Art Fashion Creation: Malcolm Rice Dollhouse, 1929

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Malcolm Rice Dollhouse, 1929

Displayed within the Farragut Folklife Museum in Tennessee, this Malcolm Rice Dollhouse is well-engineered, imaginative, and exudes a rather mysterious aura. Rice, an architect, built the house with electric lighting and it withstood three generations of play. Several details reveal the builder and creators involved were thinking out-of-the-box: a couple of the walls have very detailed, large murals depicting flamingos and either alligators or crocodiles. One room has an elaborate and modern-for-the-time recessed ceiling light. The door at the top of a staircase looks stern and gothic - with studs and metalwork. In its entirety, the dollhouse has a feeling of something created by many hands and eyes imbued with an awareness informed by many cultures and by history. The Rice Dollhouse offers plenty of charming details - such as a courtyard fountain which has for a base a now-very-antique shoe polish tin, three cats: including one nearly as big as the boy descending the stairs - and another perched on the kitchen table. The curtains on the four-poster bed depict what appears to be an Asian batik or block-print fabric. In the papa doll's room is an alcove or shrine. A pillow on the four-poster bed is hand-embroidered and the curtains, though now worn and slightly ghostly, look to be made of women's fancy handkerchiefs - the kind with silky stitched florals or decorative borders, now to be found in a grandmother's handbag. On one wall is a framed photograph of a young woman in a chequered dress - her legs crossed and I wonder if she is someone who once received the spark of imagination from this dollhouse, but that for now is a mystery. I'm so glad to have seen this dollhouse - which tells many stories in its details and which has been so lovingly preserved as-is.