Double Exposure: The Hauntings of the Thorne Rooms

“Let your imagination take over on this journey through the Thorne Rooms – miniature and, as generations of Art Institute visitors have found, wonderfully transporting,” is how the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) advertises Narcissa Niblack Thorne’s miniatures. They are not doll houses but “vivid records of period settings,” meticulously built to scale, one foot to one inch.

Narcissa Niblack’s (1882-1966) Chicago childhood included doll houses, finishing school, and visits to the gracious society capitals of Boston, Philadelphia, Paris and London. Her uncle was a Rear Admiral who sent her miniatures from all around the world. She married her childhood sweetheart James Ward Thorne, part of the Montgomery Ward mail-order and department store empire, in 1901. She had two sons, Ward and Niblack, and started her career as hostess and patroness of the arts, faintly troubled by a lack of taste and castles in America, and her own deficits: “the trouble with my childhood was that I was given no education. Knowing how to put on my hat on straight was supposed to be enough.”

Creating shadow boxes and dioramas was an accepted hobby for society ladies, especially if used as fundraisers, which gave Narcissa Thorne a natural outlet for her obsession with miniatures. And the dollhouse has an illustrious aristocratic pedigree: Duke Albert V. of Bavaria (1528-1579), whose vast life-size collections changed Munich’s layout dramatically, is said to be the inventor of the baby house, a four-story display cabinet with miniatures of his possessions, demonstrating his greatness and wealth. No child ever put a hand on any of the royal dollhouses, and Mrs. Thorne approved.

The Thorne Rooms are like little stage sets awaiting the viewers’ characters and plots. It was the gorgeous use of light, and the hints of an outside world that intrigued me when I first encountered them in Chicago. The furniture is exquisite; the details boggle the mind. Only some of the early rooms at the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) feel familiar in their slight imperfections and used doll house elements.  There is something disturbingly sterile about them as well, you better mind your manners just looking at them. I immediately felt that these rooms were haunted, and I don’t even believe in ghosts. Maybe Mrs. Thorne’s disenchantment with her own time was contagious, or I am simply allergic to the professed apoliticalness of conservative “timeless exceptionalism.” In any case, Lewis Hine’s child laborers immediately came to mind. Contemporaries of Narcissa, I could see them in the rooms, little ghosts, reminders of a painful past, pointing at a disturbing present. As instructed, I created my own stories, I put real children into unreal rooms, no VR or AI needed. The Library of Congress holds thousands of prints and glass negatives of Lewis Hine, many with his original comments: “Rhodes Mfg. Co. Spinner. A moments glimpse of the outer world. Said she was 11 years old. Been working over a year. Lincolnton, North Carolina. 11 November 1908.” - My first haunted room was “A32: Louisiana Bedroom, 1800-1850” with a small gray waif looking out of the window, hands limp as if afraid to touch the exquisite flower arrangement or dirty the ruffled curtains.

Lewis Hine (1874-1940) gave up a teaching position to photograph for the National Child Labor Committee in 1908. Theodore Roosevelt was the leader of the Progressive Movement then, his Square Deal supported control of corporations, consumer protection and conservation. Hine told “photo stories”, he was an investigative photojournalist, part of a generation of “muckrakers” who provided detailed accounts of the corruption and social hardship caused by big business – the exact opposite of today’s rightwing podcasters. His best-known photos show white children, often mill workers from the exclusively white cotton mills in the South. He also photographed black glass workers in New Jersey, mixed groups of newsies in Cincinnati. And some of the recent immigrants would not have been seen as white in his time.

The Scotch-Irish that Hine documented for the TVA in East Tennessee in 1933 had been considered “lesser whites” when they had first arrived. At the turn of the 20th century this was long forgotten, they did it “the right way.” Xenophobia ran rampant, Americans were being told that Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe. Today the great replacement theory is back, transnational elites try to convince voters that the left is replacing native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their woke political views. Or, as Andy Ogles (R-Nashville) bluntly puts it: “Pluralism is a lie.” The “white genocide” is to be fought with pronatalism from a National Medal of Motherhood to the ‘Lebensborn’ of Elon Musk. The good old days when women knew their place - in German: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church) – are glorified by “tradwife” influencers. The reality of continuous pregnancies while working nonstop is swept under the carpet, women’s health is never a concern. The Stanley Brothers sang in “Sharecropper’s Son”: “We moved here from somewhere when I was fourteen / Worked this poor ground for bacon and beans / Landlord told me that the hard times are near / It didn’t mean a thing ‘cause they’re already here / [...] Eleven in the family, ten daughters and a son / Mama just told us there’ll be another one.”

