of what we might think of as modern collectors.
Speaker: You know, people who acquired objects not just to be functional or beautiful, but who collected things systematically, and at least in part because of the stories they carry and the ideas and experiences they represent.
Speaker: And it's a very romantic idea.
Speaker: Of course, that's the core idea of curious objects.
Speaker: But it's not as old of an idea as people often assume.
Speaker: Bear in mind, most of the world's major museums were brand new at this stage or didn't even exist yet.
Speaker: And the ones that did exist functioned very differently than they do today.
Speaker: And so in a sense, what Sleeper was doing was creating a museum, but one meant not just for looking, but for living.
Speaker: He is also looking at objects that have a sense of humor to them, objects that have plays on words or imagery that when you look at them in the context of the room they're in, you kind of have to chuckle to yourself.
Speaker: You know, he would appropriate...
Speaker: the colorful glass used for ships, for maritime, to signal lantern signals for boats, and he would put them in his dining room.
Speaker: He would take something like a scarlet ibis, a taxidermied bird, and install it in the octagon room because it complemented the other shades of red, although he himself was not a naturalist.
Speaker: He would pick and choose objects with eclectic and interesting colors
Speaker: stories behind them that would not be typically considered domestic objects.
Speaker: And he would find a way to integrate them into the interiors in such a way that you felt like they had always been there and that they were a natural and perfect fit.
Speaker: In fact, you know, in 1929, when Country Life did this massive spread on Beauport, they basically said, you know, he's much more than an antique collector.
Speaker: He's an artist.
Speaker: He's an artist who puts together compositions and still lives.
Speaker: And you feel that when you walk through it today.
Speaker: You feel, you know, certainly that you are seeing some really kind of interesting objects, but that is always secondary to the kind of the mood or the kind of theatrical setting of each room.
Speaker: And it's it's hard to convey that, I think, obviously, in audio.
Speaker: But when you see these rooms, they are people are charmed is the best way to put it.
Speaker: I mean, it's people talk about this place as having a kind of magic.
Speaker: And anyone who visits Boport walks away feeling that they have just been in the best company in the world, even though he's been gone since 1934.
Speaker: You know what, I haven't even told you about today's actual curious object.
Speaker: It's a perfect example of Sleeper's special confluence of sincerity and humor, and it's quite a fascinating object in its own right.
Speaker: So we need to dive in a little deeper here and tell a story within our story.
Speaker: Because actually, Pied Andrew wasn't the only strapping gentleman Sleeper was obsessed with.
Speaker: He had another obsession who, unfortunately, was long dead.
Speaker: Oh, so George Washington, George Washington's image shows up like, you know, so many Easter eggs at at Beaufort.
Speaker: It's sort of like no matter what room you go into, it's kind of a fun game to play like, you know, where is George Washington?
Speaker: And you usually find, you know, more than one or two.
Speaker: Sleeper seems to have used George Washington's image kind of as a
Speaker: you know, a sort of stand in for the kind of colonial collection that he was putting together.
Speaker: But he really enjoyed kind of oddball representations of George Washington.
Speaker: And I think that that kind of feeds into this idea that he wasn't as interested in sort of this sort of very sober notion of like American history as he was in sort of the idea of
Speaker: older objects that were charming in some way.
Speaker: So, for example, when you come into the house, there's this tiny porcelain portrait of George Washington that was originally a curtain, but it's hung super high and it's maybe an inch and a half tall, this little portrait of Washington.
Speaker: Another Washington that he has in his stair hall is, it's actually a cast iron stove, but it's in the shape of maybe like a half life-size statue of a standing George Washington.
Speaker: And you go in and you think that this is a kind of a straightforward, you know, maybe, you know, statue of Washington without realizing it's a stove.
Speaker: I think that for those who are not looking closely,
Speaker: their first reaction might be, you know, this guy's really patriotic.
Speaker: Boy, did he love colonial America.
Speaker: When in fact, I think George Washington is actually giving him license to do all kinds of oddball theatrical and often really kind of campy, you know, kind of choices within his interiors.
Speaker: And so our curious object, arguably the most interesting of all the pieces of Washingtonia in Beauport, is a large banner called the Pine Tree Flag.
Speaker: It's a cream colored flag with a large pine tree in the middle, the date 1776 beneath, and across the top, a motto, We Appeal to Heaven.
