Thorne Rooms

Mrs. Thorne and her passion for tiny things.

Mrs. Thorne was born Narcissa Niblack on May 2, 1882 in Vincennes, Indiana. She was the oldest of three daughters.

It was when she was 5 years old, that she received her first doll house. It had 4 rooms and 2 levels. The inconsistent scale of the items in the house irritated her in addition to the lack of a stairway allowing for transition between the floors. At such a young age, to be so aware of scale and reality for physical space, certainly foreshadowed the creations she would create in the future.

One of the people who encouraged her love of miniatures was Albert Niblack, her uncle. He was a Rear Admiral in the Navy who traveled the world. He had a passion for tiny things and brought her treasures from his travels. She took great care of these treasures and placed them in boxes only occasionally taking them out to admire them.

When she was 8 years old, her family moved to Chicago, Illionois. It was at this time that her mother gave her a four-shelf mahogany cabinet with a glass front in which to display her miniatures. She continued her collecting throughout her childhood.

In May of 1901, she married her childhood sweetheart James Ward Thorne, a member of the family who owned the Montgomery Ward department stores. They built a remarkable life together and raised two sons.

Though she had traveled with her family during her childhood to the Eastcoast of the United States and to Europe and even attended finishing school, she was unhappy with her education. She felt the curriculum was directed towards how she looked and how she was to behave and not at all to teach her history, mathematics or geography. Through the miniatures she was exposed to tiny examples of the world.

During their married life, they engaged talented architects to design and build homes and apartments for them. Mrs. Thorne spent her time working with the Chicago Historical Society and the Chicago Art Museum while raising their two sons.

When James Ward Thorne was 53, he retired from Montgomery Ward & Company. It was 1926 and the family began to travel to Europe more frequently. James was an amateur photographer, and he documented their visits to French chateaux in Normandy and Brittany and English country houses through his pictures.

During these travels they were able to view Queen Mary’s Doll’s House, recently completed, in Windsor; the architectural model collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum; and the Musée des Arts Dé Paris.

The lives of our friends impact our opinions and interests. One of Mrs. Thorne’s friends definitely impacted her, and I think inspired her. Frances Glessner Lee, a friend since they were children, built 20 dioramas called the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death”. Below is a link to the Smithsonian where you can view the rooms online. Frances, a pioneer in forensic science, was an amazing woman who must have had an intellect and imagination better than any current television crime series. Her rooms have been used for training. They are accurate down to tiny details that are beyond what I thought was possible. She and her rooms deserve their own post.

https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/nutshells/inside

It wasn’t until 1930 when Mrs. Thorne purchased two small bronze chandeliers with semi-precious stones in Florence at an antiques store, that she decided to make her first shadow boxes. The story is that she saw them at the store, but the price was so high that she didn’t buy them. She and her husband went back to their hotel for the night but she was unable to stop thinking about them. She returned the next day and bought but felt they required a special setting so decided to create a box to display them. This resulted in the first Thorne room that showed a Venetian sitting room. Her first 12 rooms were displayed at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. There was a book published about this in 1940, but I haven’t been able to view it yet. The boxes/rooms were later exhibited at the Art Museum of Chicago.

https://www.artic.edu/highlights/12/thorne-miniature-rooms