A Visit to Winterthur, the House Museum Par Excellence

The du Pont estate in Delaware might be old-time but the art is timeless.

O ne of my goals in writing for NR is to cover art in all 50 states, which no art critic has ever done. It’s a big country with high culture everywhere, sometimes in dollops, sometimes delivered in demitasse spoons but, still, there’s life even where we least expect it. This week, I’m passing the halfway mark — 26 states covered — in writing about Delaware’s Winterthur, the magnificent historic house near Wilmington in the Brandywine Valley. Delaware is a tiny, strange place, a mix of North and South, inbred, a corporate sanctum, and, worth noting as we approach America’s 250th anniversary, the first colony to ratify the Constitution. It’s our first state.

I hadn’t been to Winterthur in 30 years. Shame on me since the art and period rooms — mostly from the colonial and Federal periods — are the pinnacle of quality and elegance. Its pride and joy is its superb collection of American furniture but also American silver, ceramics, textiles, glass, and flat art such as paintings, prints, and maps.

Winterthur began as a farm for sheep and cattle started by Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, an up-and-coming chemist who started the du Pont fortune by making gunpowder. His great-grandson, Henry Francis du Pont (1880–1969), eventually owned the vastly expanded property, by his time an estate fit for a Gilded Age magnate. Winterthur is named after the Swiss city from which Éleuthère’s business partner and, later, du Pont in-law came to America.

While visiting Electra Havemeyer Webb in the 1920s at her Vermont farm, packed with antiques, Henry reveled particularly in her colonial American furniture. He’d always thought old American furniture was best used to fill kitchens and servants’ halls, but he saw in Webb’s things both craftsmanship and distinctly American flair, region by region. Who knows whether black flies and mosquitoes ate him up — that’s summer in Vermont — but we know he got bitten by the collecting bug. Winterthur opened to the public in 1951, but it and du Pont weren’t famous until he chaired the committee that advised Jacqueline Kennedy on the redecoration of the White House in the early 1960s. Then, Winterthur became a temple to historic American craft and design.

Much of du Pont’s collection, now some 90,000 objects, is displayed in 145 period rooms in the historic mansion and a separate, modern exhibition hall. Winterthur also has 1,000 acres of sculpted woods, pastures, trails, and gardens. I visited on a rainy day but took the garden tram through acres of azaleas, mountain laurels, and peonies. Winterthur is a research and teaching institution, too. Its graduate programs in art conservation and decorative arts are renowned.

The place is an astonishing creation. Du Pont, once smitten, knew no bounds. He bought the best. Learning from dealers and decorators, he became an authority as well as an adept hunter. He found a vast spiral staircase in a North Carolina plantation house, bought it, and installed it as he made the manor house into a museum. He was the landscape’s mastermind. He directed the layout of the period rooms. He was a man on a scholarly mission, and pedagogical and preservation missions as well.

The entrance to the house isn’t the original entrance, which is now a period room, but a conservatory packed with potted flowering plants over which soars a carved wooden, once gilded eagle with a 14-foot wingspan. He looks to have just landed, eager to dispossess visitors of food, open water bottles, and gum still being chewed. Winterthur is laid back but not for louts. The eagle is from the mid-19th century and once decorated a nail factory. It’s an impressive introduction. In we go.

The period rooms progress one by one, with visitors moving on a path roped off from the art. That’s fine. Nothing is in cases, so the experience is less mediated. And the rooms are human-scale. There are no labels, but each room is staffed by an attendant, armed with a thick binder describing esoterica object by object, able to answer questions.

There are dozens of individual showstoppers. A Philadelphia highboy from 1760 to 1780 for which du Pont outbid William Randolph Hearst is the supreme flower of American Chippendale, with silky mahogany, harmonious carving, and proportions that are both lissome and athletic. An exotic, lacquered, or japanned, highboy from Boston around 1750 is high chinoiserie and refutes whatever notions we have that Boston style, not far removed from Puritan days, was staid. Painted landscapes with pavilions and pagodas, fantastic animals, gilding, carved shells, and floral sprays give it a showy, sumptuous look.

Walls in a spacious room called the Chinese Parlor are covered with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper from the 1720s. It’s fantastic. The imagery is organized in three registers from floor to ceiling — the lowest are close-ups of buildings, above those are a landscape, and, parallel to the ceiling, mountain peaks.

Each room is a total work of art expressing a specific style like chinoiserie, Chippendale, heavy, mid-1600s Boston and North Shore style, Pennsylvania German, and, in the Du Pont Dining Room, a neoclassical, mostly 1780s style. There’s a bit of mix-and-match in each room. Du Pont wouldn’t buy a room and all its trimmings. He’d usually buy carved moldings, paneling, and cabinets — a historic room’s walls — and then fill it with furniture, textiles, porcelain, and silver, all the best, from the same decade. The Stamper-Blackwell Parlor came from a Philadelphia home that was built in the 1760s. Its fireplace mantle and moldings were carved in exuberant garlands and dense landscapes by up-to-date London craftsmen who’d moved to Philadelphia for its high-end home-construction boom.

In the Du Pont Dining Room, in 1780s neoclassical style, the furniture stars. Covering a New York sideboard are silver tankards made by Paul Revere, urn-shaped knife boxes, and restrained Chinese Export porcelain. On the wall above it hangs Benjamin West’s unfinished group portrait of the American commissioners, among them Benjamin Franklin, who led the negotiations with the British in Paris that would free the colonies.

Period rooms in museums are an acquired — and I’m sad to say, fading — taste, but I like them. In du Pont’s time, they were de rigueur, but Baby Boomers and the subsequent IKEA generations, as a cohort, don’t comprehend intricacy, craft, style, and history, and many among them yawn at dead-white-man art collected and assembled by a rich, dead white man. You’d think people would want to learn about good taste. Each room has flower arrangements to warm them up, as will the patina of old furniture, antique carpets, characterful colors, and period-appropriate window treatments. Is the look persnickety? It’s lovely, but the place ought to be experienced in intervals and with subsequent study.

