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77 calling card of her notable national career. Salle's room installations and vignettes — arrayed over the course of five decades in a Manhattan apartment, her historical Harmonium compound in Houston's West End, and this River Oaks home — amount to the artist's Gesamtkunstwerk. The House as Muse Salle's New York Upper East Side apartment has been featured in The World of Interiors (August 1995). Her Houston cottages (poetically titled Here and There, Now and Then, Elsewhere, and By the Way), which compose the compound Harmonium, a City of Houston Historic District since 2022, have been published in seven issues of PaperCity, starting in March 2002, as well as in the books Domestic Art, Texas Artists Today, and Living in Style: Country. However, the Vaughns' River Oaks residence on Brentwood Drive — affectionately named Slippers by Salle — has never been photographed or published. Jimmy passed away on Valentine's Day, 2022, as the couple neared their 48th anniversary, just after he received overdue acclaim in a January 31, 2022, New York Times article extolling his contributions to mathematical research: underwriting the scholarly study that led to solving the four-centuries-old Fermat's Last Theorem. After the estate was settled, Salle sold the home this fall, and its fate is uncertain. With the threat of being torn down looming, the artist agreed to let her house be photographed late this summer as a testament to the couple's shared life together. The intensely private Jimmy assiduously avoided the limelight, demurred on any publicity about their home, and seldom entertained there. "We went out every night to something cultural," Salle says — so few people have ever been inside Slippers, especially in recent memory, when it was increasingly Jimmy's kingdom of books. About those volumes: Antiquarian bookseller Michael Laird says, "James Vaughn created the finest and most important collection of rare mathematics books ever assembled by a private individual. The scope and richness of the collection was almost unbelievable; he had a presentation copy of Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia which could be considered the Gutenberg Bible of mathematics books." With the sadness of moving out of her home and its possible destruction, Salle told us she has become at peace with the impermanence of life, even the loss of the graceful structure. Meanwhile, as an artist, she has entered a new phase in her creative life, rediscovered by the Houston art world after her longtime dealer Meredith Long & Company shuttered following the death Left: Ancient Egyptian canopic jars held the deceased's organs for safe passage to the afterlife. Above, an Egyptian-inspired canvas by Salle dialogues with the antiquities. The Vaughns were on the Visiting Committee for Egyptian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as at the Metropolitan in New York City, where they donated antiquities. The upstairs barrel-vaulted salon designed by Salle, the room where she used to paint. A French antique recamier found in Fort Worth, upholstered in silk velvet by Loyd- Paxton. Italian faux-marble carved column, one of a pair sourced decades ago from a now shuttered Houston antiques store. Opposite page: The master bedroom's Chinese bed, a find from Loyd-Paxton, painted a soft gray by the artist to resemble marble, backed by organdy draping. Ming Dynasty side table. On the bed, a collection of shoes.