E24: French Salon of the Louis XVI Period, c. 1780

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):

24: French Salon of the Louis XVI Period, c. 1780
Mrs. Thorne designed this interior “entirely in the spirit of Marie Antoinette—dainty in coloring and full of her symbols of design.” The queen was fond of roses, which were often incorporated into the molded decorations of swags, garlands, and baskets in rooms such as this one. Peach-colored roses also dot the curtains here. The garden tools and musical instruments in the carvings of the panel heads represent her love of nature and music.
The marquetry commode and secretary with marble tops and drawers that actually can be opened and locked with tiny keys are antique pieces Mrs. Thorne found in Paris. The armchair, lyre-back chair, and settee were modeled after eighteenth-century examples in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; the side chairs were copied from Gabriel Henriot’s Beaux meubles des collections privées (1928) and Seymour de Ricci’s Louis XVI Furniture (1929). These reproductions were delicately carved and upholstered in silk or fine needlepoint suggestive of Beauvais tapestries. The majority of the chairs in this period would have been painted rather than gilt. On the walls are antique miniatures from Paris painted on ivory, in the style of famed eighteenth-century painters Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The bust in the right corner is said to depict Marie Antoinette.
Mrs. Thorne had a special feeling for the pleasure-loving queen, whose life ended during the French Revolution. Speaking of the Petit Trianon, whose private rooms inspired this salon, 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.”
This room measures 15 x 20 1/2 x 17 inches.