The MIA’s period rooms are tucked in the back of the museum’s third-floor galleries, spaces you can walk into and feel enveloped in a “moment in time.” But period rooms change, even after the museum first installs them.
A sketch of an early scheme for the MacFarlane Memorial Room, 1969, likely by Karl E. Humphrey, Jr., DATS files.
The MacFarlane Room has evolved dramatically over the past 40 years, as I came to understand while researching and preparing for its latest incarnation (shown above), the exhibition “Made in China: The MacFarlane Room Wallpaper,” as part our Living Rooms initiative to present these spaces in new ways. The room is in one of the more inconspicuous spots around the Bell Family Decorative Arts Court, near a large case of American 19th-century glass. Despite its somewhat remote location, it is one of our most striking rooms—its walls are covered in antique Chinese wallpaper.
The MacFarlane family and the MIA established the room as a memorial in the 1970s—a pretty rare case. While donors often give an object in memory of a beloved family member, giving an entire room isn’t common even in large period-room collections. In the early 20th century, Americans had a moment of memorializing each other in public places, and the MIA was the beneficiary of a group of memorial rooms in the 1920s and ’30s. But the MacFarlane Room is an outlier even among this group, established four decades after the other memorials.
From the top: The MacFarlane Memorial Room around 1980, with the wallpaper that Mabel MacFarlane purchased in 1967 from a New York dealer, and Federal-style furniture from the late 1700s; the room around 1988; and as it looked from 1998 to 2014.
It started in 1967, when Mabel MacFarlane and her son Wayne MacFarlane donated Chinese export wallpaper made in the late 1700s or early 1800s. The premature passing of Mabel’s son Warren MacFarlane, Jr., a couple of years later, spurred the family to create a memorial room. The MIA explored a plan to construct the room as early as 1969, but plans were shelved, likely when construction of the new museum wings designed by Kenzo Tange necessitated relocating all the period rooms from the second to the third floor.
The MacFarlane Memorial Room’s earliest installation survives in a photo from the 1970s that combines the stunning, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper with draperies and woodwork in what appears to be one of the predominant colors of the era—avocado green.
David Marquis. a paintings conservator with the Midwest Art Conservation Center describes the piecing and painting he helped with in the 1980s to cover the chimneypiece area. Near the ceiling, he copied tree, mountain, and sky motifs from the existing wallpaper.
Curator Francis (Bill) Puig, an American decorative arts specialist, transformed the room in the 1980s. Like a curatorial superman, he swooped in to give an idea of what the room could be, based on new research, to Mrs. MacFarlane’s son Wayne and his wife, Rosalee, who remained involved with the room after Mabel’s death. This included updating the color scheme with gold damask upholstery and drapery fabric from Scalamandré, a reproduction of a fireplace surround and woodwork from a 1796 Boston house with plenty of Federal period street cred, and a reproduction “fitted” or wall-to-wall carpet—expensive, but possible to get in the young United States.
It also involved papering the chimneypiece with wallpaper scraps left over from the original installation, necessitating some artistic “infill.” Local artists David Marquis, now a paintings conservator with the Midwest Art Conservation Center, and Tom Jance, the long-time head of the MIA’s Art Crew, were tasked with the job, and “filled me in” on their work—you can only see it by looking very closely!
The MacFarlanes continued to work with MIA curators in the 1990s to improve the room, relentlessly searching for objects with eagles that proclaimed the power of our new nation around 1800. By 1994, the secretary bookcase from around 1760 was supplanted by a later one with an eagle on top.
One of the things we didn’t know much about was what was going on in the scenic wallpapers. My task this spring has been to take apart the MacFarlane Room and turn it into what can rightly be called a gallery for Chinese wallpaper. Our curator of Chinese Art, Liu Yang, has brought a plethora of specifics and stories to an object that we previously understood only as a generic festival. Research on wallpapers from the era by Nicole LaBouff, our assistant curator of textiles, has increased our understanding of how these papers functioned in American and European interiors, which we are sharing with our visitors. The wallpaper has now moved from the shadows into the room’s spotlight.
“Made in China: The MacFarlane Room Wallpaper” will be on view in Gallery 328 through May 2016.
You can read more about the wallpaper, and see details of the design, in this Art Story exploration.
Click to enlarge: Chinese, Wallpaper (detail, North wall), late 1700s-early 1800s, pigments on paper, Gift of funds from Mrs. W.C. MacFarlane and Wayne H. MacFarlane in memory of Warren C. MacFarlane 67.58.7