Introduction - Winterthur

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2002 by Leslie Greene Bowman

The Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Winterthur, Delaware (see Pl. II), has enthralled collectors and delighted the public for fifty years. In honor of our founding in October 1951, our anniversary festivities continue through the spring of this year. We are honored by this special issue of The Magazine ANTIQUES, and welcome this opportunity to showcase our progress in collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting the arts made or used in America between 1640 and 1860. In this issue we share fresh insights into the collecting achievements of our founder, Henry Francis du Pont (Pl. I), and we present new acquisitions and research since his death. We also launch a new vision to build upon our excellence and to provide ongoing inspiration to visitors for the next fifty years.

Born at Winterthur in 1880, Henry Francis du Pont, also known as H. F. or Harry, was the third generation of du Ponts to dwell on the grounds. He was the great-grandson of the DuPont Company's founder, Eleu-there Irenee du Pont de Nemours (1771-1834). Winterthur had once been part of E. I. du Pont's estate, and was split off to become a farm for his daughter, Evelina Gabrielle (1796-1863) and son-in-law, Jacques Antoine Bidermann (1790-1865). They named it for Bidermann's ancestral home in Switzerland. By the time H. F. du Pont inherited the property from his father, Henry Algernon du Pont (1838-1926), the acreage had been expanded from the original 450 acres to 2400.

Young Harry grew up in a decidedly formal and European atmosphere (see Fig. 1), like others of his social class. An undistinguished student, he did not take a serious interest in his studies until he discovered horticulture and agriculture courses at Harvard University's Bussey Institution. (1) He first revealed a penchant for design when he became involved with his father's project to remodel and expand the house at Winterthur in 1902. That fall his mother, Mary Pauline Foster (1849-1902), died--a devastating loss that caused him to give up plans for graduate study and return home in 1903 to manage his father's house. When the elder du Pont was elected to the United States Senate in 1906, he gradually transferred management duties to his son, until by 1914, H. F. was in charge of the entire estate, including the considerable agricultural enterprises of Winterthur Farms. H. F. set about improving the Winterthur herd of dairy cattle.

In 1916 he married Ruth Wales (1889-1967) of New York City in an elaborate ceremony in Hyde Park, New York. Although they maintained other residences, the couple made their home at Winterthur, and H. F. continued to oversee the interior decoration. His taste remained European until he was in his early forties, when he first took notice of American antiques.

In 1923, while visiting Electra Havemayer Webb at Shelburne, Vermont, he was struck by the colors and simple design of an eighteenth-century New England pine dresser filled with pink and white Staffordshire ceramics (Pl. III). The dresser might not have sparked an outright conversion had its discovery not been quickly followed by a visit to the house of Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934), Beauport, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. There he found the inspiration for the Winterthur we know today--rooms of early architecture decorated with American antiques. With Sleeper's assistance, H. F. set out to build his own version at Chestertown House, his summer residence at Southampton, New York. (2) The cultural climate was conducive. In 1924 the American Wing opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 1926 John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874-1960) began the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia. When Henry Algernon du Pont died late in December 1926, leaving Winterthur to his son, the re was no longer any question about what H. F. intended to do with the family home.

Thus began Henry Francis du Pont's legendary pursuit of American arts that continued unabated for the rest of his life. By 1929 he had begun a huge addition to Winterthur that dwarfed the family homestead, all to present his growing collection of early American architecture and furnishings. As early as 1930 he considered turning the house into a museum. In 1948 he began construction of another residence on the estate, and early in 1951, he gave the last dinner party in his boyhood home and moved out. The Winterthur Museum was born.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, thanks to the generosity of Henry Francis du Pont's cousin-in-law H. Rodney Sharp (1880-1968), Winterthur acquired a group of historic buildings in the small tidewater town of Odessa, Delaware, south of Wilmington. (3) Odessa contained some of Delaware's most important eighteenth-century Georgian architecture (see Pl. V), and it offered something H.F. could never achieve at Winterthur--a village intact on its original site. Odessa's charm and history continue to attract and fascinate visitors today.

Du Pont collected voraciously throughout his life and adapted spaces in his former residence accordingly. The bowling alley became a lane of shop fronts and the squash court a town square flanked by the facades of four early American buildings. He continually improved the period rooms, upgrading a furniture form, acquiring the perfect object or textile to accompany a color scheme, or creating a vignette of historical as well as artistic significance. Even in his final instructions to his directors and executors, he listed elusive objects and comments on where to install them if acquired.