A14: Pennsylvania Drawing Room, 1834–36

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):

14: Pennsylvania Drawing Room, 1834–36
Two parlors at Andalusia, in Bensalem Township near Philadelphia, remodeled at the height of the Greek Revival period by its owner, Nicholas Biddle, inspired this drawing room. Biddle, a leading social, financial, and cultural figure in Philadelphia, was president of the Bank of the United States. In his youth, he had traveled in England, France, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere in Europe and returned to the United States convinced that the appropriate architectural idiom for the new republic was one based on classical Greek examples. These sentiments were shared by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who came to the United States from England in 1796 and who, over the next twenty five years, was responsible for some of the country’s outstanding Greek Revival buildings. Latrobe initially had prepared designs for alterations to Andalusia, but another architect, Thomas U. Walter, renovated the mansion, adding a gigantic colonnaded portico to the Delaware River side of the eighteenth-century farmhouse. (Both Latrobe and Walter worked independently on reconstructions and extensions of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.)
The widespread popularity in the United States of Greek Revival architecture stemmed from the identification of American civic and political ideals with those of ancient Greece. Hoping for a time, as Latrobe put it, when “the days of Greece [would] be revived in the woods of America,” Americans erected buildings of nearly every description whose forms and decorations reflected Greek prototypes.
The Greek Revival elements in this model are readily identifiable in the treatment of the ceiling, mantel, window, and doorways. Also based on classical examples are the lyre-back chairs, copied from pieces in the style of Duncan Phyfe, one of North America’s most celebrated furniture makers. Born in Scotland, Phyfe had moved as a young man to New York, where he was employed as a joiner and then as a cabinetmaker. Eventually, he became proprietor of a highly prosperous establishment comprising a workshop, warehouse, and showroom. Influenced by Thomas Sheraton’s design books as well as by Empire and Directoire styles (see E–25: French Bathroom and Boudoir of the Revolutionary Period, 1793–1804 and E–26: French Anteroom of the Empire Period, c. 1810), Phyfe liked to work in mahogany, creating elegant Regency designs distinguished by the fine carving of such classical motifs as lyres, acanthus or oak leaves, and drapery swags. The armchairs flanking the game table in the center of the room were also inspired by Phyfe originals, as were the tables seen on either side of the bookcase. Both the sofa and the armchair adjacent to it reflect American Federal–style pieces made between 1790 and 1800. Mrs. Thorne copied the striking girandoles over the side tables from early-nineteenth-century examples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, although she omitted the crystal chimneys of the originals.
While the pieces in this interior are not reproductions of those at Andalusia, they are in the same vein, for it is known that during the alterations of the mid-1830s the Biddles acquired much new furniture in the French Empire style. The total bill for the remodeling came to $14,660, far more, it is said, than Mrs. Biddle thought proper.
This room measures 13 1/4 x 23 3/4 x 20 1/4 inches.