Two Gentlemen in Touraine

TWO GENTLEMEN IN TOURAINE

The story of the Gibson House begins with Catherine Hammond Gibson’s move to the Back Bay, Boston’s newest and trendiest residential neighborhood. Catherine commissioned noted Boston architect Edward Clarke Cabot to design the Gibson House at 137 Beacon Street. From 1860 until 1954, six different Gibson family members and dozens of their employees lived at the house. Its interior is filled with the family’s original furnishings—elegant wallpapers, imported carpets, and an abundance of furniture, art, and family heirlooms. Its working spaces, which include a kitchen, laundry room, and coal shed, also remain.

The Gibson House Museum is the vision of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. (1874-1954), a writer, a preservationist, and a gay man. Understanding and interpreting Gibson's sexuality within the context of the rest of his lived experience is a key part of the historical work at the Gibson House. Making the Gibson House Museum a welcoming and affirming place for the contemporary LGBTQ+ community is a key part of their current mission.

Let us then take a sweeping glance around, for we may not have another half so grand, half so fair, or half so high, while we are in the old Touraine which lies before us, there in the last orange glow of the departed sun. And if we follow these avenues of the roof below us, if we wind our way around these great towers, around the high and pointed roofs of slate, we may well imagine ourselves in some fairyland. This maze of cupolas, of domes, of towers, appears more bewildering to us than ever. And we lean against the stone, in an artistic intoxication, so overpowering is it.

—Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., Two Gentlemen in Touraine (1899)

A crisp lavender-forward fougere with a heart of bourbon vanilla, sandalwood, warm, well-loved leather, and clary sage.

When the founder of the Gibson House Museum Charles Hammond Gibson Jr. (1874-1954), met Maurice Talvande, the self-styled Count de Mauny Talvande (1866-1941), he was immediately inspired to write about him. In 1895, Charlie began writing Two Gentlemen in Touraine (1899) as a fanciful and semi-autobiographical version of their travels together through France. This Arcadian story details the flower-scented landscape where their romance began.