Child laborers barely experienced their youth, being paid a pittance, they were condemned to a future of illiteracy, poverty, and continuing misery. In industrial settings they began to develop serious health problems. Many children were underweight, suffered from stunted growth, developed diseases such as black and brown lung, faced exposure to toxins and high accident rates. Lewis Hine’s efforts resulted in the establishment of the Children’s Bureau that became part of the Department of Labor. The Supreme Court had shown its favoritism and penchant for cruelty when it repeatedly declared federal child labor regulations unconstitutional. The Fair Labor Standards Act was only passed in 1938. Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor, had also designed the Social Security Act of 1935 including the Aid to Dependent Children program. The FLSA of 1938 banned children from dangerous jobs and kept under-sixteen-year-olds from working in manufacturing, mining and during school hours. However, it did not cover agricultural child labor, and today half a million children, many recent immigrants or unaccompanied minors, are still picking and harvesting almost a quarter of the food produced in the US. The worldwide production of gold, bricks, sugarcane, coffee, and cotton is still relying on child labor and the cuts in USAID are forcing more children into menial jobs.

After parting ways with the NCLC, photographing the aftermath of WWI in Europe for the American Red Cross, and publishing the iconic “Men at Work” in 1932, Lewis Hine was a struggling freelancer and happy to be appointed chief photographer for the National Research Project in 1936 and 1937. His job was to show how new technologies and the industriousness and diversity of her workers were modernizing America during the New Deal. After the final report in 1938, he applied to the Farm Security Administration that famously employed Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Ben Shahn et al. but was rejected. He died destitute at age sixty-six in 1940.

During the 1920s, American tycoons and museums had imported period rooms from around the world by the boatload. While Abby Rockefeller helped rebuilt Colonial Williamsburg, the Thornes built “Montjoie” the “Queen of Santa Barbara’s Riviera” in 1927. A mix of French Eclectic, Italian Renaissance and Beaux-Arts it included a 17th century library imported from a Tuscan abbey, an 18th century French dining room and a Viennese ballroom. After the crash of 1929, Mrs. Thorne thought of her miniature rooms as a more affordable way for the museums to educate the multitudes. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” advised Virginia Woolf. Narcissa Thorne rented a studio in 1930 and “wrote” historical fiction. She kept it small and maintained full control. Producing the Thorne Rooms was hard work, she had to make up her staff and direct its work. She involved her favorite charity, the Chicago Women’s Exchange, where the genteel poor could sell their work without the embarrassment of being in trade. And the economy of the 1930s made renowned architects, design studios and artisans glad for miniature contracts to trickle down.

“The shifting economic order left many a once-wealthy family in need of money. Precious artifacts, including miniatures which had once graced elegant dollhouses and private collections in Europe, came onto the market at prices undreamed of ten years earlier. Mrs. Thorne was not one to let such opportunities pass.” (Bruce Hatton Boyer, Introduction to AIC, Miniature Rooms) In other words, while many lost all in the Great Depression, Narcissa went on a shopping spree. Her husband had retired comfortably at age 53, and in 1933 they went on a tour of the castles and antique stores of England and France. Mrs. Thorne was impressed by the custom-made newspapers of Queen Mary’s Doll House and immediately ordered her own.

Her first set of 29 rooms was ready for the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. “A Century of Progress” was to show a happy, not-too-distant future brought on by technology, however Mrs. Thorne offered a look at the past. Around 300,000 visitors paid 25 cents each to see it. Even today the Art Institute unironically describes the “French Bathroom and Boudoir of the Revolutionary Period” as the room whose imagined perfection “the people of Chicago, many of whom were struggling to survive the devastating Depression of the 1930s, would have found [...] especially captivating.” Hard to believe when there isn’t even a glimpse of a guillotine.

The rooms were meant to be non-specific apart from time and region. To  be honest, they are very white, only two rooms point to the exotic origin of Chinoiserie and Japonisme. Coyly, Room A-31 is called “Tennessee Entrance Hall, 1835.” It is a replica of Andrew Jackson’s (he of the Trail of Tears) Hermitage, including wallpaper depicting ‘The Passage of Telemachus on the Island of Calypso’ from the Odyssey (via Fenelon), showing very white people and an assortment of classical buildings. Adelicia Acklen, then wealthiest woman in Tennessee, whose first husband was a slave trader, had the same wallpaper put into Belmont in 1850s Nashville. Hand painted wallpaper with vaguely Greco-Roman columns were typical for America’s Federal Style period of the late 18th and early 19th century. This neoclassical revival was based on the openly homosexual aesthetics of archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). Today, right-wing conservatives and libertarians love ancient Rome: its glories, its ideals of hard, unbending masculinity, its “meritocracy,” its autocratic rulers fighting decadence and “cultural dilution.” They skip Winckelmann’s ideal of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” of Greek democracy, accountability and transparency, to spout Latin quotes about how the rest of us must die and war is great.

