This room testifies to the ambitious self-fashioning of Robert “King” Hooper, one of the wealthiest people in the Massachusetts Colony. Hooper’s money came from dried salt cod, a lucrative trade that allowed him to build not just a mansion in Marblehead, but the country seat of “The Lindens,” about seven miles away in Danvers, from which this room originates. It testifies to the way that Colonial merchants in the British Atlantic world such as Hooper emulated the landed gentry of Great Britain. (He also engaged John Singleton Copley to paint his entire family, another marker of his conspicuous consumption of culture. These paintings now can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Wadsworth Atheneum, among others.) A Loyalist during the Revolution, Hooper allowed the British Commander-in-Chief, Lieutenant General Gage, to use the house as his headquarters in 1775. But Hooper backed the wrong side, a decision that eventually cost him his fortune and reputation due to backlash and shipping boycotts. The room, restored to its original dimensions and paint color thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, reminds visitors of the way that interiors can tell stories about the ambitions and realities of the lives of their owners.