The world is a dollhouse

“Dockskåp - en värld i miniatyr” is one of the strangest books I´ve read lately. Actually, I stopped reading it half-way, realizing that dollhouses simply aint my thang. Yes, dollhouses. The book, published in 1991 by Lena Lidbeck and Stefan Nilsson, really is about famous (and some not-so-famous) such. I suppose it could of some interest if you´re first language is Swedish and your main love in life is making or buying miniatures of furniture and utensils. No hard feelings, by the way, it *is* both weird and impressive that the color pics in this volume, which seemingly show real rooms in real houses, really are of miniature ditto! Some of the dollhouses also have quite the story behind them.

Thus, there is Titania´s Palace, built by Sir Nevile Wilkinson, a British landowner living on Ireland, for his daughter Guendolen. As a child, Guendolen would play alone in the family´s big park, imagining herself to be surrounded by fairies. She eventually gave them names. Thus, Titania was the fairy queen (named after a character in a Shakespeare play). After both father and daughter had supposedly seen this fairy, or felt her presence, the father became obsessed with building a “palace” (or rather dollhouse) for Titania and her family. The dollhouse was officially “opened” in 1922 by British queen consort Mary of Teck, but Wilkinson continued to add to it until his death in 1940. After various peregrinations, the dollhouse was bought by Lego and ended up at Legoland in Denmark!

Interestingly, Mary also owned a famous dollhouse, known simply as Queen Mary´s Dolls´ House, built by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Some of the miniature books in this dollhouse were specially commissioned from famous authors and thus contain original stories, albeit very short ones, including one by Arthur Conan Doyle!

Next, there is the Stettheimer Dollhouse, built by rich American socialite Carrie Stettheimer. Artists who befriended the Stettheimer family contributed paintings, including a miniature version of “Nude Descending a Staircase” actually made by Marcel Duchamp. The dolls are caricatures of real people from the New York jet set, including Olga de Meyer (who was rumored to be the bastard daughter of King Edward VII of Britain), Surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew (oh, that guy) and Carrie Stettheimer herself. The biggest sensation is a miniature elevator or lift which actually works. Apparently, some of the manikin artwork adorning the walls of the dollhouse is pretty frivolous, including a painting of Noah dressed for a rainy day, while one of Noah´s daughters wears a swimsuit!

“Dockskåp” also contain several chapters on the history of dollhouses. As can be seen already from the 20^th century examples above, dollhouses haven´t always been intended for children. The book contains a detailed, and almost incomprehensible, description of a curiosity cabinet gifted to Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus during his intervention on the Protestant side in the Thirty Year War. The year was 1632 and the place was Augsburg. The maker of the cabinet was the famous Philipp Hainhofer. Further, there are the so-called Nuremberg kitchens, which were intended for children as a pedagogical device insofar as girls needed to learn the basics of cooking and home economy. And yes, they really were from Nürnberg.

Being published in 1991, the book naturally lacks the “woke” angle considered necessary today. It´s easy to see that the dollhouses faithfully reproduce class society, with (often female) servants in the kitchen or dining room, expensive rooms for the bourgeois or aristocratic house-owners, and everyone being lily White. On the stylistic side, on the other hand, dollhouses are apparently pretty eclectic, often combining very different fashions, or being built in pure fantasy styles. Only with some difficulty did the authors manage to find dollhouses that could represent “real” artistic or design styles, such as Neo-Rococo or Functionalism.

With that, I end this strange review…