Le Petit Salon : The journey of an 18th Century room from Paris to Vermont

Exhibition at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, 8 July–7 December 2025

Over the past three decades, the petit salon – a magnificent Louis XVI-style painted décor created by royal architect Pierre Adrien Pâris around 1776 – has been neglected in the storerooms of the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Vermont. Originally intended for the Duke of Aumont, a great connoisseur and patron of pre-revolutionary France, it was later donated to Middlebury College in the 1950s by Susan Dwight Bliss when she put various decorative elements from her family's Manhattan mansion up for sale.

This exhibition catalogue recreates the small salon in its original form for the first time in 120 years and presents its history and evolution, tracing its various transformations over time, from 19th-century Paris to its arrival at Middlebury College, via New York's Gilded Age.