The gracefully painted, paneled room made in the 18th century for a Parisian mansion, Le Petit Salon, debuted at the Middlebury College Museum of Art on July 8. The exhibition will run until Dec. 7.
Designed by French architect Pierre-Adrien Pâris, the exhibition displays a set of wooden carved panels from a Parisian interior belonging to the Duke of Aumont. The artifacts landed in New York City during the Gilded Age and were gifted to Middlebury in 1959 by Susan Dwight Bliss when she put pieces from her family's Manhattan mansion up for sale.
This is the first time the room has been reassembled in three decades. The panels were once displayed in Le Château but have been held in storage since the 1990s. The exhibition also includes loans from Bowdoin College, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Fine Arts Museum of Besançon.
Gabriel Wick, a Paris-based historian and a professor at the NYU Paris campus, curated the exhibit. He also published a catalog in July, which traces the transformation of the salon from France to New York and, ultimately, Middlebury.
Museum Interim Director Katy Smith Abbott and Josephine Rodgers, curator of collections and director of engagement at the museum, worked to bring the exhibition to life alongside Wick. The museum’s Sabarsky Graduate Fellow, Eloise McFarlane '24.5, has also dedicated her time to researching the exhibit and providing insightful tours to the Middlebury community.
“Le Petit Salon is special in the way that it transports us to another time and place entirely. Rarely do you get to engage with works in a museum in such an immersive way. When you physically step into the room, it’s like a portal from rural Vermont to 18th-century France,” McFarlane wrote in an email to The Campus.
The exhibition runs in tandem with the 100 year anniversary of the Château. Modeled on the Pavillon Henri IV at Le Château de Fontainebleau near Paris, it was the first “maison française” in the country, a house where students pledged to speak only French. It now houses the Lois ’51 and J. Harvey Watson Department of French and Francophone Studies, faculty offices, a theater for foreign language productions, classrooms, and student housing.
The Department of French and Francophone Studies will host a celebration on Saturday, Sept. 27, which will include visits to the Le Petit Salon exhibition. McFarlane will give tours in both French and English, as she did this past summer.
“We hosted an event for art history students in the French Language School, which was awesome. I led a tour in French, which was followed by a letter-writing event. I love when museum visits are paired with a hands-on component,” McFarlane wrote.
The exhibition has come within the first few months of Smith Abbott’s new role as interim director. She began her tenure on March 3, bringing a bright and passionate presence to the museum.
In an interview with McFarlane this past May, Smith Abbott expressed a desire to focus on outreach within the Middlebury community.
“While it is an art museum, I hope that it’s a place where people come expecting various forms of cross-disciplinary inquiry. I think a lot about how we can be invitational to students who aren’t taking art history classes or don’t think of themselves as ‘artsy.’ I would like to make the museum a place where all students want to spend time, where they meet up with friends or expect to bump into faculty they know from other disciplines,” she said.
The Le Petit Salon exhibition has done just that: It has fostered a connection across departmental lines, allowing an interdisciplinary conversation between the arts and languages.
Julia Breckenridge ‘25.5 visited the exhibition over the summer. As an art history major and French minor, she appreciated the intersection of the two disciplines she studies.
“Hopefully, it can be the start of more collaboration between the arts and the languages, because I think that's something that Middlebury's kind of losing. It's our root, language, and art, and there's such a focus on STEM right now, that I'm excited by this collaboration,” she said.
Maya Alexander ‘26 (she/her) is an Editor at Large.
She is a sociology major and intended French minor from New York City. She loves getting lost in her Pinterest feed and staging spontaneous photoshoots, occasional yoga and a solid iced oat milk maple latte.