The Art of the Deal thrives in (lavishly columned) secret places. Or as Lin Manuel Miranda puts it: “No one really knows how the game is played / The art of the trade / How the sausage gets made / We just assume that it happens / But no one else is in the room where it happens.” (Hamilton, 2015) Too many children in the US know exactly how the sausage is made though. Immigrant children are hired to perform nighttime shifts at meat production sites, using dangerous chemicals to clean head splitters and back saws. The children miss school, fall asleep and hardly anyone graduates. The companies easily pay the fines and continue on their merry way. The Heritage Foundation wants to officially allow teenagers to work hazardous jobs again, current federal protections would only discourage young people from their “interests in the field.” Unsurprisingly there was an 88% rise in child labor violations in 2025.

In the end, Mrs. Thorne created one hundred rooms in three sets that she donated to the Art Institute of Chicago. She wasn’t happy that IBM purchased the first in 1942 for their art collection. They were displayed at the IBM Gallery in New York and sent around the country until Niblack Thorne saw a rather ramshackle room. Mrs. Thorne intervened, took them back and refurbished them. Twenty rooms were then given to the new Phoenix Art Museum, and nine rooms were donated to the newly established Dulin Gallery of Art in Knoxville, where they became an immediate attraction. The sets in Chicago have had their own gallery since 1954 and Mrs. Thorne, now an Honorary Curator of Decorative Arts, gave private tours to visiting European royalty.

Even in Knoxville the Thorne Rooms depend on rich patrons. The Dulin Gallery was built as “Crescent Bluff” by mill and department store owner Hanson Lee Dulin. John Russell Pope, who would later design the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art, was the architect. When Eugenia Dulin died in 1961, her daughter Kathrine Folger leased the mansion for a dollar a year to create an art gallery. Without the funds to renovate and expand, and an embarrassing early closure of a French Modernist exhibition, the museum moved temporarily to the Candy Factory – along with the Art Market Gallery that had started during the World’s Fair. After an astounding fund-raising campaign, the Knoxville Museum of Art opened in March 1990 with a dedicated Thorne Room Gallery. For preservation reasons these early rooms are kept far darker than the Chicago sets.

Lewis Hine came to Knoxville, the “Underwear Capital of the World,” in 1910. A great number of textile mills and clothing factories meant a “large number of very young boys and girls work here.” Hine photographed at the Brookside Mills, one of the largest and longest running (1885 to 1956) in what is now Happy Holler. Jack Neely cites reports of hungry mill children and workers who tried to pack a little extra food to share with them. In Loudon, Hine commented: “This little girl like many others in this state is so small she has to stand on a box to reach her machine. She is regularly employed as a knitter in London [i.e. Loudon?] Hosiery Mills. Said she did not know how long she had worked there.” A pictured raveler is so tiny, her feet do not touch the ground under her chair. Hine was a humanist. He established a connection with his subjects as seen in their gaze, curious, defiant, dejected or full out laughing at this man lugging a Graflex camera, flashpowder and fifty pounds of gear. He liked “persons not people” and preserved their dignity. He may have used deception to access workplaces, but he was honest in his art. He wanted to provoke compassion not pity and inspire activism not charity.

“Home is a safe haven and a comfort zone. A place to build memories as well as a way to build future wealth. A place where we can truly just be ourselves,” proclaims Habitat for Humanity. One-room cabins and overcrowded tenements are not necessarily comfort zones, and the American Dream of building wealth through homeownership is faltering. But having any home is heaven compared to being unhoused, to be dragged from home, to be displaced. Dorothea Lange was hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the forced “evacuation” and incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942. The military immediately saw that the photos revealed the cruelty, seized and suppressed them for decades. Few ICE arrests have gained more notoriety than the Hmong-American citizen dragged from his home, handcuffed and barely clothed in cold winter. Or 5-year-old Liam Ramos who was taken from the driveway of his home. He and his father were sent for eleven days to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. At least 3,800 children have been locked up since the center was reopened in 2025. These children are traumatized, their brains reorganized around vigilance and fear. CoreCivic, the private for-profit prison contractor with roots in Tennessee, receives 160 million dollars annually. Profits must be great since reports of rotten food, lack of water, and the outbreak of diseases are mounting.

