A28: South Carolina Drawing Room, 1775–1800

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):

28: South Carolina Drawing Room, 1775–1800
Founded by English settlers, Charleston has occupied since 1680 its present site at the head of the bay formed by the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers. Despite a devastating fire in 1740, the city, by the latter part of the eighteenth century, had become the commercial and cultural center of the South. Its population augmented by French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in their homeland, Charleston was early on a cosmopolitan city surrounded by great plantations growing rice, indigo, and cotton. Many of its splendid townhouses were built and maintained by the planters who helped create the region’s wealth. Some of the finest houses date from the period Mrs. Thorne chose to represent here, the last quarter of the eighteenth century, as well as the first quarter of the nineteenth.
This interior is a composite of the second floor drawing room of a house built by Colonel John Stuart in 1770 and of a considerably later addition constructed over the garden and used as a dining room. The mantel and doorways derive from the earlier room, the bay window from the later one. The woodwork of both interiors is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The very English character of the detail reproduced by Mrs. Thorne—especially of the doors and overmantel—reflects that Charleston had a closer cultural kinship with England and the West Indies than it did with the northern colonies on the Atlantic seaboard.
Mrs. Thorne furnished the interior with American Neoclassical pieces. The gate-leg table set for tea in front of the fireplace and the hanging shelves on either side of the bay copy originals depicted in Percy Macquoid’s Dictionary of English Furniture (1924). The settee and high-back armchair are in the Hepplewhite mode. The bookcase along the right wall is a much altered version of a Sheraton sideboard; the center table in the bay and the armchair in the foreground are also based on Sheraton designs.
The globe beside the bookcase at the right, copied from a pair of antique examples depicted in a 1939 issue of Connoisseur magazine, and the Chinese rugs and screen symbolize Charleston’s far-flung connections.
This room measures 12 1/4 x 22 1/4 x 21 1/2 inches.