Art in Chicago: The Thorne Rooms

At the Institute for Art in Chicago there is a famous collection of about 50 miniature rooms made in the early 1900s. They are inset in the wall and only backlighted with light coming in from windows in the back or the side walls, so there is no lightning at all in the room themselves. I took some photos, without flash, so they are grainy (sorry about that), but I think you get the idea. The rooms were designed by the wife of the owner of a fancy department store in Chicago, Marshall Field's, and the Montgomery Ward stores (like Ahlens in Stockholm), and she hired artisans to make the furniture, walls, needlepoint, etc. All items where handmade, and often of the correct type of wood. After a lot of digging in the book I have I found out her maiden name was Narcissa Niblack, but she is always mentioned as Mrs. James Ward Thorne in our book.

I loved this collection, which I had never heard about before. I just happened to run into it when I was visiting and saw the sign "Thorne Miniature Rooms". The scale is 1 inch = 1 foot, a scale she started to use that later became standard for miniature works like this and dollhouses. There are other of these rooms at other museums across the country, so now I have more places I need to visit.
She started with making a series of European rooms from different periods (Louis XIV, Victorian British, etc.) but those didn't interest me as much as the American rooms she designed later. I especially liked the kitchen. They looked 'lived in', cozy, and the light coming in from the windows made them look so welcoming. Below is the New Mexico Dining Room (c. 1940). She was very exact with the details, so note the beams, the typical adobe fireplace, and the rugs. Below is the Pennsylvania kitchen (1752), which looks like something that could have been from this area in New Jersey's area too. It is a kitchen in a Pennsylvania Dutch house (Amish, or similar). Look at the glass on the table, it is probably only 4 mm high, and still copies the original design.
And here is a third kitchen, this one a Massachusetts living room and kitchen (1675-1700). Look at the typical elliptic rugs, you can still see them used around here. This kitchen is supposed to represent a Pilgrim kitchen in the Boston area about 50 years after they first settled. Glass was very expensive since it had to be imported, so windows were small and of many small pieces of glass.
And, for comparison, a English COttage Kitchen from the Queen Anne period (1702-1714). In the book I got it says that the hooked rugs on the floor are not typical of this kitchen, since they were invented in America and only available later. Instead floors like this had dry grass or sedges strewn over them, which was swept out when it got too dirty. But I bet that didn't look as neat.