Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago

Other Details: 142 full-color illustrations 168 pages 11 x 11" Published 1984

amateur architect of Monticello and the University of Virginia. Benjamin Franklin, who always listed his trade as printer, invented the stove that bears his name and helped write the Constitution.

The word "amateur" comes from the Latin amare, to love. An amateur, simply put, is one who pursues an activity for love rather than for money. And love is what Mrs. Thorne lavished upon her work. A member by marriage of an important Chicago family, she devoted many years of her life and considerable portions of her substantial financial resources to the creation of her beloved rooms. What she lacked in formal artistic training she made up for with diligence, aptitude, and a keen sense of mission. It was her passion, combined with a unique confluence of historic and economic opportunities, that made the Thorne Rooms a reality.

Born Narcissa Niblack in Vincennes, Indiana, in 1882, she was the daughter of a prominent businessman. Her early schooling was at the hands of a governess. At the age of 11 she was sent to public school and, subsequently, to a private school. Looking back in later years, she commented somewhat wistfully, "The trouble with my childhood was that I was given no education. Knowing how to put my hat on straight was supposed to be enough."

True, it was not much of an education by modern standards, but by the standards of the day it was not uncommon. The world was a far smaller and more intimate place at the turn of the century than it is today. London and Paris were the capitals of gracious society; Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia were their American counterparts. Any young lady "of means" was expected to absorb the manners of these places and not pay much attention to anything else.

Narcissa Niblack absorbed her lessons well. She accompanied her family on their travels to the East Coast and to Europe. Her sparse education was augmented considerably by tours of castles and fine country homes on both sides of the Atlantic. When her family moved to Chicago, sometime before 1900, she saw even more.

In 1901 she married James Ward Thorne, whom she had known since childhood. He was the son of George R. Thorne, co-founder of Montgomery Ward and Company with A. Montgomery Ward. James and his three brothers all worked for the company. A vice-president and director, James retired in 1926 at the age of 53, enabling him to travel extensively with his wife.

By the time she married, Narcissa Niblack had achieved all the success to which a young lady of her background could aspire. She was beautiful, gracious, and well-liked. By all accounts, she was delightful company�warm and open-hearted. Her marriage to James Ward Thorne gave her both wealth and social connections. It is no surprise that she quickly became prominent in Chicago society, giving her time to cultural institutions like The Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Historical Society, and to various charities like the Woman's Exchange and several hospitals. The Thornes had two sons, Ward and Niblack. The couple continued to travel, and she continued to indulge in her childhood passion: collecting miniatures.

Her son Niblack recalls his mother's explanation of her lifelong fascination with miniatures as a compulsion; when she saw one, she just had to have it. A variety of reasons probably contributed to her love of miniatures. Certainly, dollhouses and toy soldiers were a common feature of childhood in her day. We do know that she was quite fond of dollhouses; in later years she recalled with affection one particular dollhouse with which she had played during her first years in Chicago. We also know that her uncle Rear Admiral Albert P. Niblack sent her miniatures that he picked up in his travels around the world. Many people have similar experiences without going further, but Mrs. Thorne was able to convert this childhood pastime into a lifetime work that would entertain and educate millions.

During the 1920s, and especially after Mr. Thorne's retirement, the Thornes spent much time abroad. The world they saw on these trips was quite different from that in which they had grown up. World War I had seen to that. The great empires had been shattered. The supremacy of England and France in matters of art, manners, and taste was on the decline. The new powers of Russia and China had emerged as the result of violent revolutions. New styles of art had burst onto the scene as well�Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism�styles that were quite divorced from the grand and genteel traditions of earlier centuries.

With these social and cultural upheavals came opportunities. The shifting economic order left many a once-wealthy family in need of money. Precious artifacts, including miniatures which had once graced elegant dollhouses and private collections in Europe, came onto the market at prices undreamed of ten years earlier. Mrs. Thorne was not one to let such opportunities pass. By 1930 the Thornes' apartment on North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago was so overflowing with miniatures that she rented a studio on Oak Street, a few blocks away, to relieve the crush.

It was sometime during the 1920s that Mrs. Thorne conceived the idea of creating miniature rooms. There are several stories about just how the idea came to her, including one that traces it to her discovery of a miniature shadow box in a bazaar in Istanbul. But there were other important influences as well.

The single most important catalyst was the appearance in American museums of full-scale period rooms. The idea of the period room�one that is carefully fashioned to recreate a real or imagined room from a bygone era�had been around for a half-century. The Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts, is generally credited with being the first American museum to install period rooms, which it did as early as 1907. By the 1920s the idea caught fire. In 1924 The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened its collection of period rooms, spanning four centuries. The Art Institute of Chicago, The Detroit Institute of Arts, and The Brooklyn Museum followed suit in short order. It was during the 1920s also that the Rockefeller family undertook the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg.

