A Private Room, a Lasting Image: The Worsham-Rockefeller Interiors

Imagine a ‘Gilded Age’ episode where the mistress of a railroad tycoon commissions the top designers of her time to build a New York style dressing room fit for a lady of her status. The living room, however, should be designed in a moorish fashion, and the primary bedroom in the latest French moda. Altogether, she will have fifteen different rooms in her newly built mansion, each different and spectacular in its own way. This is not fiction but actually what took place in 1881, when Arabella Worsham commissioned George A. Schastey & Co. to decorate her home on West 54th Street. Soon after completion, the mansion was sold to John D. Rockefeller, who later donated the interior of the house to museums around the US, so they can display how life was back in those golden days.

View of 4 West 54th Street, ca. 1864, looking south. © Rockefeller Archive Center

A private dressing room in an 1880s Manhattan townhouse might seem an unlikely place to consider the evolution of interior photography. Yet the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room as it became known, now on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together two closely connected creative acts: shaping an interior and making an image of it.

The room is a work of art in itself, we love stopping by on our visits to the Met. What makes it more exciting for us is that the rare surviving photographs of the house, dating from around 1883, give that art another life which closely relates to our own work at Pearl May Studio.

They show how the basic aesthetics and concepts of high-end interior photography have remained consistent since the early days of photography. Technology has changed and evolved, yet what was required of a 19th century real-estate photographer remained largely similar to our own times. And, similarly, they allow you to see well designed interiors within their original domestic setting, opening a view into spaces that very few people would have entered.

For us as interior photographers, that relationship is the most compelling part of the story.

The Room as a Complete Work of Art

Some necessary background: around 1881–82, Arabella Worsham built her dressing room to reflect the Aesthetic movement’s belief that artistic consideration should extend throughout everyday surroundings.

Within this approach, a room could be conceived as a complete composition. Architecture, furniture, textiles, and ornaments were designed in relation to one another. Their combined effect mattered as much as the beauty of each individual piece.

The dressing room makes that idea tangible. Satinwood, purpleheart, and mother-of-pearl gave its surfaces depth and variation. Decorative motifs connected the furnishings to the architectural woodwork. Combs, mirrors, scissors, and jewelry appear in the marquetry, tying the ornament to the room’s purpose.

There is something intimate about that specificity. The decoration belongs to the activities of the person using the space: dressing, arranging her hair, selecting jewelry. Ordinary rituals become the subject of extraordinary craftsmanship.

Image: The Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room @metmuseum.org

An Interior with More Than One Timeline

Part of the room’s fascination today comes from understanding what has survived.

The woodwork, painted ceiling, and frieze are original and remain in superb condition. The stenciled walls and textiles have been reproduced from the original designs. What we encounter today at the Met museum, therefore, brings together surviving craftsmanship and the careful reconstruction of elements that were more vulnerable to time.

That distinction deepens the experience of looking. An interior contains materials that age at different rates. Wood, fabric, painted surfaces, and upholstery rarely arrive in the present equally intact.

The historical photographs offer another point of reference. They preserve an earlier arrangement of the house, allowing us to consider the rooms as furnished spaces connected to one another, before their transformation into museum interiors.

A View into a Private World

Although richly decorated, the dressing room was a private space accessible to only a few individuals. Its beauty belonged to a restricted domestic world.

Photography made that world visible beyond its walls. A photograph offers outside viewers a glimpse of a room they might never enter.

In the photograph of the library room from around 1883, the dressing room is partially visible through an adjoining doorway. That glimpse is especially evocative. We understand something of the home’s spatial sequence, and the dressing room becomes part of a larger environment. This is exactly the kind of image we would create for a client - a doorway in a photograph can convey a great deal. It establishes depth, connects spaces, and suggests what lies beyond the frame.

Right: Drawing Room at 4 West 54th Street, ca. 1883.  Left: Bedroom at 4 West 54th Street, ca. 1883 @metmuseum.org

Interior Photography, Then and Now

These photographs offer a useful way to think about the evolution of our field.

We should be careful about assigning them a purpose that has not been established. Yet we can recognize what they make possible: the study of furnishings, the reading of architectural details, and an understanding of how a particular household presents its surroundings.

Today, interior photographs circulate through property listings, design publications, portfolios, and social media. Their audiences and uses have expanded enormously. The visual challenge remains familiar: how do you translate a space into an image that someone else can understand?

A camera position determines whether adjoining rooms feel connected. Light affects whether ornament reads clearly or disappears into a surface. Framing establishes a hierarchy, guiding attention toward certain features while allowing others to recede.

Our team’s art education informs those decisions at Pearl May Studio. We look at an interior through composition, proportion, material, and rhythm, the same relationships that make the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room so rewarding to study.

What the Images Continue to Give Us

Most interiors we encounter online or in magazines remain known to us only through photographs. Here, we have the unusual opportunity to compare the photographic view with an experience of the room at The Met: to discover how its scale feels in person, how materials respond as we move, and which details the images encourage us to notice.

The museum installation cannot reproduce the entire original home. The photographs preserve its connections to adjoining rooms, while the surviving interior offers a physical encounter with its craftsmanship. Each expands our understanding of the other.

The original townhouse is now gone; Parts of its interiors survive, and the photographs preserve something further: how those rooms once belonged together.

Their value has grown with time. They help us understand an era’s taste, craftsmanship, and domestic arrangements while giving us an opportunity to reflect on photography itself.

A space once seen by very few people can now be examined by generations of viewers. That enduring access is one of interior photography’s most meaningful contributions: allowing a room, and the ideas embodied in it, to remain available to the eye long after its original world has changed. Yes, we have this in mind with every press of the shutter button.