Sign and Symbol: The Cranbrook House Oak Room Cartouches

ABOUT THE EVENT 
This holiday season, experience Cranbrook House in a new, festive way, as we explore a century of history painted onto the walls of the magnificent Oak Room. In a virtual lecture broadcast live from the home of Cranbrook’s founders George and Ellen Booth, Center Curator Kevin Adkisson will introduce you and your family to the events commemorated by the hand-painted Oak Room cartouches. 

Completed twelve years after the family moved into Cranbrook House, the Oak Room served as a place for the growing extended Booth family to play, listen to music, and celebrate the holidays. The first time the Booths used the Oak Room was Christmas night, 1920.  

Two years later, son Henry Scripps Booth found himself reminiscing about important events that had taken place in the room while admiring the beautiful wood paneling, carved by woodcarver John Kirchmayer. These linen-fold panels are topped with decorative shields, or cartouches, that encircle the entire room.  

Gathering his painting supplies, Henry painted five cartouches to commemorate special events. These first cartouche paintings marked the wedding of his brother, Warren; a surprise birthday party for his mother; an engagement dinner for a dear cousin; an outing at Cranbrook for local disabled children thrown by his sister, Florence; and, with a twinkling Christmas Tree, that first Christmas celebrated in the Oak Room. 

The Booth family, and later, Cranbrook Educational Community, have continued the tradition of commemorating significant events through paintings on the Oak Room Cartouches. From family weddings and birthdays in the 1920s and 1930s, to important conferences and artistic gatherings in the 1960s, the formation of the Cranbrook House and Gardens Auxiliaries in the 1970s, and up to the construction of the Woodward Avenue Entrance in the 1990s, the cartouches are a story book way to learn the history of Cranbrook. 

^{PHOTO CREDITS}
_{Cartouches in the Cranbrook House Oak Room, 2019. Photograph by Eric Franchy. Cranbrook House & Gardens Auxiliary.}

_{Cartouche commemorating the first Christmas Tree in the Oak Room in December 1920, painted by Henry Scripps Booth in 1922.  Photograph by Eric Franchy. Cranbrook House & Gardens Auxiliary.}

_{The Oak Room decorated for Home for the Holidays at Cranbrook House Virtual Tour, December 2020. Photograph by Daniel Smith, CAA Architecture 2021. Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research.}

_{Cartouche commemorating the Woodward Access Road and Entrance Feature, painted circa 1994.  Photograph by Eric Franchy. Cranbrook House & Gardens Auxiliary.}

_{Portraits of Ellen Scripps Booth and George Gough Booth hanging beneath cartouches in the Oak Room, December 2020. Photograph by Daniel Smith, CAA Architecture 2021. Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research.}

_{Cartouches commemorating the formation of Cranbrook Gardens Auxiliary in 1971 and the Cranbrook House Auxiliary in 1974, painted circa 1975.  Photograph by Eric Franchy. Cranbrook House & Gardens Auxiliary.}