Susan Rawles
Associate Curator of American Painting and Decorative Art
photo: Travis Fullerton © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
C: Hi, I’m Caroline Adzell and we’re here in the American Art exhibit with Susie Rawles, Associate Curator of American Painting and Decorative Art, and we’re going to be talking about the Worsham- Rockefeller room. Now, if you could tell us which items in the room are original pieces and which ones are reconstructions.
SR: Sure, so the room has had various incarnations-when it was sold in 1884 and transferred from Arabella Huntington to John D Rockefeller, and again in 1937 when Rockefeller passed away and his son and daughter-in-law donated it to the Museum of the City of New York. At this time, there were certain things that couldn’t be transferred and were duplicated with the help of a local decorator who was particularly interested in historic interiors. The furnishings are all original. This is a very interesting component of the story; we actually think that the room started with a different type of woodwork. When we installed the room we realized that the ebonized surface areas that you see now were originally the pale wood with the inlay in the Met’s corresponding dressing room, and at some point in the campaign they decided that wasn’t what she wanted. My feeling right now is (and this could change) she decided on the ebonized furnishings, which were very popular for bedrooms at this time, and this inspired her to go back and ebonize the room and create this kind of inlay.
C: Okay, now which items in the room had to be conserved or repaired?
SR: They all had to be conserved in terms of at least a minimum cleaning. The drapery (which was also reproduced in 1937) is based on what was thought to be the original style. You can see the trim work and the embroidery work, and that was all original to the draperies and reapplied here. The most dramatic cleaning process was the carpet, which even doesn’t look clean anymore, and the ceiling. The ceiling paper was rolled out in appropriately long strips and was laid on the mosaic floor in the upstairs gallery over in the other wing and was meticulously cleaned. I believe that was the most time consuming.
C: How was the room transported to the VMFA?
SR: The Museum of the City of New York had done a re-interpretation of its mission and packed everything up and stored it in off- site storage. That had been sitting there for some time, so it was already all crated, rolled and soft packed while it was in storage. So we hired a transport company to essentially go and deliver all of the pre-packed crates and everything, and bring them here. The tricky part then was that Carey Howlett, who was the contracted supervisor/conservator of the re-installation of this room, had to lay out every single strip of wood, board, and piece of paper and had to figure out which pieces went in which area.
Explore More:
Story of the Worsham-Rockefeller Bedroom
Inside the Worsham-Rockefeller Bedroom
Conservation of the Worsham-Rockefeller Bedroom
Worsham-Rockefeller Bedroom: Interview with Curator, Susie Rawles
Worsham-Rockefeller Bedroom: Interview with Deputy Directory, Stephen Bonadies