Tue, Oct 31
|James Merrill House Visitor's Center
EXHIBIT OPENING "James Merrill's World: Fans and Clouds and Bats"
Stop by the Visitor's Center on Halloween night to learn the story behind James Merrill and David Jackson's whimsical wallpaper. Refreshments such as cookies, candy, cider, wine, and seltzer will be served. We look forward to seeing you!
Time & Location
Oct 31, 2023, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
James Merrill House Visitor's Center, 107 Water St, Stonington, CT 06378, USA
About the event
In the early 1970s, James Merrill and his partner David Jackson decided the old wallpaper in the sitting room of their apartment at 107 Water Street "had to go." An old friend, Hubbell Pierce, whom they knew as a cocktail lounge crooner of Cole Porter songs, had taken up wallpaper design. One evening after a soufflé dinner, the three men had an idea for a fantastical new wallpaper, taking the theme of fans and clouds and bats from the images in their old Chinese carpet. After commissioning Pierce to make it, Merrill and Jackson returned from a winter in Greece to find the extravagantly weird, hand-printed wallpaper, named "Summer Palace," installed on the walls of the third-floor parlor.