Why Miniatures Inspire Such Awe

Empires and nation-states are remembered for their monuments, but they also leave behind plenty of miniatures. Inside the Egyptian pyramids, within the chamber where the pharaoh’s mummy rests, stand collections of little statues—wooden figurines of mummified servants, clay hippos painted turquoise—to remind the ruler how the world once looked. Academics have complained that miniatures suffer from scholarly neglect. After carrying out the first comprehensive survey of more than 500 miniatures found in excavations along the Nile in 2011, the Italian archeologist Grazia Di Pietro felt compelled to remark in an essay that these were more than “simple toys.”

A miniature is a replica of something bigger, a distortion of scale that makes it wonderful in a way the merely small is not. Miniatures are not the same as models, which are didactic (an anatomical model of the heart to educate students, for example) or utilitarian (a model showing the plan for a skyscraper yet to be built). Miniatures imitate life but have no clear practical purpose. They can be harder to make than their full-size counterparts. But they are portable, like the tiny mannequins the French government commissioned from fashion houses when World War II ended and Parisians couldn’t afford human-size haute couture. The mannequins toured Europe, splendidly dressed ambassadors carrying the message that the French had skill, if not much fabric.

Miniatures seek detail rather than abstraction. They are competitive. Some strive to be ever smaller, like the diminutive books that surged in popularity during the Industrial Revolution, after the printing press had rendered mass production easier. The essayist Susan Stewart writes about this in her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Maybe, she suggests, the guilds of printers and binders missed the challenges of craftsmanship. (Centuries before the printing press, Arab and Persian calligraphers figured out how to make Qurans smaller than their thumbs.) Other miniatures strive to be ever more perfect—consider the locket portraits once sold in England, each with its own magnifying glass.

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“I think a lot about record books, like the Guinness Book of World Records,” Joan Kee, an art historian at the University of Michigan, told me. “There’s always the smallest and the biggest: two extremes of human achievements.” Monuments and miniatures both inspire awe, but the awe each inspires is of a different kind. The pyramids stand as testaments to the glory of great powers, pooled resources, and concerted human effort. They’re formidable. The Egyptian figurines conjure images of a single artisan’s obsession, squinting eyes, and precise fingers. They’re precious.  

Here’s an irony of time and size: Monuments, in their grandness, seem destined to last forever—but the unobtrusive miniature is often what survives the passage of centuries and the onslaughts of natural disasters. Today, museums are full of miniatures, though many institutions don’t seem to know what to do with them. Jack Davy, a British curator, coined the term miniature dissonance to criticize the practice of exhibiting them all together with little context, like souvenirs on a table. Museum collections are a kind of miniature themselves—a whole world made to fit inside a building. One way to tell the history of museums is that they evolved from the rooms in which noble families once displayed trinkets from their trips of conquest—dried butterflies, incense lamps, taxidermic birds, Chinese porcelains. The rooms were called cabinets of curiosities, or wunderkammer in German—“wonder rooms.” The word cabinet then came to mean the piece of furniture that might contain such wonders; the word became its own miniature.

In the 1930s, Narcissa Thorne was a Chicago housewife and socialite, married to a scion of the Montgomery Ward department-store fortune. She mocked her ladylike education: “Knowing how to put on my hat straight was supposed to be enough.” Since childhood, she had relished traveling and collecting small objects, and liked to say that her miniatures were not a hobby but a mania. In 1933, hundreds of thousands of people lined up at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition to see not some futuristic technology but an exhibit of 30 miniature rooms, imagined, commissioned, and furnished by Thorne. There was a Tudor hall, a Victorian drawing room, a Versailles-esque boudoir with a gilded bathtub. Some of the rooms had windows, through which the scenography of an outside landscape was visible and the light of a miniature sun seeped in. The audience found the realism uncanny, Kay Wells, an art historian at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, told me. Some were so shocked by the view of all that intimate domesticity, they felt like voyeurs. Quite a few compared the rooms to peep shows.

