Mrs. James Ward Thorne. French Salon of the Louis XVI Period, about 1780, about 1937. Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne
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Let your imagination take over on this journey through the Thorne Rooms—miniature and, as generations of Art Institute visitors have found, wonderfully transporting.
Narcissa Niblack Thorne, the creator of the Thorne Rooms, herself had a vivid imagination. In the 1930s, she assembled a group of skilled artisans in Chicago to create a series of intricate rooms on the minute scale of 1:12. With these interiors, she wanted to present a visual history of interior design that was both accurate and inspiring. The result is two parts fantasy, one part history—each room a shoe box–sized stage set awaiting viewers’ characters and plots.
The highlights below offer just a glimpse of the fascinating stories behind the much-loved Thorne Rooms—so unleash your imagination and step into these astonishingly tiny spaces.
Of the 68 rooms created by Thorne and her craftsmen, this is the only miniature of a sacred space. The Gothic-style church is built on an even smaller scale than the models of domestic spaces, emphasizing the grandeur of the space. Thorne did not set out to create a “typical” church space but rather one with specific character and exquisite details. She lavished attention on even the smallest elements of the space, specially commissioning the elaborate altarpiece, grille work, and crucifix from artists who generally worked in full scale. The Gothic style of the church would have been familiar to her Chicago viewers—after the Great Fire of 1871, the city embraced the Gothic Revival style for churches, universities, apartment buildings, hotels, and private clubs.
E-29: English Roman Catholic Church in the Gothic Style, 1275-1300 (Magic of the Miniature)
LINDSEY MICAN MORGAN: E-29: English Roman Catholic church in the Gothic style, late 13th century.
Mrs. Thorne’s Gothic church is the only room that is not one inch to one foot. It was reduced further in size because of the grand scale of the Gothic church. Things of note in the room are the triptych at the back of the church; this was designed by a famous artist, Hildreth Meière. She is mostly known for very large-scale pieces, so it’s quite charming to see her work in such a small scale. Another artist of note that Mrs. Thorne hired is Marie Zimmerman. She did the family crypt gates that are here in Chicago for the Thorne family, and Mrs. Thorne was so taken by her work she asked her to do the ironwork that can be seen here to the left by the anteroom. Miniaturist, Hank Kupjack:
HANK KUPJACK: Mrs. Thorne had a fascination for miniature, and she was on the board of the Art Institute during the time when full size period rooms were all the fashion in museums, and she realized that to have a comprehensive example you would need a building three times the size of the institute, and that was their original purpose: to educate and to give the public an idea of what full size period interiors look like.
RM WOLFF: The relationship of one inch to one foot, that was her work that resulted in that being the now accepted way that miniatures are built.
LINDSEY MICAN MORGAN: Doctoral candidate and graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, RM Wolff.
RM WOLFF: Part of the reason that Mrs. Thorne’s rooms were able to be so successful is because they come on the heel of a larger interest in period rooms, a nostalgia that gets manifested as preservation.
Archive: "In the process of turning back the pages of history to colonial days, 458 structures were demolished and all evidence of modern life removed…"
RM WOLFF: Colonial Williamsburg, that restoration has begun in the 1920s led by the Rockefellers with this feeling of sort of making sure to preserve American history.
Archive: "Even the signs are in keeping with the restored city."
RM Wolff: So her project fits squarely within this moment of threat to these original spaces. Partially because of the war these objects are now available on the market, and absolutely this nostalgia for a simpler time, a less threatened time, is completely part of the period room trend on the whole and the Thorne Rooms in particular.
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Thorne, like many of her generation, was generally not an admirer of Modernism, but she wanted her survey to at least touch on contemporary taste. She called this room a “modern art gallery,” and the focus is on striking (and tiny) paintings and sculptures, all commissioned from well-established artists including Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, and Léopold Survage. The Cubist painter Léger created the work hanging over the bright red sofa. Thorne strongly disliked what she called “packing box furniture,” adding “I shall never feel the urge to own chairs made of tortured plumbers’ pipe camouflaged with a wash of chromium and upholstered with slippery leather.”
A37: California Hallway, c. 1940 (Magic of the Miniature)
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: A37. California hallway, circa 1940.
Set in Mrs. Thorne’s own time period. If you look out the balcony window you can see the skyline of San Francisco at nighttime all lit up.