The period room, and by extension, the period village, was intended to serve an educational purpose. Mrs. Thorne, with her long years of volunteer work at major cultural institutions, found the concept appealing. She also saw that the creation of enough full-sized rooms to offer anything approaching a comprehensive look at European and American interior design would require more space than any museum could possibly spare. Constructing such rooms in miniature was a perfect way to solve the problem.

In choosing this method, Mrs. Thorne was following another tradition of long standing: the royal dollhouse. Because the royal dollhouse had quite a different purpose from its present-day counterpart, it is worth a brief examination. An invention of the 16th century, it was intended to serve as a three-dimensional catalogue of its owner's possessions, a testimony to his greatness, wealth, and position. Duke Albert V of Bavaria, whose Baby House of 1558 is generally regarded as the first royal dollhouse, commissioned several such elaborate structures to display tiny replicas of his belongings. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, other such dollhouses were built by teams of craftsmen for nobles and wealthy burghers alike. The value placed on such houses was closely related to the intricacy of the workmanship.

The vital difference between royal dollhouses and modern ones is that the royal versions were never intended to be playthings for children. Indeed, the very idea of "playing" with a dollhouse was completely absent. Instead, children were encouraged to view the houses as examples of proper living; it was assumed that they would absorb the "lessons" in decorum and manners that such houses displayed. Thus, royal dollhouses were instruments of instruction rather than sources of amusement. One of the most recent examples, still on display today at Windsor Castle, was Queen Mary's Dollhouse, created during the 1920s. Its elaborate workmanship and exquisite detail certainly provided some inspiration for Mrs. Thorne.

A third phenomenon that influenced the creation of the Thorne Rooms was the growing fashion among wealthy Americans during the early decades of this century, and in the 1920s in particular, for building and furnishing their residences in various historical styles. By the 1930s, the way of life exemplified by the elegant estates of England, France, Germany, and what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire was rapidly disappearing. The displacement of the old by the new appears to have made many of the well-to-do all the more nostalgic for the styles and manners of the pre-World War I era. The most emulated period was the 18th century, both in England and in France. The great appeal of the art, architecture, and decorative arts of this particular epoch for these Americans seems to have been its comfortable elegance, aristocratic associations, and compatibility with their gracious way of life. But homes or rooms of other periods�Tudor or French Renaissance, for example�were also frequently designed. Among the most spectacular and best known homes built in this historicizing spirit are Henry E. Huntington's San Marino in California, James Deering's Vizcaya in Florida, and, most notably, William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon, also in California. It should be noted that innumerable city apartments and suburban homes were designed and decorated in this taste, as well.

Some of these environments incorporated genuine articles imported from Europe, sometimes even whole rooms. Dealers like Sir Joseph Duveen scoured Europe and Russia for his clients to find authentic paintings and sculpture, furniture, porcelain, and other objects. Most interiors, however, were pure pastiches, approximating the look of the period being imitated. Interior decorating firms like P. W. French of New York and Alavoine of New York and Paris were hired to design and produce paneling, furniture, draperies, upholstery, and carpets, which they then arranged and maintained; they were even asked to purchase appropriate silver, crystal, dishware, and linens. Understandably, the creation of such ambitious and expensive decorating projects slowed down considerably after the Depression and all but ceased after World War II.

It was the confluence of all these social, economic, and cultural factors that gave Mrs. Thorne a rare chance to turn her private hobby into an extraordinary public display. She plunged into the creation of her rooms with the same passion that had marked her collecting. Her son Niblack recalls that she went to the studio nearly every day, often for long hours, and that at times there were 30 rooms in various stages of completion in her tiny studio quarters. Often there were several craftsmen at work in the studio at the same time�one creating architectural shells, another doing plasterwork, while a third carved the miniature moldings.

In 1932 the first set of Thorne Rooms�30 in all�was put on display at the Chicago Historical Society for a benefit for the Architectural Students' League. One year later, the same thirty rooms were displayed to a much larger audience when they were installed in their own special building at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition. Hundreds of thousands of people lined up to see them. Much encouraged by the popularity and success of the rooms, Mrs. Thorne began work on a new and even grander project.

In the first set of rooms Mrs. Thorne for the most part had used miniatures that she already owned, so that the contents of her collection had in large measure dictated the historic periods she depicted. For this new set of rooms Mrs. Thorne fixed upon a comprehensive approach. She decided to follow a chronological scheme, and so to present a history of European design, creating the furniture and accessories from scratch where necessary. This enabled her to maintain a consistent scale of one inch to the foot in every room from this point on, except for the interior of the church Our Lady Queen of Angels (E-29). Mrs. Thorne has been credited with establishing one of the standard proportions used by miniaturists.

The design and construction of this second set of rooms occupied her until 1937. She went to Europe several times expressly to collect miniatures and to study rooms she might wish to copy. Her husband accompanied her and, since he was a dedicated amateur photographer, no doubt helped her in her research by photographing the homes they visited.

