KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The Knoxville Museum of Art is pulling out the Thorne Rooms to display throughout the holiday season.
The Thorne Rooms were originally developed in the 1930s by Chicago artist Narcissa Niblack Thorne. She was inspired by her love of dollhouses as a young girl. After traveling throughout Europe where she collected miniature furniture and accessories, she created over two dozen mini rooms.
These rooms were made on a scale of 1 inch to 1 foot, and Thorne also painted and stained the woodwork, created the wallpaper and made fabrics for the rooms.
The rooms were displayed at various World Fairs throughout the 1930s and 1940s such as the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933 and 1934, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939 and the New York World's Fair in 1940.
Thorne went on to make 29 more rooms that copied European homes and castles. She would also commission architects to make historically accurate settings, textiles and carpets. These rooms were inspired by English and French style from 1500 to 1920 and were shown in 1937 at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1942 she gave another group of rooms to the institute that were inspired by American homes from 1675 to 1940.
In 1962, IBM purchased 29 rooms and gave nine of the original rooms to Knoxville’s Dulin Gallery of Art, now the Knoxville Museum of Art.
KMA is one of five museums in the nation to have original Thorne Rooms and the museum has some of the earliest.
"We've got little Christmas trees, and Santa Clauses and there's even a little Hannakuh section, and you know it's just kind of a way to have fun and enjoy the holidays and get people seeing the Thorne Rooms that, you know, maybe haven't seen them in a while," said Sarah Kaplan, KMA's marketing manager.
The rooms will be on display until Dec. 30.