Le Petit Salon: The Journey of an Eighteenth-Century Room from Paris to Vermont

The Middlebury College Museum of Art will reassemble Le Petit Salon, an 18th-century French neoclassical paneled room designed by Pierre-Adrien Pâris in 1776 for the duc d’Aumont’s Parisian mansion. Gifted to the college in 1959 by Susan Dwight Bliss, the room had been in storage since the 1990s. The exhibition, running from July 8 to December 6, 2025, traces the room’s journey from Paris to Manhattan—where it decorated the Bliss family’s Gilded Age mansion for fifty years—and finally to Middlebury, where it became part of Le Château, the college’s French language dormitory. The show also features Pâris’s original watercolor elevations and studies from his time in Rome and Naples, with loans from Bowdoin College, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Fine Arts Museum of Besançon.