Miniatures are often said to be all about control: creating tiny utopias by shrinking what is big and intimidating. “You can control your dollhouse,” Leslie Edelman, the owner of the only dedicated dollhouse store left in New York City, told me, as he showed me a miniature fruit basket so exquisite that the bananas inside of it could actually be peeled. “I mean, the outside world these days is insane!” In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the character who collects miniatures is a frail mother who falls into depression after the birth of her child. Poor woman, I thought when I read the book, making this little world for herself because she can’t handle the real one.

[Read: Dollhouses weren’t invented for play]

Narcissa Thorne, too, wanted to assert control—over the stubborn passage of time and what she saw as the ugliness of modern fads. Art Deco mixed influences from too many places in a pastiche she didn’t fancy. Instead, she liked the “period rooms” that were being added to museums in Detroit, New York, and Chicago to display the prettier interior design of bygone eras. She donated and volunteered at major institutions, but none big enough to accommodate a collection as comprehensive as she would have wished. By making her own compact period rooms, she could display the chronology of European domesticity at a manageable scale.

But miniatures can do more than provide an illusion of control. And perhaps, despite her intentions, Thorne’s rooms did something of the opposite. Great miniatures create the fantasy that they are part of a world that will never fully reveal itself to the viewer. This is the same fantasy, as Stewart observed in On Longing, that animates The Nutcracker, Pinocchio, and other fairy tales in which toys come alive. A reporter at the Chicago Tribune wrote that looking into the rooms made you feel like a Lilliputian in Gulliver’s Travels.

The Thorne rooms exert a power that preserved historic villas and museum period rooms cannot replicate. If a space can be inhabited, then the people inhabiting it can’t escape the presence of EXIT signs, plexiglass barriers, and one another. You always know you’re trapped in the present. You can’t walk into a miniature room, yet it feels somehow much more immersive. Thorne chose not to populate her rooms with tiny people. Ellenor Alcorn, the curator of Applied Arts of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds the biggest collection of Thorne rooms, calls that a “really wise” decision. “The absence of figures means that we, as the visitor, become the human element in the room, and bring them to life,” she told me.

The Thorne rooms at the Art Institute remain something of rarity: miniatures taken very, very seriously by a major American museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, is home to the world’s biggest collection of American portrait miniatures—including a locket memento of George Washington and “Beauty Revealed,” a miniaturist’s self-portrait, which shows only her breasts—but only about 3 percent, are on display at the moment. (A spokesperson for the museum told me these paintings are rotated every few months because they’re sensitive to the light.)

American miniature enthusiasts are used to thinking of their fascination as a quirk. Elle Shushan, who collects and sells 19th-century miniature portraits like those at the Met, told me her circle is “niche but passionate.” Carolyn LeGeyt, a Connecticut retiree who made dollhouses for all the girls in her family—10 nieces and two granddaughters—when they turned 9, told me that her favorite week of the year is when she goes to a summer school run by the International Guild of Miniature Artisans at Maine Maritime Academy. For that one week, she doesn’t need to explain her “love for small things.” (That’s also where she learned to paint and then sand down her dollhouses’ door knobs so that they look worn by use.)

It doesn’t help their reputation for quirkiness that, as a group, American miniaturists are drawn to old-fashioned things. Most American dollhouses are Victorian. The miniature railroad at the Brandywine Museum, near Philadelphia, emerged out of nostalgia for disappearing old trains. This needn’t be the case. In Germany, Miniatur Wunderland replicates Hamburg’s warehouse district. Niklas Weissleder, a young man who works for the museum, told me that curators are getting anxious because many of the city’s cars are now electric, and the tiny cars have not yet been updated to reflect this change.

Not all American miniatures are quaint idylls. Frances Glessner Lee, a contemporary of Narcissa Thorne, created detailed room boxes too, but hers were murder scenes, with blood stains and decomposing bodies. Glessner Lee liked to read Sherlock Holmes stories, donated money to fund the school of legal medicine at Harvard, and hoped the budding detectives there would use the rooms as puzzles to crack in 90-minute sessions. For her contributions, Glessner Lee earned the title of “godmother of forensic science” and became America’s first female police captain.