Glancing around the room, you can’t but notice all the artwork and there’s something pretty significant about the artwork within this room. These were not made as duplicates of existing artworks; they were actually made specifically to go in this room.
Looking at the far back wall over the fireplace is an original work by the cubist painter Ozenfant. Then, if you look to the right, over the red sofa, there is an original work by Léger. And the pair of bronze sculptures are by John Storrs.
Mrs. Thorne supposedly wanted to commission Pablo Picasso for an original piece for this room, so she sent her sister over to Europe.
HANK KUPJACK: Her sister, Lydia Swift, was in Paris and had the job of trying to contact Picasso. This is before the war. So she went over to his studio four or five times and knocked on the door. And, finally, the last time she went over— Picasso’s studio was on the top floor and he opened the window and shouted out, “What?!” Mrs. Swift said, “I have a commission for you.” So she trotted up five floors and she showed Picasso what paintings Ozenfant, the rest of them, had done for Mrs. Thorne and he took one look at it and said, “That’s silly,” and slammed the door. Wouldn’t do it. But she tried. She tried.
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: So that’s the story. I think it’s pretty hilarious. Luckily, there were many artists who did not think it was silly and they’re just stunning pieces and specifically done to go in a miniature room.
RM WOLFF: The Thorne rooms are so compelling because they’re historical objects and artistic creations. They are both. They tell us history and they tell us history in very real ways that we have lots of evidence for. We know that these are how chairs and Marie-Antoinette’s anteroom looked. And we know that this is how dining rooms in Pennsylvania looked. We know that they’re telling us a very real history through their objects. And at the same time we know that they are creations of this woman in this particular moment.
MARIANNE MALONE: There’s her hand involved in these, her imagination, her desires, her wants, her direction.
ANNE THORNE WEAVER: I cannot emphasize what an incredible woman she was. A friend of a friend’s, a wonderful grandmother, she was just really— I don’t mean the “one of a kind,” but she was an exceptional woman.
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Thorne particularly admired the refined classical style of 18th-century French and English interior, and the people of Chicago, many of whom were struggling to survive the devastating Depression of the 1930s, would have found the imagined perfection of this room especially captivating.
Thorne’s inspiration for this room was the Petit Trianon, a small but richly furnished classical retreat set in the gardens of the French royal palace of Versailles. She noted Marie Antoinette as a particular inspiration, infusing the room with mystery and drama by associating it with the doomed French queen who, before her execution, had been a leading patron of the arts. The room’s miniature furniture was purchased in Paris and is especially fine: the marquetry commode and marble-topped secretary can be actually opened and locked with tiny keys!
E-24: French Salon of the Louis XVI Period, c. 1780 (Magic of the Miniature)
LINDSEY MICAN MORGAN: E-24: French Salon of the Louis XVI period c. 1780. Everything about the room screams of Marie Antoinette.
Mrs. Thorne wrote: "Nothing could be more chaste, more restrained; this was Marie Antoinette’s favorite retreat and it is here that I always feel her shadow." And I’m not sure I would describe this as restrained, a lot of gold up in this room. Marie Antoinette was a teenager given a royal coffer and she was irresponsible as most teenagers would be, and it has such lovely sensibilities. These are also the sensibilities that got Marie Antoinette beheaded.
RM WOLFF: When we look at this miniature room the detail is just amazing. We get completely caught up in the idea that we know Marie Antoinette loved music and nature, and there’s a chair that has a harp-shaped back and there are roses everywhere, even on the small vases, and the tiny secretary desk that’s included in the room can actually be locked and unlocked with a very tiny set of keys. We’re delighted by these details, and don’t totally remember their context. This was a queen that just years after this room depicts suffered at the hands of a revolution that would see her as representative of taking advantage of this beauty and this wealth and pulling it all in for herself. So miniatures do this very funny thing where they pull us into their spaces, but sometimes we don’t always take our context with us, or their context with us. They depict moments in time. They do tell those other stories too. They do give us insight into those more complex historical moments also.
LINDSEY MICAN MORGAN: Almost all of these rooms are depicting households that indeed would have a staff, that’s because that’s stylistically of what’s note. If that’s who had the money to hire architects and have something put together in a way that was historically of note then that’s completely part of who she is and part of the reasoning of the rooms.