Speaker: It was made around 1776, and it was commissioned by George Washington from one of his officers.
Speaker: The pine tree emblem on the banner references a couple of different things.
Speaker: It references an indigenous symbol for peace, and it was also a symbol of colonial resistance in the years leading up to and during the Revolution period.
Speaker: So it had been transformed by Washington from an indigenous political symbol into a symbol of revolution and colonial resistance to the British.
Speaker: And so by its history, it also flew on one of his ships, his squadron of cruisers.
Speaker: And its history after that is somewhat of a mystery until it came into the hands of Henry Davis Sleeper,
Speaker: So it is an object with great political symbolism to it.
Speaker: And the pine tree and motto, we appeal to heaven, has its origins in various indigenous and in the case of we appeal to heaven directly from the Bible, these ideas that were coalescing among the provincial soldiers who are fighting against the British about peace, about conflict, about liberty,
Speaker: So all of these ideas are integrated into this object and its meaning has transformed since it was originally used in the 18th century.
Speaker: It has become somewhat of a divisive symbol today as different factions in the political landscape have co-opted the image, the symbol, the words to, in defense of their own unique political position.
Speaker: But at Beaufort, Sleeper may have acquired this object because of its rarity, because it appealed to his love of Americana.
Speaker: And physically, inside the book tower, which is a very vertically oriented space, he might have appreciated the play on words, we appeal to heaven.
Speaker: As you look heavenwards when you're in that space to behold the banner as it extends down from the second story balcony.
Speaker: Here's what I love about this banner.
Speaker: It's an object that meant such different things to different people at different times.
Speaker: For Washington and the Continental Army, it was a beacon of desperate hope.
Speaker: Its imagery, the pine tree, meant something completely different to the indigenous people who had developed it.
Speaker: And for Henry Davis Sleeper, it was an homage to a hero, but also maybe a private joke.
Speaker: And on top of that, part of his own desperate hope for a relationship with Pied Andrews.
Speaker: And now I think it's time to check back in with Pyatt.
Speaker: Because the whole time Sleeper was working on Beauport and filling it with wonderful things and acquiring the Pine Tree banner, there was really only one person he cared about impressing.
Speaker: There was a really telling moment at which Sleeper receives his first professional kind of encouragement from the architect, Arthur Little, who writes to him and he says...
Speaker: Arthur Little writes to him and says, you know, you really should be thinking about doing this professionally.
Speaker: People would kill to have houses like yours.
Speaker: Sleeper turns immediately around and shares this in a letter with Pied Andrew and says, basically, can you can you believe this great compliment that was paid to me by Arthur Little?
Speaker: But he ends this whole passage about the encouragement to become an interior decorator by saying,
Speaker: Well, of course, you know that I never would have taken the pains that I did at Beauport were it not for you.
Speaker: Beauport is basically, you know, my gift to you.
Speaker: He doesn't say it in so many words, but he effectively saying that how funny that people should think that, you know, I have a talent when in fact really all of this has been made as a way to, you know, sort of attract your attention.
Speaker: I fully believe that his elaboration and expansion of Beauport was in many ways a way to capture and to maintain Piat Andrew's attention.
Speaker: I think of it as kind of like an architectural geisha performance.
Speaker: I love that phrase.
Speaker: That's my favorite description of a house that I've ever heard.
Speaker: He was just kind of constantly, you imagine that he's constantly saying to Pied Andrew, come on over, I've added a fifth dining room.
Speaker: I've added a 12th guest bedroom.
Speaker: This was a house that was really, I mean, he was kind of a shy guy.
Speaker: This was not someone who was throwing kind of wild parties with dozens of house guests.
Speaker: It's just that he almost couldn't stop himself.
Speaker: He just kept building wing upon wing and room upon room.
Speaker: to this house until it became this extraordinary kind of almost like an installation piece of his collections.
Speaker: I think since Sleeper's death, people have tried to figure out, you know, sort of what motivated him.
Speaker: And I think that stories have really, I think, grown up around his, particularly his collection of
Speaker: American folk art and sort of colonial era objects that he was primarily really interested in kind of the founding fathers and the sort of the story of the beginning of America.
Speaker: And so I guess, you know, he gets kind of pegged as an antiquarian in that sense.
Speaker: I actually believe that any
Speaker: interest he may have had actually in American history was always secondary to his interest in an object's kind of charm, its sense of humor, its kind of inside joke kind of quality.
