A22: Virginia Dining Room, c. 1752

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):

22: Virginia Dining Room, c. 1752
In 1752 colonel Fielding Lewis married George Washington’s sister Betty and took his wife to Kenmore, the home he had built for her in Fredericksburg on an 836-acre tract that had been surveyed by his brother-in-law. The exterior of the Georgian brick residence, with its white trim, resembles that of other houses of the period, but its interior is distinctive for its remarkable plasterwork, especially on the ceilings. Because the standard ceiling height at the time was fourteen feet and the Kenmore ceilings are twelve and onehalf feet, it is thought that the plasterwork may have been added later. Documents found at Mount Vernon refer to a Frenchman as having executed the plasterwork; in two rooms, the ceiling patterns were derived from Batty Langley’s City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs, first published in London in 1740 and reissued in subsequent years.
As indicated in “Creating the Thorne Rooms”, Mrs. Thorne took some liberties with this interior, moving the doors away from the flanking walls toward the fireplace and substituting the elaborate mantel and overmantel from another room at Kenmore for the simpler paneling that comprises the overmantel in the actual dining room. The furniture now at Kenmore is not original to the estate, since the house passed out of the family after Betty Washington Lewis died in 1797 and its contents were dispersed. The house suffered considerable damage in later years, especially during the Civil War. In 1922, when it was threatened with destruction, Kenmore was acquired by the Fredericksburg chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and eventually was refurnished with the help of Louise du Pont Crowninshield, working with museum curators. Mrs. Thorne created a similar ambience, but with pieces copied from a variety of sources.
Although Mrs. Thorne described this interior as being from the mid-eighteenth century, the furnishings, such as the sideboard, window seat, and mirror, are actually modeled after American Federal examples dating for the most part from the 1790s. Mrs. Thorne modified the mirror by adding chains from the eagle at the top to the urns below. The dining room table represents a type of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and the commodes reflect originals that date from 1800. The silver compotes on the sideboard are from Tiffany and Company, New York, and bear the mark of the noted silversmith John C. Moore.
The windows open onto a broad portico with white columns. Across a garden can be glimpsed a portion of the exterior of Kenmore, to allow the viewer to visualize the mansion over which Betty Washington Lewis presided.
This room measures 14 x 21 x 21 1/4 inches.