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Thorne was entranced by the romantic idea that America’s colonial past was a simpler time, uncomplicated by industry, immigration, or urbanism. She wanted this interior, which she found warm and intimate, to evoke the lifestyle of seafaring families who, she thought “might occupy a one-story cottage, small and [as] compactly planned as the boats built by the same craftsmen.” It was Thorne’s genius to leave out human figures from all of her rooms, since they would inevitably be taken for dolls. Instead she wanted the viewer’s imagination to take over. Here, the child’s toys on a diminutive chair and a table set for tea suggest that the occupants might have just stepped out of the room.
A12: Cape Cod Living Room, 1750-1850 (Magic of the Miniature)
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: A12. Cape Cod living room, circa 1750 to 1850.
HANK KUPJACK: Part of the joy of this art form is re-creating things that no longer exist. But by making a miniature of it you can experience the way it actually was, that you no longer can.
RM WOLFF: My favorite room is the Cape Cod living room. It’s sort of selfish. I used to go there when I was a kid and there’s just something about the light in that room that Mrs. Thorne gets so right. It feels like the ocean is right there. It feels like the afternoon sunlight is streaming in and that’s the magic of being with the rooms is that they take you back to moments and memories in your own life that mean something to you. I could stare at the sunlight from that room all day.
HANK KUPJACK: This is actually a saw that was used during the construction of the Thorne rooms because it was bought by my father in 1934. And we still use it. My name is Henry Kupjack and I’ve been doing miniature for my entire lifetime. My father, Eugene Kupjack, started working for Mrs. Thorne in 1934 when he was 23 years old. He worked for her on the American series of rooms that are presently housed in the Art Institute. Well, you didn’t really want to tell the kids on the playground that your father made dollhouses. So I never really talked about it with other kids. It was just sort of the thing we did. First of all, you have to know what to copy. If something full size is crap and you shrink it down, it’s still gonna look like crap no matter what you do. You have to have a reasonable amount of hand-eye coordination. You have to have a cinematographer’s sense because you have to light them without seeing the lights. There are a lot of people who do this and for the most part they look like what they are. What we try and do here— what Mrs. Thorne tried to do is make them look real. And that’s not so easy.
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: In Mrs. Thorne’s Cape Cod living room if you look by the little children’s chair there is a miniature doll tea set and it is placed atop a copper serving tray. This copper serving tray is actually a hand-hammered penny. If you flip the tray upside down, you can actually see the head of Lincoln.
HANK KUPJACK: The materials we use and the materials that you see are not what they actually are. We don’t use stone for marble. It’s painted wood. These are like the movies: It’s all illusion.
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Thorne traveled widely in England and France and learned much about the history of interior design from those cultural journeys, as well as from books and publications supplied by antique dealers for collectors and designers. She wanted her rooms to serve as useful tools for teaching design history—as miniature versions of the full-sized “period rooms” which were popular across American and European museums at the time. She also hoped they would be inspiring examples of sophisticated taste, which she may have felt was lacking in Chicago at the time.
The furnishings in this room were made in England and inspired by designs published in 1791 by the successful cabinetmaker Thomas Sheraton. Thorne intended this drawing room to bring to mind 18th-century English country villages, “which were peopled with the hypersensitive women and overindulged and overestimated men whom Jane Austen immortalized.”
E-12: English Drawing Room of the Georgian Period, c. 1800 (Magic of the Miniature)
LINDSEY MICAN MORGAN: E-12: English Drawing Room of the Georgian period c.1800.
MARIANNE MALONE: I was an art teacher in an all girls middle school and we would always bring our students up to the Art Institute of Chicago and we always popped down to the Thorne Rooms to see them and I saw over and over again jaws drop and eyes pop. So I created Ruthie and Jack, who are best friends and they’re sixth graders who find a magical way to shrink and enter the room. My name is Marianne Malone. I’m the author of the book series "The Sixty-Eight Rooms", a series of books which is based on the Thorne Miniature Rooms. So the English Drawing Room of the Georgian period is a beautiful, very simple room compared to many of the other rooms, and there’s a little violin that sits in its case on the loveseat of a bay window that looks out onto a garden, and in the story it’s one of the very first rooms that Ruthie visits. Mrs. Thorne was very smart in that she set her rooms in complete settings, that is there are dioramas outside of the windows and doors as well as extra little rooms, so you have the sense that the rooms aren’t just simple boxes that are perfectly executed, and I think that that makes people want to peer out all the doors and windows and see into the little side rooms and hallways, and you can imagine somebody going in and out of those doors.
