The Modern Interior

A period room from Cane Acres, an eighteenth-century house on the Perry Plantation,
Summerville, South Carolina, exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
This is an exhibition, and therefore it is no criticism to say that most of
these rooms lack reality. It is important that the public should realise
this. Otherwise they may feel that it is all rather outside their powers of
attainment.’ 33
Museums played a crucial role in collecting and displaying period
interiors through the twentieth century and, indeed, many of the strategies
used in the more commercial contexts of exhibitions and department
stores had originated in the context of the ‘period room’. The
Victoria and Albert Museum acquired its first complete interior in 1869
while New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art began to collect
rooms in 1903. 34 The Brooklyn Museum also engaged in acquiring period
rooms. One of its exhibits, an eighteenth-century dining room from
a plantation house in South Carolina, called Cane Acres, contained a
number of tasteful, English-influenced items of furniture. Visitors to the
museum were encouraged to believe in the ‘authenticity’ of the setting by
the presence of wine in the glass carafes. The original motivation behind
what came to be known as the ‘period rooms’ phenomenon had been to
educate the public in historical styles at a time when historicist eclecticism 69