Gibson intro paragraph

Stair Hall at Gibson House Museum in Boston

In 1934, fifty-nine-year-old writer Charles Hammond Gibson Jr. (1874-1954) inherited 137 Beacon Street, his childhood home in Boston’s Back Bay. Preserving the home’s still- intact 1890s interiors and presenting himself as a living embodiment of the Gilded Age, Gibson envisioned a future house museum that would enshrine his literary legacy and showcase the lifestyle of his elite Boston family. Privately, his project reflected a host of anxieties: the decline of his writing career, the passage of his “Boston Brahmin” social class, and the fading of his once-legendary beauty. Like a reversal of Oscar Wilde’s fictional character Dorian Gray, whose portrait aged while he remained youthful, Gibson grew older in a home utterly immune to change. Today the house provides an invaluable reflection of a lost era and perhaps the most authentic portrait ever made of its final owner. 

When Gibson’s grandmother Catherine Hammond Gibson commissioned the family home in 1859, she avoided the two-room entryway of a typical Back Bay home in favor of a more impressive double-width stair hall. The striking wallpaper in this space, added by her daughter-in-law Rosamond in the 1890s, represented the very height of Aesthetic Movement fashion. Produced in Japan, its gilded, three-dimensional pattern imitates seventeenth-century stamped leather.