The Thorne Rooms

After I soaked in the wonderful Quilts as Souvenirs exhibit yesterday (see the previous post) I spent a half hour revisiting one of my favorite Art Institute exhibits:  the Thorne Miniature Rooms, or the Thorne Rooms for short.  I suppose I was six or seven when I first saw these elegant dioramas.  Every day in ThorneRoomLand is sunny, but the quality of the light is at once yellow, cool, and slightly dusty.  (I pressed my face against the glass to try to see the light bulb. I think I succeeded once.)  I could imagine tiny people just around the corner, waiting to come out and use the rooms after all the museum visitors left.

Quilty floor!  / 16th C France

Narcissa Niblack was born in Indiana in 1882 and grew up in Chicago. In 1902 she married her childhood sweetheart James Ward Thorne, an heir to the Montgomery Ward department store fortune. They had two sons.   Her interest in miniatures began early when her uncle, a Navy admiral, sent her trinkets.

During the Depression she engaged unemployed skilled craftsmen to create the 1:12 scale models of period rooms from upper-class homes from France, England, and the U.S.  (And a few others (see the Chinese room, below).)  Early exhibitions were private charity fundraisers. They were displayed to the public at the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition (Chicago) and the 1940 World’s Fair (New York). 

The Art Institute created a permanent gallery for 68 Thorne Rooms. It opened in 1954.  The Phoenix Art Museum has  20 rooms and the Knoxville Art Museum has nine rooms.  [We saw the Phoenix rooms some years ago. It was so odd to see Thorne Rooms that were unfamiliar-yet-familiar.]

Traditional Chinese Interior 

The rooms are cleaned with cotton swabs and tweezers. There is a detailed layout plan for each room to ensure that items are put back in their proper places.   

My favorites have always been the American rooms, especially the 18th century. 

A Shaker scene. I appreciate this much more now!

A new room was installed in 1999 to commemorate Frank Lloyd Wright.  It took 800 hours to create!