Mrs. Thorne was not interested in war, epidemics or depressions, she wanted to preserve a very specific dimension of culture from the onslaught of modernity. Only for completeness’ sake did she include a “California Hallway c.1940” (for which she commissioned a Fernand Léger painting,) while complaining bitterly about “chairs made of tortured plumbers’ pipe.” The standard of good breeding and taste was 18th century France and England, the setting for most of the rooms of her second set. She created one “German Sitting Room of the Biedermeier Period, 1815-50,” an interesting choice since during this era of censorship and police surveillance, Germans tried to stay out of trouble by concentrating on the domestic and ‘non-political’, dwelling on terror and discomfort only in dark romantic tales.

The third set of rooms featured 37 American Rooms focusing on New England and the South. Mrs. Thorne would draw inspiration from the grandeur and prosperity of antebellum estates as shown in “Gone with the Wind” (1939) without addressing the uncomfortable source of that wealth. Shaker furniture is also tinged in nostalgia, a longing for simpler pleasures, simpler times. The Shakers themselves were a radically egalitarian, pacifist and celibate community. Many abused women joined them, the only children were adopted orphans and homeless, and the children who arrived with new members. While the Shakers have disappeared, child homelessness, poverty and abuse are on the rise. Social media, cuts in victim services and task forces investigating child trafficking are adding to the misery. And looking at Lewis Hine’s “Mendicants. New York City, July 1910” in the Trump-Epstein age is upsetting.

The KMA Spanish Bedroom with its dark pillared bed and red velvet curtains points to the origin of the Hispano-Moresque revival of the 1920s when Marjorie Merriweather Post (of the cereal maker dynasty) built Mar-a-Lago. Post was another patroness of the art, buying Imperial Russian treasures at bargain prices from Joseph Stalin. Mar-a-Lago is now a place of corruption, treason and recruitment for another kind of child labor. It is worth remembering that the success of the Muslim Moors in Al Andalusia relied on religious and cultural co-existence, and negotiations with local authorities instead of the use of extreme violence.

We don’t know what career Narcissa Thorne would pursue today - artist, curator, architect, designer? While being snarky about her wealth and the focus of her patronage, she got things done and will be fondly remembered. Knoxville is lucky to have free access to its art museum through patronage. The restauration of the Throne rooms relied on the patronage of notable donor Sherri Lee. Worryingly, the idea of patrons as stewards of creative commons, as supporters of artists and institutions, gaining social capital and building a legacy, seems to fade next to capital preservation, extractive power and censorship games. What used to be public art is auctioned off to become warehoused, alternative blue-chip investment. Philanthropy means “love of humanity” and is seen as a weakness by fundamentally anti-human billionaires.

I wonder what would have happened if Mrs. Thorne had memorialized the less fortunate, shown us glimpses of Hoovervilles, or on a positive note, if she had designed the “decent homes” that every American family deserved according to FDR, even shown the inside of a Bell Research Lab. She was convinced that she could raise America’s taste level with her rooms, why not raise America’s compassion or dreams of the future? Frances Glessner Lee was a childhood friend of Narcissa Niblack. Her father forbade her to study medicine, so she became a patroness of science and “mother” [!] of forensic science instead. In 1938 she came into the family fortune and began to craft dollhouses as well. Knitting, painting and sewing herself, she was highly averse to the idea of the sacred domestic sphere and created “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.” She built shacks and tenements, most victims were women, and every death was accompanied by case notes and witness reports. Her miniatures were used as training tools by the Havard Medical Law department and now reside at the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The Trump administration is trying to take the country on a historical amnesia tour all the way back to a fictitious and rather offensive Golden Age. Nostalgia can be a much-needed escape but cannot be confused with history or replace an agenda that goes beyond vulgarity, lawlessness and greed. Ghosts and hauntings are narrative tools to subvert the beautiful illusion, question the status quo and demand acknowledgement, reparation and change. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is not so popular for nothing. Double Exposure is the photographer’s tool of disruption and even Lewis Hine experimented with it. Next time you see the Thorne Rooms, see which ghosts arise for you. As the Art Institute of Chicago instructs: “We are not just the audience anymore, we are the playwright and the stage director as well.”