Henry Davis Sleeper

Henry Davis Sleeper
Born	March 27, 1878 Boston
Died	September 22, 1934 Massachusetts General Hospital
Cause of death	Leukemia
Nationality	American

Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934) was a nationally-noted antiquarian, collector, and interior decorator.

Henry Davis Sleeper was born March 27, 1878, in Boston to Major Jacob Henry Sleeper, a distinguished Civil War veteran and Maria (Westcott) Sleeper, their youngest son after Jacob and Stephen. He was grandson of Jacob Sleeper, one of the founders of Boston University as well as a clothier and manager of a real estate trust. Henry's education appears to have been by private tutors due to ill health as a child, and it is unclear as to whether he was ever formally educated.

Henry Sleeper was introduced to the Eastern Point in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the spring of 1906 by the Harvard economist A. Piatt Andrew who had built a handsome summer mansion, Red Roof, on a rock ledge above the harbor. Sleeper was much taken by the location and immediately decided to build a little further along the ledge from Red Roof. He purchased the land on Eastern Point in Gloucester on August 13, 1907. Eastern Point was an enclave occupied by a somewhat louche group of "Bohemian" artists and intellectuals with frequent visits from some of the more colorful and unconventional members of Boston Society, in particular Isabella Stewart Gardner, the legendary art collector and builder of Fenway Court in the Back Bay Fens, now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The group became known as Dabsville, DABS containing the initials of the core members.

Construction of Beauport, Sleeper's relatively modestly scaled Arts and Crafts-style house began in the fall of 1907 and was sufficiently finished to receive A. Piatt Andrew as a house guest in May 1908. A gay man, some sources say that Sleeper was in a relationship with Andrew. Others state that the two were just friends. As property flanking Sleeper's became available, Beauport was expanded several times until 1925, often in response to events or important experiences in his life. The house was now not only a home but a major showcase for Sleeper's interior design and decoration business. Clients could choose wallpapers, window treatments, or entire rooms to have reproduced in their own houses. Sleeper had a specialty in "Puritan Revival", the Jacobean-American architecture and decorative arts of the original American colonies, but his tastes and interests included French decor of several centuries and a great deal of orientalia.

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