A few years ago, the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery, in Washington, D.C., displayed Glessner Lee’s rooms in “Murder Is Her Hobby,” a three-month exhibition. Nora Atkinson, the show’s curator, told me that it had been a tough sell for her bosses: They were “skeptical that anybody would be interested in sort of dollhouses, as they put it.” She felt there was a sense that the miniature rooms were just a feminine hobby, and not particularly “innovative.” In fact, the exhibition was so popular that the museum extended its hours. (A spokesperson for the Smithsonian told me that the exhibition was part of a series “showcasing women artists” and “challenging the marginalization of creative disciplines traditionally considered feminine.”)

Is there a country in the world where miniatures are more than a strange little pastime? I’m talking about a place that could serve as a site of pilgrimage for miniature-lovers, or a first destination in the event that a team of scholars finally sets out to write the Unified Theory of Miniatures as an Important Category of Artistic Expression.

There are probably quite a few candidates, but I’d submit Japan, where a long tradition honors the fascination with all objects mijika (“close to the body”) or te ni ireru (“that fit in the hand”).

Ayako Yoshimura, now a librarian at University of Chicago, told me that she doesn’t understand why collecting miniatures is seen as a bit weird in America; it was quite normal in Japan when she was growing up. When she moved to the United States for college, she brought along the miniatures from her childhood and has since kept a drawer for them in every place she has lived. She has all the makings of a miniature Japanese garden, with a fence and an ornamental water basin, but she rarely shows them to anyone.

Scholars I interviewed about the popularity of miniatures in Japan suggested that it might have to do with Japan itself being so small and dense, or with the nation’s tradition of decorative crafts. Yoshimura thinks her fellow Japanese have a “philosophy of concealment”; they are people who like owning little treasures to enjoy in private.

[From the January/February 2017 issue: Big in Japan–tiny food]

In the 1980s, the Korean professor and politician O-Young Lee wrote The Compact Culture, a best-selling book arguing that Japan’s love for small things, such as haiku and netsuke—tiny ivory sculptures concealed inside a kimono’s folds—led to its innovations in small-but-powerful industrial products such as the mighty microchip, and is by extension key to the nation’s economic success. Sushi, one of Japan’s most famous exports, is arguably a miniature—all the ingredients of a big plate, in a single bite.

Japan is also the master of what I believe to be the canonical miniature: bonsai trees, which are microcosms of nature outside nature. Originally from China, the practice of making miniature landscapes was supposed to teach students how to manipulate the elements. Individual pieces were called silent poems. When the art form spread to Japan, it conserved the meaning of an environment subdued. “A tree that is left growing in its natural state is a crude thing,” reads Utsubo monogatari, a 10th-century story. “It is only when it is kept close to human beings who fashion it with loving care that its shape and style acquire the ability to move one.”

There’s something cruel about a desire for control that necessitates trapping a tree with wires, for decades, to stunt its growth and sculpt its shape. Keiichi Fujikawa, a second-generation bonsai artist from Osaka, told me he strives to hide or remove the wires before the trees are exhibited, but that without them the bonsai is not “aesthetically viable.” The wires are the price of beauty. Crucial to the Buddhist belief system, Yukio Lippit, a professor of Japanese art at Harvard, told me, is the idea of “nestedness,” of universes contained infinitely within universes. Miniature trees can remind their beholders of a cosmology in which every small thing holds an entire world.

When I first saw them, in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I understood that bonsais are not small trees but enormous ones—all of the complexity is there, simply at a reduced scale. I struggled to define why this effect is so beautiful, but I met an academic who came close: “Bonsais show the respect the artist has for you as a viewer,” Robert Huey, a professor of Japanese literature at University of Hawaii, told me. The bonsai artist knows that a miniature that simplifies would be an impostor, and bonsais are the opposite of impostors: not just miniature trees but real ones. They take decades to grow; they have leaves that blossom and fall with the seasons, and trunks that get sick and age. Like the trees that grow in the forest, they are fully alive.