Speaker: He was always much more interested in the way that things kind of delighted people than he was in, say, preserving American history.
Speaker: So there's this dashing young economist, Pied Andrew, and he's wonderfully handsome.
Speaker: I can say this having looked at pictures of him online.
Speaker: I mean, a real heartthrob, right?
Speaker: Who is this guy and how did Henry Davis Sleeper come to know him and get to be close to him?
Speaker: Pied Andrew is a very interesting guy.
Speaker: Here's a young professor with a bit of independent wealth who wanted his own place.
Speaker: And so his sister, who had just married a Gloucester boy and had moved to Eastern Point herself, is the one who gets him to looking at Eastern Point.
Speaker: So in 1903,
Speaker: This is when Pied Andrew builds his home, Red Roof on Eastern Point.
Speaker: And it really becomes kind of just this the coziest arts and crafts bachelor retreat you could possibly imagine.
Speaker: But when you go into the historical record, you see these images of him.
Speaker: He was kind of impossibly handsome and charismatic, just like people, you know, everyone who met him fell in love with him like instantly.
Speaker: God, I hate him.
Speaker: I hate him too.
Speaker: And you can kind of see why.
Speaker: I mean, he just there is one like millisecond of a YouTube video that I've found where you can see him at a cousin's wedding.
Speaker: And he sort of it's it's silent, but he sort of shows up in front of the camera and grins and walks off stage.
Speaker: You know, I felt my heart skip.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It was sort of like it was like looking at, you know, Cary Grant or something.
Speaker: And, you know, in addition to all of these kind of intellectual pursuits, he was this unbelievable athlete, tennis, golfing, rowing, jogging, horseback riding.
Speaker: He did it all.
Speaker: And he did it all, preferably in the company of equally athletic, handsome young men.
Speaker: They are in the early years, just a nonstop
Speaker: Harvard party of like undergraduates who recently graduated these like handsome young men that looked like they just came out of like an Aero shirt ad or something.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And they're all they're all roughhousing and rowing and climbing over the rocks and pretending to box and wrestling.
Speaker: And, you know, that was that was his world.
Speaker: And that was the world that Henry Davis Sleeper, a kind of shy, sickly indoorsy
Speaker: guy, you know, lands in.
Speaker: And he is nothing like the young men that Pied Andrew was interested in.
Speaker: But they do create a friendship in a very different way.
Speaker: Andrew was much more than just an academic economist.
Speaker: He would become director of the U.S. Mint, assistant secretary to the Treasury.
Speaker: He served on the National Monetary Commission.
Speaker: He even became a congressman from Massachusetts.
Speaker: I would I would say romantically, it was absolutely one directional.
Speaker: Sleeper makes it very clear from the beginning from and I love they actually met the day of the lunch that they had at Red Roof.
Speaker: They met the day of the San Francisco earthquake.
Speaker: Sleeper does not mention the earthquake in his diary.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It is it is all about, you know, the earth moving on, you know, Eastern Point for him.
Speaker: Yeah, I think from the beginning, he made it very clear to Pied Andrew that he was smitten with him and Pied.
Speaker: reciprocated only to the extent that I think he would send him sort of vaguely flirtatious letters that Sleeper would, you know, just treasure.
Speaker: And there were lots of sort of exchanges of sweet little gifts and neckties and things like that.
Speaker: I get the sense that Sleeper maybe in the beginning kept holding on that, you know, one day, you know, love, love would blossom.
Speaker: And I don't think it probably ever did for for Pyatt.
Speaker: You do get the sense that there were moments at which Pyatt Andrew attempt to kind of pull back from Sleeper.
Speaker: We only know this because we have the letters that Sleeper sent to Pyatt Andrew, which he saved.
Speaker: Sleeper's own papers and the letters that he received have all been destroyed.
Speaker: But we have letters that are kind of heartbreaking in their nature, as late as the 19-teens and 20s, of Sleeper begging not to be dismissed from doing small favors for Pied Andrew, saying things like, you know, I do these things because you are so dear to me.
Speaker: Please, please don't take these things away from me.
Speaker: And you almost get the sense that Pied Andrew is saying, can you just dial it back a little bit?
Speaker: Oh, it's painful.
Speaker: It is painful.
Speaker: But you also maybe get the sense that Pied Andrew thinks, oh, well, you know, he's this sweet guy and he's such a good friend and I can't say no to him.
