Carrie Stettheimer

Carrie Walter Stettheimer (1869-1944) created a remarkable two-story, twelve-room dollhouse over the course of twenty-five years, from 1916 to 1935. Carrie and her sisters Florine

Florine Stettheimer

Florine Stettheimer was an American artist. She has been described as "a Deco-influenced early Modernist who’s never really gotten her due".-Early life:...

  and Henrietta (Ettie) lived with their mother Rosetta in New York City; Florine was an artist and Ettie an author, and the family attracted a celebrated group of artists, writers, and critics during the first half of the twentieth century.
Carrie was inspired to begin her dollhouse in 1916; during their summer vacation in upstate New York, the sisters (and other upper-class visitors to Lower Saranac) contributed items to a fund-raising bazaar to benefit local children affected by a polio epidemic. Using wooden boxes from a grocer, Carrie created a dollhouse with found objects and scraps. When the family returned home to New York City, Carrie began her own dollhouse.

Art Collection

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the dollhouse is its art collection. Many of the Stettheimers' artist friends made tiny copies of their paintings and sculptures for the dollhouse; Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

, for example, made a miniature copy of his Nude Descending a Staircase

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

-External links:* at the Philadelphia Museum of Art* from Life magazine...

. Other artists who created works for the Dollhouse include Alexander Archipenko

Alexander Archipenko

Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist.-Biography:...

, George Bellows

George Bellows

George Wesley Bellows was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City, becoming, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".-Youth:Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio...

, Gaston Lachaise

Gaston Lachaise

Gaston Lachaise was an American sculptor of French birth, active in the early 20th century. A native of Paris, he was most noted for his female nudes such as Standing Woman.-Early life and education:...

, and Marguerite Zorach

Marguerite Zorach

Marguerite Zorach was an American fauvist painter, textile artist, and graphic designer and was an early exponent of modernism in America. She won the 1920 Logan Medal of the Arts.-Life:...

.
Even in death the Stettheimers attracted artists; Pop artist Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

 wrote about the Stettheimers in his 1980 book Popism: the Warhol ‘60s. “Florine Stettheimer was a wealthy primitive painter, a friend of Marcel Duchamp’s, who’d had a one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

in 1946, and her sister Carrie had made some fabulous dollhouses [sic] that I loved at the Museum of the City of New York.”

Museum of the City of New York

After her mother's death in 1935, Carrie stopped working on the dollhouse and some rooms were left unfinished. Her sister Ettie (who survived both Florine and Carrie) donated the dollhouse to the Museum of the City of New York in 1945; she arranged the unfinished rooms (the Art Gallery or Ballroom and the Dining Room) as she thought her sister would have wanted them. The dollhouse is about 28 inches tall, 50 inches long, and 35 inches wide.

External links

• Museum of the City of New York
• Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten’s Portraits of Women (an exhibit at Yale University's Beinecke Library that includes a photograph of Carrie Stettheimer taken on October 8, 1932)