E10: English Dining Room of the Georgian Period, 1770–90

Narcissa Niblack Thorne, creator of the Thorne Rooms, combined a deep knowledge of design history with a vivid imaginative sensibility. In the 1930s, she assembled a team of skilled artisans in Chicago to construct a series of intricately detailed interiors at the scale of one inch to one foot (1:12).

Conceived as a visual history of interior design, the rooms are at once scholarly and inventive. Meticulously researched and carefully composed, they balance historical accuracy with artistic interpretation. Each atmospheric interior feels like a stage set awaiting its occupants—two parts fantasy, one part history, and entirely absorbing.

Entry from Fannia Weingartner, Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2nd ed. (The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004):

10: English Dining Room of the Georgian Period, 1770–90
Reflecting on the success achieved by the brothers Robert and James Adam in England during the 1760s and 1770s, Mrs. Thorne concluded that one important reason for the popularity of their work was “that they deemed no detail too trivial to receive their personal care.” Not only did they design the houses for which they served as architects, but they were also responsible for the complete decoration of the interiors, including all the furniture, hardware, lighting fixtures, mirrors, painted ceilings and wall schemes, carpeting, draperies, and other fabrics. The result was the kind of harmonious elegance well represented by this dining room. Mrs. Thorne modeled the interior after the dining room of Home House in London (1774–78), designed by Robert Adam. The room also incorporates elements from another dining room by the same architect, at Saltram in Devonshire. Robert Adam studied architecture in Italy at a time when the archaeological excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum and at the site of Diocletian’s palace in Spalato in Dalmatia (today Croatia) stimulated great interest in classical architecture and decoration throughout Europe (see E-25: French Bathroom and Boudoir of the Revolutionary Period, 1793–1804). The delicacy and lightness of his interpretation of the antique, close to the spirit of the Rococo, assured him enormous success, and his name became forever associated with the style.
In practice in London with his brother James, Robert hired cabinetmakers like Thomas Chippendale, Jr., to execute furniture whose design juxtaposed Neoclassical elements with current English forms. In fashioning interiors, he replaced wood and wallpapers with paint and plaster, working out most of the ornament in low relief in the manner of Roman stuccos, set against a painted plaster background in framed or unframed panels.
Much of the furniture designed by Adam was gilt in the Continental fashion, as in this interior’s side table (the immediate ancestor of the sideboard) and flanking pedestals and in the oval wine cooler underneath. All of these pieces, as well as the two torchères near the window, are ornamented with ram’s heads, a classical motif that appears in white throughout the frieze of the room. Furniture veneered with light-colored woods such as satinwood and sycamore and often decorated with Neoclassical marquetry or painting—like the commodes on both sides of the window—was highly fashionable at this time.
The commodes, rug, chandelier, and silver all replicate Adam’s designs. The urns on the mantel are copies of Wedgwood examples. The painting over the mantel is a copy of Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with the Flight into Egypt in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. The landscape opposite is in the style of Claude.
“Robert Adam had many imitators,” wrote Mrs. Thorne, “but there was a quality to his work which others aspired to but did not achieve.”
This room measures 20 x 35 1/4 x 25 5/8 inches.