Speaker: So you do get this sense of a complicated friendship between them.
Speaker: And it, you know, it's, I feel like it's misleading when you look up, you know,
Speaker: tied Andrew's Wikipedia page.
Speaker: The last line is this sort of insinuation that he and Henry, you know, Henry Davis Sleeper had a physical relationship.
Speaker: I really don't think they did.
Speaker: And I think it it's I think that stems from sort of this belief that, you know, kind of two gay men could not have sustained an emotional relationship with one another for as long as they did without sleeping with each other.
Speaker: I actually think they didn't.
Speaker: I think that it was an unrequited passion.
Speaker: And I think that has a lot to do with how Sleeper's house in his collection developed.
Speaker: But he certainly developed a very deep friendship for Sleeper, was really interested in what he had to say about his writing and about his
Speaker: you know, articles he would send to him in draft form.
Speaker: He very much took Sleeper's lead in terms of decorating his own home.
Speaker: He was nearly as obsessed with Red Roof as Sleeper was with Beauport, but he didn't have nearly the same kind of eye or talent that Sleeper had.
Speaker: And so Sleeper begins to transform Red Roof over the years.
Speaker: So those who knew Red Roof, which no longer really exists in the form when it was when Pied Andrew lived there, those who knew it said that it looked very much like Beauport.
Speaker: And that was really by design.
Speaker: Sleeper was bit by bit sort of transforming Red Roof to be kind of a mirror to Beauport.
Speaker: The houses
Speaker: became these kind of extraordinary stand-ins for the men themselves.
Speaker: And certainly that's often the way that Sleeper talks to Piotre Andrew about his affection.
Speaker: He very rarely, not never, but he rarely...
Speaker: comes right out and talks about how deeply he feels for Pied Andrew.
Speaker: Instead, he quite often talks about how attached he is to Red Roof and how much he loves the rooms of Red Roof and how much Red Roof has meant to him.
Speaker: And in fact, the very last lines that Sleeper ever wrote to Pied Andrew on his deathbed, and he knew he was dying, were, you will never know.
Speaker: how much Red Roof meant to me.
Speaker: And, you know, it was the only way that he could say it.
Speaker: Now, before I start choking up, I just want to zoom back out a little and talk about how this exhibition and the story of Henry Davis Sleeper is fitting in with the larger mission of Historic New England.
Speaker: And for that, it's time to bring on one more guest, Vin Cepolla.
Speaker: He's the president and CEO of Historic New England.
Speaker: What's the big picture story that you're trying to tell through the lens of these four men and their houses?
Speaker: Something that we're very much committed to at Historic New England is to kind of show the more inclusive or the complete picture of these properties and the communities that they are in and the times that they represent.
Speaker: And so we've begun an initiative I'm exceptionally proud of called Recovering New England's Voices, which each year we bring in a cohort of PhD scholars to examine the histories of these places and to find the information and material to bring forward those stories that haven't been told before.
Speaker: And it's very research intensive.
Speaker: It's really data driven.
Speaker: We want to bring forward things to the public in a way where we can really support what we're learning.
Speaker: And so it has been breathtakingly fabulous in the extent of information, the work these scholars continue to produce, and the introduction of those stories, of expanding narratives.
Speaker: and the way in which we interpret our 38 museums.
Speaker: We're very committed to that work and have produced a great number of new stories that have great influence in how we now conduct visitor experience.
Speaker: The lives of the enslaved individuals who worked and lived on these sites
Speaker: the arc of the histories of those individuals from being enslaved to being freed, but yet perhaps remaining at the site, living and passing away in these places and bringing forward what we know about their lives.
Speaker: and their connection to these places.
Speaker: The stories of women and women preservationists, which were very often not fully considered.
Speaker: So, you know, the guy's name is on the house, but, you know, the story of the women that actually
Speaker: Were the activists and the leaders that might have protected this property or were the communitarians and the culturalists that really helped build those communities?
Speaker: And Tripp is very much a member of the family and has been, as you know, conducting research on these four figures in their homes for quite some time and working on a book about the lives and experiences of these individuals in their houses and their influence.
Speaker: you know, in American design and decoration.
Speaker: And so it kind of all just really came together.
Speaker: And what is so great about the exhibition is that we have removed a few of those sort of iconic objects from the room and have installed them in the galleries, but in such a way that their assemblage will conjure up that same impression of the octagon room.
