Time Capsule: Miniatures exhibition brings big crowds

“Time Capsule” is a 1 Fine Arts Blog series drawing on the rich history of the Saint Louis Art Museum as documented through its institutional records. Established in 1976, the Museum Archives preserve and provide access to historic records chronicling spaces, events, exhibitions, and other activities. Materials from the Archives are open to the public by appointment in the Richardson Memorial Library’s reading room.

A marble-topped secretary desk complete with a set of working keys adorns an 18th-century French Salon period room covered in ornate gold wall moldings, but this version can be contained to a shoe-box-sized stage. An assortment of these miniature period rooms from the Art Institute of Chicago brought record numbers of visitors to the City Art Museum, now SLAM, in the 1940s.

During the World War II years, the Art Institute circulated two waves of miniature room exhibitions: the European series and the American series, each featuring rooms illustrating interior design styles and decorative arts from the 16th through 20th centuries on a miniscule scale. In the spring of 1944, St. Louis served as a stop for the famous traveling exhibition titled the Thorne American Rooms in Miniature. Under the creative direction of Narcissa Niblack Thorne, her workshop of skilled craftspeople assembled these period room miniatures on a scale of one inch to one foot. They are currently part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection. With free admission, the American rooms exhibition proved to be a smashing success in St. Louis, attracting over 7,000 visitors on the opening Sunday. Two years later, the Thorne European Rooms in Miniature exhibition opened at the Museum and set a record attendance high for the time with 200,000 visitors—a number that has only been surpassed four times in Museum history.

Meyric R. Rogers, former director of the City Art Museum from 1929 to 1939, organized the planning and execution of the traveling exhibition as the curator of decorative arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. Interest in the nationwide exhibition tour was so great that it took nearly three years before the miniatures first arrived in St. Louis. In a 1941 letter to then-director Perry Rathbone, Rogers wrote: “I have begun to work my way out of the Thorne room tangle and can definitely assign the months of April–May 1944 to you for the American rooms, Series II. This is rather earlier than I had expected but found that it would be best to jump the rooms at the end of 1943 into the Middlewest and work them back East instead of following the European series a year later in the same direction.”

As a World War II–era exhibition, the Thorne American Rooms in Miniature had a contract with stipulations regarding wartime damage and risk. Each exhibiting institution was also required to provide standard size bulbs (60-watt, 75-watt, 100-watt) for lighting, while specialty 7-watt light bulbs for the rooms were supplied for the show. Given the scarcity of certain materials during wartime, the City Art Museum opted to purchase the wooden-frame setup for the American series of the Thorne Rooms instead of tracking down specialty lighting. The City Art Museum purchased the set up from the Rhode Island School of Design, which had in turn purchased it from the Albright Art Gallery. The setup, packed into 76 crates, included lumber, functional electrical wiring, and small steps for children to view the rooms. Former Museum cabinetmaker Ben Swartz and registrar E. Oscar Thalinger constructed and adapted the setup for installation in St. Louis. Modifications made by Swartz included a special ventilation project to combat the heat generated from crowds streaming through the gallery.

Unique to the exhibition was a specialized custodian/curator role tasked with traveling with and attending to all details—except the set’s physical construction—and furnishings of the 37 American miniature rooms. As the keeper of the rooms, the Art Institute’s custodian Laduca Wilson arrived in St. Louis by train on March 17, 1944, to carry out the exhibition installation. The process took about two weeks, with an entire week devoted to furnishing the rooms, ranging from a 17th-century kitchen to a relatively modern penthouse apartment. Wilson would remain in residence through the run of the exhibition and become a de facto member of the Museum staff.

The exhibitions proved so popular that staff kept the entry line filing continuously, but it spanned from the exhibition gallery into Sculpture Hall. In a 1944 letter to Rogers, Director Rathbone noted: “We have broken every record in daily attendance except one way back in 1914 when the Pageant and Masque was going. This I do not consider a legitimate record since a large portion of it was doubtless attributable to the well-known lavatory trade. . . .” The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, a historical pageant staged on Art Hill for the city’s 150th anniversary in 1914, was considered one of the largest theatrical events, and therefore, because of its proximity to Art Hill, the Museum saw an increase in visitors primarily for the purpose of using the restroom.