The Thorne Rooms

The Thorne Rooms

This article relates to The Making of Home

In The Making of Home, Judith Flanders argues that it can be difficult to know what ordinary homes throughout history looked and felt like, in part because museums with "period rooms" tend to devote precious space to recreating the opulent homes of wealthy figures from the past. Perhaps it's much more fun to look at ceilings replete with gold leaf than rough-hewn beams?

One museum that partially solved the space problem is the Art Institute of Chicago, whose beloved Thorne Rooms were always a must-see during my childhood visits to my grandparents in Chicago. These miniature dioramas, filled with exquisitely detailed furnishings, offered little windows into homes across centuries of history.

The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago are just the most extensive and well known of the miniature rooms designed by Narcissa Niblack Thorne in the early twentieth century and built by master craftsmen between 1932 and 1940. Other collections are housed in the Phoenix and Knoxville art museums.

Thorne was an artist and world traveler who originally designed her miniature rooms to house her rapidly growing collections of miniature art objects. Originally they were displayed to raise money for charities, and later she took them to exhibitions like the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition and the 1940 World's Fair. Like many period rooms, Thorne's best-known rooms depict upper-middle-class and wealthy homes from Europe, although she also designed rooms depicting North American and Asian interiors as well, and some depicting homes of more humble residents. They were painstakingly built on a 1:12 scale, and cleaning and maintenance of them is equally painstaking, requiring work with tweezers and cotton swabs.

There are approximately one hundred known Thorne Rooms, sixty-eight of which are at the Art Institute of Chicago. And besides capturing the imaginations of millions of visitors, the rooms have inspired creativity, from a children's fantasy novel set amid their miniature visions of home to the recent Art Institute online interactive "Game of Thornes" that invites Internet users to click their way through the Thorne rooms.

Salon Louis XVI Thorne Room, courtesy of Giovanni-P

Filed under Music and the Arts

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Making of Home. It originally ran in October 2015 and has been updated for the September 2016 paperback edition. Go to magazine.