The Thorne Miniature Rooms
Designed by Narcissa Niblack Thorne (1882 to 1966) · 1932 to 1940
Sixty eight tiny rooms are set into the walls of a darkened gallery on the lower level, each one lit from within and each a complete interior built to a scale of one inch to one foot. There are English drawing rooms of the Georgian period, a French bedroom of the time of Louis the Fifteenth, a Massachusetts kitchen of the seventeenth century, a California hallway of the nineteen forties and a Chinese interior with lacquer screens. Look through the glass and you find working fireplaces, rugs woven to scale, tiny paintings, chandeliers with real crystals, and through the doors and windows glimpses of gardens and streets beyond.
Narcissa Niblack Thorne, the wife of a Montgomery Ward heir, began collecting miniatures as a girl and in the nineteen thirties commissioned a team of craftsmen to build rooms to her designs. She wanted them to be accurate records of the history of interior decoration, so she used real period fabrics, had silver pieces made by working silversmiths and asked museum curators to check the details. Look for the needlepoint rugs, some of them stitched by Thorne herself, and for the way each room is lit as if by daylight or candlelight through its own windows.
Thorne gave the rooms to the Art Institute in 1941, and they have been on continuous display ever since, becoming one of the most visited parts of the museum and a favourite of children. Other sets are in Phoenix and Knoxville, but the Chicago group is the largest and the best. The rooms are also a document of taste on the eve of the Second World War, as the nineteen thirties imagined the elegant past. A memorable detail is in the modern rooms at the end of the sequence, where Thorne included tiny pictures painted for her by artists of the day, so that a room of the nineteen forties has its own miniature abstract canvas on the wall.
Did You Know? Some of the tiny rugs in the rooms were stitched by Narcissa Thorne herself, with as many as two thousand stitches to the square inch.
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