Representing the Complicated History of American Interiors

Harrison Furey and Rachel Smith
March 8, 2021
Black-and-white image of an actor in 18th-century period costume sitting in the Marmion Room

This early publicity photograph features a person in historic costume posed in the Marmion Room. A series of related images were used to promote the new American Wing when it opened in 1924.

The modern living room is a stage for the bustling intersection of domestic life. Part office, part movie theater, part restaurant, part daycare center, it reflects the many values and modes of our time. At The Met, period rooms capture how people lived in the past, revealing the historical fashions and values of different eras. While you could previously only visit period rooms and other historic interiors while at the Museum, now you can also explore over twenty such settings and learn about their histories online. We sat down with our colleagues in the American Wing to discuss how making these resources available online allows The Met to share the ever-evolving interpretations of these rooms’ histories with the public.

Period rooms have a long history in The Met’s American Wing. Fifteen rooms—ranging in date from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—were first unveiled when the Wing opened in 1924. Since then, the American Wing has added rooms from the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth century, including ones designed by notable American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. Amelia Peck, the Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Decorative Arts, who has worked on the period rooms since she started at the Museum over thirty years ago, told us how curators balance the history of the rooms with the Museum’s interpretive goals.

“Each of these rooms has had a life, and once they enter the Museum’s collection, curators make conscious choices to represent a specific period of their history,” Peck explained. “We then use objects from the collection to reflect that particular moment.”

Researching the period rooms

The American Wing’s period rooms aren't simply pulled out of houses and installed in the Museum. They’re extensively studied and analyzed by conservators and scientists, who identify original paint colors, wood finishes, hardware placement, and textiles. Considerable curatorial research into the designers, builders, owners, occupants, and furnishings of each room—through primary documents, including wills, inventories, and newspapers—reveals complex and layered histories. While these meticulously assembled rooms are aesthetic works to be appreciated on their own merits, the research that goes into staging them also make them informative representations of the past.


Amelia Peck during the installation of the Frank Lloyd Wright Room at The Met, ca. 1982

But the information that guides curatorial decisions and informs how the rooms are furnished hasn’t always been accessible to visitors. For many years, without the help of a guide or docent, visitors were only able to appreciate these spaces on a visual level.

In 2009, The Met installed interactive screens in the galleries, which presented the history of each room and its furnishings to visitors. “They were a godsend,” Peck said, noting that visitors who wanted to understand the complexities of these spaces and the people who lived in them finally had a comprehensive resource at their fingertips.

Verplanck Room

View of the Verplanck Room with an interactive screen visible in the foreground

In-gallery interactive screens on view in the Verplanck Room

Moira Gallagher, a research associate in the department, said that the screens were introduced to show “why the rooms look the way they do, and to lay out those deeper stories.” They provided information on the rooms’ architecture, stories of the people who designed and inhabited them, information about the furnishings and objects on display, and details about how they had come to be installed at the Museum.

These devices were cutting edge when installed, but the technology has since become outdated. Over the past two years, the American Wing and our team in the Digital Department have led a joint effort to preserve the rooms’ interpretive content by migrating it to The Met’s website, where it can reach millions of people. Onsite visitors can now scan a QR code posted in each room to access this information. This transition also grants the Museum’s Digital Department more flexibility to update the presentations as curators continue their research.

Old rooms, new stories

Revisiting the decade-old didactics provided American Wing curators the opportunity to add new research and dig deeper into the rooms’ histories. “Our interpretation has changed in some of these spaces,” said Gallagher. The American Wing is expanding its interpretation of American art to reflect the contributions of African American, Latin American, and Native American people, rather than telling primarily Euro-American stories.


The mahogany-paneled Richmond Room

One room featuring new stories is the Richmond Room, a drawing room from a house built in 1810 to 1811 for the lawyer William Clayton Williams. It features mahogany paneling and doors. Mahogany was “the most high-style and expensive wood” available at the turn of the nineteenth century, Peck explained. However, the in-gallery screens weren’t sufficiently explicit in acknowledging the extreme circumstances of the mahogany trade—a brutal industry that relied on the labor of enslaved individuals in the Caribbean and an expansive international trading network.

View of the fireplace wall of the Richmond Room

“How can we have a room that’s paneled in mahogany and not talk about the reality of how this material was attained?” asked Peck.

New research into the lives of the owners and occupants of some rooms has brought fresh perspectives. Today we have a greater understanding of the expansive manufacturing enterprise that funded Jedediah Wilcox’s lavish mansion in Meriden, Connecticut—the original location of the Renaissance Revival Room. And the ownership history of the stately villa that housed the Rococo Revival Room is now documented, providing new insights into the development of Astoria, Queens. Likewise, an earlier interpretation of the Marmion Room, an ornately painted interior from an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation, focused on its masterfully rendered faux marbling, Rococo trophies, and landscape scenes. New research into Fitzhugh and Lewis families, who owned the plantation, uncovered details about the lives of over sixty individuals they enslaved, including three people identified as James Lucas, Billy, and John Stuart. Their personal stories, as well as the many that remain untold, highlight the complex intersections of artistic patronage, slavery, and historic preservation.

Presenting these stories online offers a more nuanced view of the complicated histories of American design and decorative arts. Publishing this new research has taken on greater significance as the Museum expands its online resources. Making the history of period rooms more widely available on The Met’s website, Peck said, allows people all over the world to “visit and learn about the rooms in a way that they couldn’t have even a year ago.”

Harrison Furey

Harrison Furey is a production coordinator in the Digital Department.

Rachel Smith

Rachel Smith is a production coordinator in the Digital Department.