Love and Magic on Eastern Point

Virtual Lecture with Tripp Evans, Professor of the History of Art, Wheaton College

Ever since its doors opened in 1908, Beauport – the Massachusetts home of renowned collector and decorator Henry Davis Sleeper – has been hailed as a landmark achievement in American interior design. It is also one of the greatest love letters ever composed. During its quarter-century of construction, the house mushroomed from seventeen to forty-five rooms, each more dazzling and inventive than the last – and all created to charm the love of Sleeper’s life, his charismatic neighbor on Gloucester’s Eastern Point, Piatt Andrew. Red Roof, Andrew’s own home, attracted an admiring circle that included collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, painter Cecilia Beaux, and even a youthful Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Among those in Andrew’s orbit, however, none was more devoted than Sleeper – who once declared to his neighbor, “Beauport would not have existed but for you.” Join author Tripp Evans for an exploration of the intertwined lives of these two men, whose homes’ seductive power remains palpable nearly a century after their owners’ deaths.

Image: Beauport (1908-1934) in Gloucester, MA. Courtesy of Historic New England, photograph by David Bohl.