Speaker: And that will be aided by another watercolor by William Rankin of that same room.
Speaker: The challenge of the exhibition, of course, is to extract these elements from the spaces and to create and suggest and evoke the same feeling that you get when you stand in those spaces yourself.
Speaker: And visitors to the exhibition are highly encouraged to have their next stop be to Beauport or Codman or Gibson or RISD Museum so that they can experience that for themselves.
Speaker: The value of not really changing much, of keeping it as it looked when Sleeper was there and of course, you know, when the McCann's were there, is that you get an unvarnished and transparent look into the mind of a designer at the peak of his powers.
Speaker: And that is both a positive and there are some drawbacks to that and some moments to educate and contextualize.
Speaker: For example, when you walk into Beauport, you will find a few antiques that sleeper acquired that are kind of problematic, that they either have racially insensitive imagery or they themselves have histories embedded in them of violence or colonization.
Speaker: Each object tells a very different story.
Speaker: And when taken as a whole, you can see Sleeper's vision, but you also have to question some of his motivations and intentions.
Speaker: And that is the opportunity for historic New England.
Speaker: And this is aided by our excellent guide staff.
Speaker: who interpret and facilitate conversations inside the house about his collection.
Speaker: And for people who are curious about why he acquired a certain object, why it's here, we can answer those questions for you.
Speaker: The benefit of having the house look today the way it did when Sleeper was there is that we are offering our visitors a very transparent look at the mind of a designer, warts and all.
Speaker: And I think that sort of value and honesty and authenticity cannot be replicated in other house museum experiences.
Speaker: We really let the rooms speak for themselves.
Speaker: You know, it's often said that we're living in a second Gilded Age now with respect to wealth disparity and cultural rifts.
Speaker: I just wonder, did the homes and the individuals represented in this exhibition highlight any parallels or contrasts for you between the first Gilded Age and the one that arguably we're living in today?
Speaker: Well, I mean, I think that certainly it's a reality, right, that there is this divide.
Speaker: There's a very pronounced divide in the world today and in our country today, and there are always...
Speaker: always has been, where there's wealth and power and its influence and expression in those that don't have those advantages.
Speaker: And one of the very important things about the work of historic New England is to, and part of what I'm trying to outline here is the full story of these places, not just the wealthy individual who could have this home and acquire these objects.
Speaker: but also those that could never dream of having this home and acquiring these objects, but yet were a part of the experience of that community and the lives of the individuals who did have that wealth.
Speaker: And so there is that, obviously, extreme divide.
Speaker: exceptionally extreme divide in some cases, and the importance of all of it being presented to the public to try to provide as complete a history as possible.
Speaker: So, you know, I think that the part of the purpose of the work that we do is the illumination, right?
Speaker: Is to show, try to represent the times accurately.
Speaker: of the property and the objects that we're presenting to the best of our ability and having people extrapolate and draw conclusions and think about those things as we think about how to make our present world a better place.
Speaker: That's a beautiful mission for an exhibition.
Speaker: And I think it's a beautiful note to end on.
Speaker: Thanks for joining me.
Speaker: Thanks to Historic New England for supporting this episode and to Tripp Evans, Erica Loam, and Vin Cipolla.
Speaker: It flew by so quickly with no intermission, I didn't have the chance to remind you that you can see photos of Boport and the banner and Henry Davis Sleeper and most importantly, Pied Andrew online at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: And by the way, in the current July-August issue of the magazine Antiques, Mitch Owens, the new editor, actually reviewed Tripp's book, The Importance of Being Furnished.
Speaker: So pick that up if you haven't already.
Speaker: And stay tuned for more Mitch Owens in this space.
Speaker: If you enjoyed the show and want to support us, I don't ask for money, but I would ask for a huge favor, namely to leave us a five-star rating on your podcast app.
Speaker: Just go to the Curious Objects show page and make sure you've subscribed, then drop a rating and a review to help other podcast listeners find their way here.
Speaker: We'll continue releasing episodes through the summer, but every other week instead of weekly.
Speaker: Hopefully that makes it a little easier for you to keep up with the show, and it definitely makes it a little easier for us to get out in the sun this summer, so thanks for understanding.
Speaker: Of course, if you'd like to get in touch, I'd love to hear from you on Instagram at Objective Interest or over email at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