<reads> "The room appeared smaller with a lower ceiling and the walls were painted white. Straight ahead of Ruthie was a bay window with a gold silk covered window seat that looked out into a sunny spring garden. On her left was a marble fireplace with tiny blue and white china pieces on the mantel. Just past the fire place was a harpsichord, and on the window seat a delicate violin sat in its case. Ruthie was about to take another step when she heard voices. She quickly ducked out of the room and waited again. ‘This would be so much better if the museum were empty’ she thought. At last the viewers passed by. This time she made a beeline for the harpsichord. She placed a finger on one of the keys softly. The key was stiff, but she managed to push it down all the way. It played. It sounded tinny and out of tune, but it was a real harpsichord all right. She tried a chord, ‘Wow, who could possibly have built this so small?’ She had to work fast; more people would be coming by. She took two steps over to the window seat and picked up the violin. She made a pass. It squeaked! She made it two more – not bad, but then she heard voices coming again, ‘Not enough time to put this back. Run!’ She sped across the room and out of the door, just as two elderly women came into view. ‘Mary, did you hear something?" one of the women asked, ‘Sounded like a mouse’ the other answered.
Now wasn’t that fun?
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In the 1920s and ’30s, American museums were committed to displaying their collections in inspiring architectural settings. Many, including the Art Institute of Chicago, purchased the wall paneling of rooms that had been removed from their original sites in Europe and Asia. Thorne chose to represent one Chinese and one Japanese interior in her suite of 68 vignettes, a reflection of the broad influence of non-Western design on American Modernism. Though she had a group of highly skilled artisans contributing to the making of the rooms, she recognized the need to engage specialist skills for this room and commissioned Chinese carvers to produce the screens and fretwork.
E-30: Chinese Interior, Traditional (Magic of the Miniature)
LINDSEY MICAN MORGAN: E30. Chinese interior traditional.
TAO WANG: Traditional Chinese households there was little sound. Something we don’t see here is bird cages, because in Northern China, particularly older people like to keep birds. So you can hear the birds in the morning. But here we don’t see the bird cage.
LINDSEY MICAN MORGAN: This is one of the few interiors that Mrs. Thorne never visited the location, but she did go to the extent of having a craftsman from Hong Kong carve all of the fretwork within this scene. Lindsay Mican Morgan: Pritzker Chair of Asian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, Tao Wang.
TAO WANG: When you look at this room you can imagine yourself standing in the middle of the courtyard. It’s usually walled. Usually would have the bamboos and the sometimes with the plum tree. Clearly, it’s not for ordinary people. It is for a very rich family. So if you look at the design, it’s actually have three levels, the front, the middle and the back. On your left it’s reception and on the right hand it’s the bedroom. Usually that bedroom is reserved for the eldest member of the family— should be the grandpa or grandma.
TAO WANG: Most important thing you can see here is that room at the end, you can see ancestral portrait is hanging on the wall. At the front of the portrait there are incense burner, there are candlestick; for many families they have to come together every morning to pay their respects to the ancestor.
LINDSEY MICAN MORGAN: It’s of note that Mrs. Thorne felt that Chinese and Japanese design needed to be represented within her collection of interior depictions. If you view any number of the Thorne miniature rooms, you will be able to spot the influence of Asian design on the rooms. You can see jade carvings, wall papers with paintings done in the style of Asian artwork.
TAO WANG: But, to me, I think it’s very much kind of feel at home— I do kind of recognize all the elements in this design. In that way I think it’s— it is quite accurate and it’s so balanced, it’s so perfect, I think here it does kind of represent this idealized China in the mind of a society lady.
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This interior complete with a large fireplace and a charming braided rug is meant to represent a cozy Massachusetts room from the late 17th century, about 50 years after the Pilgrims had established themselves at Plymouth. The tiny miniature ship on the mantel over the fireplace is a model of the Mayflower—a reminder of the Pilgrims’ journey. In the 80 years since this room was made, however, our notion of the settlers’ life and the impact they had on the Indigenous people and their way of life has shifted. We can readily see that the brightly waxed floors and uniform display of pewter on the cupboard more accurately reflect a Depression-era longing for an idealized American past. Like the Cape Cod Living Room, it is a perfect example of Colonial Revival taste.