Mrs. Thorne had all of Europe to choose from, which makes her final choice of rooms quite interesting. (The Chinese and Japanese rooms appear to have been added as an afterthought, perhaps in recognition of the important influence of Oriental design on European decorative styles.) Of the twenty-nine European rooms in the Art Institute, all but one are either English or French. None dates from earlier than the 16th century. There are no ancient or medieval rooms; no rooms from Italy, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia; and few rooms from the houses of any but the well-to-do. There is just one room representing Germany (E-28). (Mrs. Thorne did create another German room�a Rococo hallway�which was initially exhibited with both sets of rooms. It was dismantled around the time that the rooms were placed in their present gallery in the Art Institute.) The rooms are arranged precisely in chronological sequence, with the greatest proportion (13 of 31, or 40 percent) depicting interiors from the 18th century. There are only four rooms from the 19th century and only two from the 20th. But Mrs. Thorne was not concerned with being comprehensive; that would have been impossible to accomplish. For the most part, she chose to portray the styles and periods she felt were significant. As we have seen, for Mrs. Thorne and others of similar background, the grace of English and French interiors during the 18th century was the standard of good taste and breeding. Her notes contain references to her belief that in the 18th century, interior design reached its zenith, and it was this period that provided the styles with which she surrounded herself in her everyday life. Thus, the European Rooms, taken as a whole, can be seen as a reminder of a style of living that had virtually come to an end with World War I.

The second set of rooms was shown along with the first set at the World's Fairs in San Francisco and New York, in 1939 and 1940, respectively. Extensive publicity accompanied the rooms, including major articles in newspapers and in Life magazine. In the course of the next few years the rooms traveled to such cities as Baltimore, St. Louis, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

Not one to rest on her laurels, Mrs. Thorne now embarked on a set of 37 American Rooms to complement the European ones. These were designed and executed between 1937 and 1940. As with the European Rooms, Mrs. Thorne's selection of places and periods is revealing. Of the thirty-seven rooms, twenty-one date from the 18th century and all but eight depict interiors on the East Coast.

Certainly, Mrs. Thorne's selections can be accounted for, in part, by the fact that the East Coast was settled first and therefore displayed the greatest variety in interior design. But, her choices seem to have been determined as well by a conviction, held by most experts of her day, that in America the dominant and most important cultures were those of the Atlantic Seaboard, New England, and the Old South. Examples of such styles as Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Prairie School, and Bauhaus modernism are noticeably absent. Only three rooms�from the West and Southwest�are contemporary ones, and the one room representing the entire Midwest (A-33) dates from the post-Civil War era. Once again, as she had with the European Rooms, Mrs. Thorne seems to have chosen periods and styles she admired and with which she was most familiar.

Thus, what we have in the Thorne European and American Rooms is not the history of interior design, but a history. That history was Mrs. Thorne's; she had her own vision of what was important, and she followed it.

Mrs. Thorne presented all three sets of rooms to The Art Institute of Chicago in 1940. Shortly afterwards, the museum sold the first set of 30 rooms to the IBM Corporation, which, in turn, sent them on tour for a number of years. In 1960 Mrs. Thorne's son Niblack happened to see some of them on display in a New York store window. They were, in his words, "the worse for wear." Years of travel had taken a heavy toll on the fragile rooms. Through the generosity of IBM, Niblack Thorne arranged to have the rooms returned to Mrs. Thorne. Repairs were made and the rooms were extensively refurbished. Sixteen of them were then donated to the Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, Arizona as a tribute to Niblack Thorne's late wife, Marie. Nine of the rooms were presented by IBM to the Dulin Gallery of Art in Knoxville, Tennessee, at about the same time. The remaining rooms were dismantled. Today both the Phoenix Museum and the Dulin Gallery have the rooms on permanent display. The Art Institute's Thorne Rooms were installed permanently in the museum in 1954 with a fund Mrs. Thorne provided for their exhibition and care.

A personal triumph for Mrs. Thorne occurred in 1936, when she escorted members of the British royal family through an exhibition of her second set of rooms. Later, she was told that the family would accept a room made by her, and so she created an interior depicting a library in Windsor Castle. She intended it as a gift for the coronation of Edward VIII. When Edward abdicated, the room entered the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Mrs. Thorne continued to work with miniatures for the remainder of her long life, but she never again produced such rooms for public display. She did, however, make many more modest rooms for her son Niblack and for friends and relatives in the Chicago area. In her last years she began to make shadow boxes, many of which were sold through the Woman's Exchange for charity. Shortly before her death in 1966 she created two rooms for Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

In her late miniatures Mrs. Thorne broke away from her earlier emphasis on periods to include Parisian street scenes with people and soldiers, and fanciful interiors with Peter Rabbit and other Beatrix Potter characters. She also continued to create dining rooms and parlors. She seems to have loved miniature books, for among her later works are libraries and bookstores with curved windows displaying their wares.