Who Built The Thorne Rooms?

Downstairs from the Michigan Avenue entrance, near the photography department and the bathrooms, a quiet set of tiny dioramas attract thousands of visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago every year. They come to feast their eyes on the Thorne miniature rooms, a beloved Chicago institution whose creation was planned and overseen in the 1920s and 30s by Mrs. Narcissa Niblack Thorne.

Narcissa was the wife of James Ward Thorne, an executive at the well-known mail-order supplier and department store Montgomery Ward. As her husband’s family business sold kit houses and the furnishings to go in them, Mrs. Thorne developed a parallel, high-end practice that was the antithesis of the mass-produced consumer commodities the Ward catalogue sold. In a small studio in their (surely wellappointed house) on Prairie Avenue, she oversaw the creation of over 100 dioramas representing rooms in historic houses with punctiliously reconstructed interior designs. 68 of them are now at the Art Institute.

Though it’s easy to assume from the way the rooms are presented at the Art Institute that Mrs. Thorne crafted them entirely with her own hands, she didn’t. Her family fortune allowed her to hire architects, carpenters, and textile workers to create the rooms to her taste. The invisibility of labor is notable in these rooms. There are no people. Some of the rooms offer a glimpse of a meal or a task in progress. But there are no owners relaxing or dining, and no servants or slaves providing the labor that makes it all happen. imitation of interiors from Gone With the Wind, boasts “Blackamoor” statues in classical garb bearing planters on their heads.

And it would, in fact, be a matter of slaves. A large proportion of the American Thorne Rooms cannot be divested from slavery. As with architectural tours of Southern plantations—at least up until recently, when some have changed their approach—to amputate human life from these scenes is also to glorify the architecture and design at the expense of the people whose labors made it possible. It could be true of almost any of the Northern rooms too, but it’s especially apparent for the Southern rooms, whose luxury depends directly on vast quantities of plantation labor. In the Thorne rooms there’s a particular obsession with Virginia— more rooms than any other state, and most of them from houses where hundreds of people at a time were enslaved, where enslaved people literally built the houses that so inspired Mrs. Thorne.

The Maryland Dining Room is from a house built by enslaved people. The Virginia Dining Room (1758) is based on a house where 300 people were enslaved. The Georgia double parlor, designed partly in The 1920s and 30s may have been the heyday of period rooms, but they were also the heyday of racially restrictive covenants in White Chicago that confined Black Chicagoans to a few overcrowded neighborhoods where they were packed into “kitchenette” apartments. Like Mrs. Thorne, the character Sallie, in Gwendolyn Brooks’s epic poem “In the Mecca,” “want[s] to decorate.” Sadly her interior monologue rebukes her: “But what is that? A pomade atop a sewage. An offense. First comes correctness, then embellishment!” on where Black Chicagoans could live, Mrs. Thorne built her tiny monuments to genteel Southern slaveholding life. She fetishized décor and structure at the expense of honest history. Perhaps she was of her time (and class, and race, and gender), but we do not have to be.

If the institution won’t reframe (or commission an artist to reframe) these spaces, I suggest a volunteer intervention is in order. Along with homes belonging to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, the Southern houses that inspired Mrs. Thorne include the Hammond-Harwood, Gunston Hall, Carter’s Grove, and Wilton plantations. Google any of them and you will find that the organizations that run these historic buildings have begun, to a greater or lesser degree, to acknowledge the violence of slavery. If they can reckon with their own history, shouldn’t the Art Institute and the Thorne Rooms?

Rebecca Zorach @rabbitrez