A1: Massachusetts Living Room and Kitchen, 1675-1700 (Magic of the Miniature)
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: A1. Massachusetts living room and kitchen. Circa 1675 to 1700.
Most rooms have to be cleaned about every three to four months. There are some rooms that are mysterious and love to be dusty almost immediately. So I’m going to clean the Massachusetts living room and I’m going to open it up now. And here’s one of our magical keys.
One of the main parts that gets a bit of dust is actually where the keyhole is. So <laughs> we have people gratefully coming in by the masses right off the street, so they bring in a fair amount of dust from the outside. We’ll start removing the objects from the room. Now I’m going to pick up this largest piece of furniture, this cabinet from the back of the room. This has quite a few pieces of pewter. I try never to be in any kind of a rush. And I won’t deal with the fireplace, because Mrs. Thorne would actually gather the ash trays from her workers and save the ashes to put in the fireplaces. Of course, I’ll clean off the dust on the stones and everything, but we don’t want to dust in the fireplace really all that much, ‘cause we don’t want to lose the little ashy bits in there.
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: You know, some people love to joke about— if they see me during the day, they’re like, “Oh, where’s your mini-vacuum?” And we actually do have vacuums, but they’re not miniature at all.
The major tools that I use are a couple of different brushes. The fun part is getting your— you can actually get your whole head inside a room to be able to see around a corner or something.
Now let’s go ahead and get back in here. Okay. This chair goes over here and that one goes in the back.
MALE VISITOR: You’re setting up a room.
CHILD VISITOR: You’re setting up a room.
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: Yeah, we’re just inspecting everything and making sure everything is—
MALE VISITOR: I bet you they dusted it just like we dust our room at home.
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: We just did!
All right. And there we go. I’ll probably go back over that way, because I was a little rushed.
MALE VISITOR: Okay, should we keep looking?
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: Have fun, guys!
MALE VISITOR: Well, when you’re five this is cool.
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: This is cool when you’re fif—
I was like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” This is pretty cool at <inaudible>
I have to be very careful every time I’m within these rooms that these are such precious objects. It’s pretty— you know, quite an honor to be able to work with them.
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Thorne drew inspiration for this lavish parlor from the elaborate antebellum plantation interiors depicted in the popular 1939 film Gone with the Wind, as well as from a study of furnishings from the period. She acknowledged that in representing these spaces, she was not interested in “wars and famines” but instead focused on style and taste. Here, like others of her generation, she celebrated the grandeur and prosperity of a Southern estate, but chose not to address cotton plantations and the uncomfortable source of that wealth.
A30: Georgia Double Parlor, c. 1850 (Magic of the Miniature)
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: A30. Georgia double parlor, circa 1850.
The Georgian double parlor is one of the few rooms that’s partially based on fiction, but it’s a fiction that was also based on some fact. A “Gone with the Wind” room.
RM WOLFF: In Mrs. Thorne’s personal effects, there was a copy of “House and Garden,” which is still a magazine that exists, but an American magazine about interior decorating that had still images from the film in it, including still images of the parlor, that were in Mrs. Thorne’s folder on the Georgie double parlor. So we know that this is what she was looking at while she was building the rooms.
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: There’s exact replicas, you know, of some of the objects seen within the movie that then Mrs. Thorne added to her Georgian double parlor. The most easily identifiable objects are the large gold, ornate mirror over the fireplace mantel as well as the detailing over the windows above the drapery.
RM WOLFF: Why she would chose, in this one instance, to go to something that had been in such a popular way depicted— yeah, it is a little bit of a curiosity. I mean, imagine the delight at visiting the Thorne rooms. You know, “Gone with the Wind” has just won Best Director, Best Picture and Best Actress— to go to the Thorne rooms, which have finally arrived in your town and to see Scarlet O’Hara’s parlor. That’s being very invested in your audience at the time.
SCARLET: I’ll go home. And I’ll think of some way to get in there. After all, tomorrow is another day!
LINDSAY MICAN MORGAN: Mrs. Thorne re-created such a scene as Scarlet O’Hara would be comfortable in.
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