Drawing Room, Speke Hall, Lancashire

Narcissa Thorne collected watercolors by Joseph Nash, including this one depicting a drawing room in Speke Hall, a historic house in Lancashire County in England. Thorne used works like this as inspiration for the Thorne Miniature Rooms. Unlike Thorne, Nash populated his watercolors with joyful figures enjoying cozy fires amid clutter suggesting relaxed, lived-in environments. Nash’s approach to these scenes, set some 200 years before his birth, was decidedly nostalgic: he referred to the 17th century as “the Olden Times” and applied a 19th century eye to the social interactions he imagined for the settings. He based some architectural elements off surviving examples, but others he took from Victorian restorations or adaptations of Renaissance interiors.