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E-10: English Dining Room of the Georgian Period, 1770-90

Miniature Georgian-era dining room with pale green walls, ornate white trim, long glass table.
CC0 Public Domain Designation

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  • Miniature Georgian-era dining room with pale green walls, ornate white trim, long glass table.

Date:

c. 1937

Artist:

Designed by Narcissa Niblack Thorne
American, 1882-1966

About this artwork

The sixty-eight fascinating Thorne Miniature Rooms feature highlights from the history of interior design and decorative arts from the thirteenth century to 1940. These enchanting miniature stage sets were conceived by Mrs. James Ward Thorne of Chicago and constructed between 1934 and 1940 by master craftsmen according to her exacting specifications, on a scale of one inch to one foot. The harmonious elegance seen here is based on two dining rooms designed by Robert Adam, the successful eighteenth-century London architect whose precise and delicate interpretation of the antique (stimulated by then-recent excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii) dictated English taste for a quarter of a century. To insure perfect conformity, Adam undertook the entire design of a house and every detail of its interior, hiring cabinetmakers to execute furniture that blended Neoclassical elements with current English forms. Instead of using wood and wallpaper, Adam carved low-relief ornament in plaster against painted panels in the style of Roman stuccos, as seen in this dining room. His furniture was often gilded in the Continental fashion, as is the side table in this room. The landscape over the table, painted by one of the many artists that Mrs. Thorne commissioned for the project, is in the style of Claude Lorrain.

Status

On View, Gallery 11

Department

Applied Arts of Europe

Artist

Narcissa Niblack Thorne (Designer)

Title

E-10: English Dining Room of the Georgian Period, 1770-90

Place

United States (Object made in)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

Made 1932–1937

Medium

Miniature room, mixed media

Dimensions

Scale 1 inch = 1 foot: 50.8 × 89.5 × 65.1 cm (20 × 35 1/4 × 25 11/16 in.); Interior, Scale 1 inch = 1 foot: 50.8 × 89.6 × 65.1 cm (20 × 35 1/4 × 25 5/8 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne

Reference Number

1941.1195

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.

https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/43714/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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