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.
This exhibition matters because it restores public access to a rare, intact example of French neoclassical interior design that has been hidden from view for decades. It also illuminates the transatlantic journey of a complete period room—a genre of art-historical object that bridges aristocratic French patronage, Gilded Age American collecting, and the educational mission of a liberal arts college. By reuniting the panels with Pâris’s original architectural drawings, the show offers a holistic view of the designer’s vision and the room’s layered history, making it a significant event for scholars of 18th-century decorative arts, museum studies, and the history of collecting.