This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Museum of the City of New York, a museum dedicated to the history of this legendary metropolis and the people who inhabited it. Looking back on the museum’s century-old history, one can discover a host of idiosyncratic “only in New York” stories.
For example, in December 1945, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) held a lavish housewarming party for a dollhouse, attended by the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe. But this unusual holiday wasn’t meant to honor just any old dollhouse, but rather an intricately ornate, miniature mansion created by Carrie Stettheimer, one of the town’s three famous Stettheimer sisters.
Miss Carrie Stettheimer, portrait photograph, 1932. Courtesy of Getty Images.
The well-to-do family, of German Jewish descent, was well known in intellectual circles and lived between New York and Europe; atypically for the time, the family of five children was led by Rosetta, their mother, as their father abandoned the family and fled to Australia. Children were known to be creative early on. A budding theater designer, Carrie was the sister of Florine, the accomplished painter, and Ettie, a novelist and philosopher. The eldest of the sisters, Carrie, hosted fashion shows alongside Rosetta and worked on her dollhouse. Ultimately, after Carrie’s death in 1944, Ettie donated the intricate dollhouse to MCNY in 1945, writing, “I’m sure no deposit would have been more satisfying to her than the museum at his own town.”
Dollhouse by Carrie Stettheimer (1916-1935). Photo: Brad Farwell. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
WhaThe Stettheimer Dollhouse is a two-story dollhouse measuring 28 inches tall with 12 bedrooms, including a ballroom with a powder blue piano, an elevator, a bathroom, a child’s bedroom, a kitchen equipped with pots and pans. It’s a dizzying display of detail that offers more and more to discover for those with patient eyes. One of the star items in the MCNY’s collection, the dollhouse is usually on permanent display (as of fall 2020, the museum opened”Until Closede” an exhibition focused on the details of the house with visual eruptions and illuminating wall texts). Currently, however, the beloved object is undergoing a routine restoration to be seen again in 2024. To mark the museum’s centenary, we decided to take a closer look at the wonderful Stettheimer dollhouse and find out three fun facts you might not have expected. Be sure to catch him when he comes into view again!
Stettheimer worked on the dollhouse for 20 years, but never finished it
Dollhouse by Carrie Stettheimer (1916-1935). Photo: Brad Farwell. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
As her sisters’ careers flourished, older sister Carrie Stettheimer’s professional ambitions took precedence over her duties of managing the Stettheimer household at their home on West 58th Street, known as Alwyn Court. When Carrie dreamed of creating large-scale theatrical design, she turned instead to miniature theater sets.
Carrie made her first dollhouse, it is said, as a child vacationing at posh Lake Saranac in the Adirondacks. She solicited wooden crates from the local grocer to build her little edifice, a project she donated to a local polio fundraiser held that summer. But that was just the start of her curiosity, it seems, and in 1916 Carrie began assembling the Stettheimer Dollhouse, her small-scale magnum opus. This richly detailed dollhouse she modeled on André Brook, the family estate in Tarrytown, north of the city.
Dollhouse by Carrie Stettheimer (1916-1935). Photo: Brad Farwell. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
The new dollhouse became a never-ending project for Stettheimer, who went so far as to rent a secondary New York apartment at the Dorset Hotel to devote himself exclusively to the task. The decor of the design spared no detail, mirroring the decor of the Manhattan family home; Stettheimer made Empire wallpaper, Limoges vases, Louis XV furniture, pots, pans, and everything else imaginable. A painting of Noah’s Ark in a nursery shows the three sisters, with their pets on leashes, waiting to board the ark itself. Although now lost, the house once included small plaster models of guests visiting the house. The home’s whimsical furnishings would have been “incredibly chic” in the 1920s, the MCNY noted.
Dollhouse by Carrie Stettheimer (1916-1935). Photo: Brad Farwell. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
But the completion of the dollhouse came to an abrupt halt when Stettheimers’ mother Rosetta died in 1935, and Carrie, in a decision ripe for psychoanalysis, abandoned work on the dollhouse altogether and dollhouse was sealed in a warehouse where it would languish for the 10 years before Carrie’s own death. When Ettie took over her sister’s estate, she salvaged the dollhouse and attempted to decorate the remaining rooms in a way she believed her sister would have liked. Ettie donated the dollhouse with a doll belonging to Carrie and an accompanying Saratoga trunk and keychain. Considering the 19 years that Carrie worked on the house, Ettie reflected on her sister’s project with a sense of disappointment, writing “I regard this production of Carrie as an easy and more or less posthumous substitute for the work which she was eminently suited to adopt as a vocation, had the circumstances been favorable – stage design.” Given the dollhouse’s warm reception over the past 75 years, however, Ettie might have viewed the one-of-a-kind object more generously in hindsight.
A miniature art gallery houses real works by Marcel Duchamp, George Bellows and other famous artists
Carrie Stettheimer’s dollhouse (1916-1935). Photograph by Brad Farwell. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York
The Stettheimer House was a favorite of art-world dwellers during the early decades of the 1900s; frequent visitors included Marcel Duchamp, photographer Carl Van Vechten, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz and Tristan Tzara, among others. In making his dollhouse, Stettheimer asked artists from their community to recreate their works in miniature. If we take a closer look, we will notice that the doll’s house is a veritable museum of the 20th century, filled with works by Marguerite Zorach, William Zorach, Alexander Archipenko, Albert Gleizes and George Bellows, among many others.
Certainly, the most famous of the works exhibited in the house is Marcel Duchamp’s reprisals against his emblematic Nude descending a staircase (1913)-this 1918 version a the ink and wash version is only three and a half inches. Undeniably delightful, these tiny works can be glimpsed keyhole through the home’s exterior arched windows. Other crowd favorites from the collection include Diminutive of Gaston Lachaise Venus sculpture in the courtyard of the house. In fact, there are more works of art intended for the dollhouse than can reasonably be expected. Over the decades, however, Carrie has commissioned some 28 known works that she never managed to hang. When Carrie died, Ettie made a selection of 13 works for display in the house, although more still exist; it is believed that they may have been intended for display in their rotation.
Some of these small paintings are still being identified
Louis Bouche (1896-1969). Mama’s Boy, c. 1920. Gift of the estate of Jane Bouché. Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.
While many of the paintings and sculptures made for the Stettheimer Dollhouse have well-known references, still others have yet to be identified by museum curators. In 2016, curator Bruce Weber made an exciting discovery in this vein. While attending an exhibit at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum in Woodstock, New York, he recognized a painting in the exhibit as one of the yet unidentified works from the Stettheimer Dollhouse. The painting was the oil painting of American artist Louis Bouché Mom’s son.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
The campy work depicts a brooding young boy with his arms folded, staring disdainfully between lace curtains, and belongs to Chez Bouche series of so-called Nottingham Lace Curtain Paintings. Bouché, called “the bad boy of American art” by Carl Van Vechten, was something of a regular at the Stettheimer salon and is also known for making a graphite drawing of three Stettheimer sisters, now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The discovery of her painting in the house offers new insights into the artistic relationships of the Stettheimer sisters and in many ways underlines how the dollhouse is a veritable treasure chest of these intertwined references.
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