For someone whose reputation rests on rendering historic scenes in terrific precision, it's oddly charming that the world's most respected creator of miniature worlds got her start by depicting something that never happened at all.
In 1931, Narcissa Niblack Thorne set to work on her first ever miniature room as an homage to what was expected to be the coronation of Great Britain's Edward VIII. History and the royals conspired against Thorne, and the scene she so thoughtfully rendered was never meant to be. Though Edward would go on to abdicate the throne in favor of love, Thorne continued to follow her chosen path, creating scenes with such mind-boggling precision that they would attract the attention of international art critics for the rest of her life.
Thorne's first set of miniature rooms were displayed in the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago. The public's response was so enthusiastic that she went on to make two more groups of rooms: a European set, first displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1937, and an American set, completed in 1940. These, plus the Asian Rooms, added in 1962, comprise the amazing installation visitors see on any given day today.
Out of only approximately 100 total left anywhere on Earth, The Art Institute of Chicago offers a permanent exhibition of 68 miniature rooms conceived by Thorne.
Built to an astonishingly small scale of just 1:12, visiting the Thorne Miniature Rooms Exhibition allows museum-goers period-accurate glimpses into European interiors from the late 13th century all the way through the 1930s, in a way that logistics like time and space wouldn't otherwise allow. Other selections of her miniature rooms are stocked with precise representations of American furnishings from the 17th century to the early 20th century.
But, like any room, Thorne's creations get dirty and require maintenance. The skilled team of Art Institute staff members tasked with cleaning the miniature rooms aren't little elves or regular-sized humans wielding feather dusters and vacuum cleaners scaled to size. Rather, these extremely gentle humans come armed with cotton swabs and eye droppers, attacking the works with a degree of pride and skill necessary when maintaining impossibly small handmade time machines that just so happen to be located in an era obsessed with convincing us that bigger is better.