I wandered around in the dark, peering through the windows like a voyeur. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I dreamed of napping in one of the plush beds with the gilded headboards and silk sheets.
I gawked at the elevator, never having been in a home with its own private lift. The art collection, hung salon-style in a large entry hall with striped floors, stunned me: cubist paintings, works by Gaston Lachaise and Marguerite Zorach, Marcel Duchamp’s famed Nude Descending a Staircase! I made my way to the other side of the house, finding a room with silver walls and red lacquer furniture.
A mahjong set had been abandoned mid-game on the table, and a bookshelf overflowed in the corner. I longed to be allowed in, to settle into one of the red chairs and read a book. On the shelves, alongside works by Sterne, Swift, and Defoe, I spotted a light blue book called Love Days by Henrie Waste.
Oh, how I wished to read it! If trespassing had been physically possible, maybe I would have slipped inside. But how can you break into a house so small that its furniture fits in your pockets?
Built in 1916, the dollhouse was designed and continuously redecorated until 1935 by Carrie Stettheimer (1869-1944). In 1945, the house entered the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, where I saw it displayed inside a glass box on a cold winter afternoon. Carrie performed a “Honey, I Shrunk the Salon” miracle: encapsulating her family’s world of art and privilege in dollhouse miniature.
The dollhouse memorializes the salon hosted by Carrie and her younger sisters, painter Florine and writer Ettie, and visited by all the great avant-garde artists and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her startling novel guides us through the Stettheimer sisters’ fabulous world and the interior spaces of a troubled woman’s mind. The dollhouse is most often discussed in the context of Florine’s (1871-1944) paintings: colorful and surreal canvases of gargantuan flowers, New York City landmarks, and her elegant sisters, dressed up in drop-waist evening dresses or romping through the countryside in pants.
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