The Gilded Age in Boston: An Evening with Author Stephen T. "Skip" Moskey

Author and historian Stephen T. "Skip" Moskey will give an exclusive, illustrated talk for guests of the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum entitled "The Aesthetic Vision of Larz and Isabel Anderson."

October 5 at 7pm. Tickets now available. $10 per person. Proceeds support the Waterworks Museum. 

Larz and Isabel Anderson were an elite Boston couple whose lives spanned almost a century of American history, from the Civil War to World War II. They benefitted from inherited Gilded Age wealth that allowed them to pursue their interests in domestic and public architecture, interior design, landscape gardening, and literature. They held Italian and Japanese art and architecture in especially high regard, and incorporated these traditions into their personal aesthetics. Moskey, author of Larz and Isabel Anderson: Wealth and Celebrity in the Gilded Age, will present an illustrated lecture on the aesthetic vision that informed the architecture and landscape of what was once the Anderson estate Weld, now the Larz Anderson Park, in Brookline during the almost half-century that the Andersons lived there (1899-1948). He will show never-before seen floor plans of the mansion, a schematic reconstruction of the vast system of interconnected gardens that gave shape and texture to the estate’s 64 acres, and a rare color home movie made in 1937-38 documenting the estate’s horticultural splendor.

Stephen T. Moskey researches and writes about American cultural history.  A graduate of Georgetown University, where he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics and modern European languages, he is a member of the Historical Society of Washington, the Victorian Society of America, and the Latrobe Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.  He co-authored The Turkish Ambassador’s Residence and the Cultural History of Washington, D.C.  Skip lives in the nation’s capital four blocks from Anderson House, the former residence of Larz and Isabel Anderson.