The rooms at Winterthur were never meant for day-to-day living. Du Pont designed them for museum display. He and his family moved out of the house before it opened to the public. Rooms might seem a tad packed, but the rooms in my house are warrens, so they looked fine to me. Of course, at Winterthur we don’t see the stuff of everyday life like dozing cats and dogs, pet toys, piles of books and magazines, random mail, shoes, messy cords, or blankets for impromptu naps.

Winterthur has a lively temporary-exhibition program. Almost Unknown: The Afric-American Picture Gallery is its unusual, new exhibition inspired by an essay by William J. Wilson published in 1859 by the Anglo-African Magazine, a black intellectual magazine based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Wilson, a free black journalist, created a black character named Ethiop who gives us a tour through the first, though imaginary, museum of black-themed art in America. Using objects from Winterthur’s collection and channeling Wilson, Almost Unknown takes us into America’s free as well as slave life in antebellum America.

It’s not a bad exhibition. It’s an intelligent, sensitive reiteration — freedom’s good, slavery’s bad — and an intense design experience. Each small gallery displays a handful of objects, sometimes only one, along with text from Wilson’s essay. A French textile from the 1830s, possibly made into wallpaper, illustrates the many steps in the slave trade. Ethiop tells us that the slave ship has no better friend and companion than Satan, and I can’t say he’s wrong.

Wilson’s imaginary museum isn’t linear, and Almost Unknown isn’t entirely an art show. It’s more precise than impressionistic. The exhibition jumps next to “the first and last colored editor in America,” about black newspaper and magazine editors in the 1850s, one of whom moves to Ontario. Then it move on to Crispus Attucks, who was the first American killed in the Revolutionary War, the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, slave catchers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Phyllis Wheatley. Here and there, Almost Unknown is a curatorial flight of fancy. Wilson’s essay, for example, never mentioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

There are about 25 stops on Ethiop’s tour. Some are far-fetched. The view of the Smoky Mountains by Robert Duncanson, a black Hudson River School painter, is pretty but doesn’t convey “a distinctly black way of marking, interpreting, and reclaiming space.” On view alongside a copper slave badge from 1819 is a pastel self-portrait of John Singleton Copley, who owned slaves and needs a comeuppance for it.

George Washington takes it on the chin for owning slaves. These passages put me in a “but, but, but” frame of mind. They’re among the moments when the curator needed to set Wilson and Ethiop straight.

Many spots on Ethiop’s tour launch a good look at the many slices of black thinking in Wilson’s time. Should American blacks return to Africa? How could slaves leave an impression on the world as individuals? Can free black societies and conventions make a difference? How could educated, middle-class blacks combat anti-black anxieties in the North? What’s the future for young blacks?

Almost Unknown doesn’t work for museum saunterers. It demands close looking and thinking. The voices of Wilson, Ethiop, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wheatley, and the curator, among others, need to be parsed and absorbed. The exhibition’s design might be an impediment. Dramatic contrasts of light and dark, high-end graphics, fancy cases, and lots of text compete and, here and there, overwhelm the message.

As viewers, we have 150 years of hindsight, too, and that’s a complication. Praise the Lord, the hate group and grifters Black Lives Matter get only one short mention. That’s still one mention too many.

I loved On Tour: Lafayette, America’s Revolutionary Rock Star, a small exhibition focusing on the French marquis’s trip through the United States in 1824 and 1825, exactly 50 years after his decisive help during the Revolution’s darkest days. It’s instructive as well as fun since so much of the show involves souvenir development related to Lafayette’s visit. In-depth displays of Winterthur’s Staffordshire, Chinese Export porcelain, and soup tureens are worth a visit to Winterthur in themselves. The furniture study gallery is the beacon light of clarity and depth as it plumbs the differences among William and Mary, Queen Anne, Chippendale, Sheraton, Hepplewhite, Federal, and Empire styles through chairs, chests, tables, and clock cases.

Winterthur’s website needs a thorough overhaul. The online database of the collection didn’t work at first — Winterthur’s fault, not mine — but once shot up with formaldehyde, it came to life. It’s being replaced soon. The website’s bare-bones orientation is toward visitors, but Winterthur is a scholarly institution, and the website is not much help if you want to learn anything serious. The staff I met are, without exception, helpful and nice. Though two floors’ worth of the period rooms in the house are open, three are closed except for special, focused tours. I don’t know whether or not this is a staffing issue. The focused tours by docents, booked in advance and limited to a few people, cover topics such as ceramics, textiles, and glass. I would have gone on the “Chamber Pots and Other Necessities” tour but didn’t have time, alas. Frequent trams take visitors from the visitor center to the historic house and the exhibition hall.

Winterthur is a du Pont proposition, so going hungry isn’t an option. Its endowment is north of $400 million, but, between the garden and landscape and the period rooms, it’s labor-intensive. The place gets about 100,000 visitors a year. It will probably benefit from the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and the buzz surrounding colonial America, the Revolution, and the republic’s early days. The 1619 Project nincompoops will try to ruin the party, but it won’t work. They seem more and more like drooling husks each day. I knew very little about the Brandywine Valley but it’s thick with heritage. Near Winterthur are the Brandywine Museum of Art, a Wyeth trove; Nemours, another du Pont house museum; Longwood Gardens; and the Hagley Museum, which covers the history of the chemical company. Is this competition for Winterthur? Possibly, but for me it just means I’m coming back. I was at Winterthur for only a few hours. There’s lots more to see there and in the neighborhood.