Clubs We Do Not Care to Join: Club for the Retired Sons of Indulgent Fathers

Rea Irvin stages a satirical floor plan of gilded uselessness. The central figure is a fountain whose basin is upheld by nude caryatid figures — an architectural joke about the club's only animating principle: women as decoration. Around it, silk-hatted wastrels enact varying degrees of collapse: one slumps on a tufted sofa exhaling a dotted-line snore-cloud while a liveried footman sprays him with perfume; another crouches at the fountain's rim, studying his own drink; a third is physically ferried across the room by a servant. A small page scatters rose petals for no apparent recipient. Two men near the left actually stand upright, which reads as suspicious. The room's striped columns, bead curtains, and Moorish arches signal orientalist fantasy — a standard Gilded Age shorthand for excess without labor. Irvin's target is hereditary leisure itself, the idle son as the American plutocracy's waste product.