Today we went to the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.
It’s a few miles across the Delaware/Pennsylvania line so we were able to check
off our final eastern state. Winterthur, pronounced “winter-tour,” was
named after the ancestral Swiss home of Jacques Antoine Bidermann who, along
with his wife Evelina DuPont, built the first house there in 1816 on 450 acres
of land they bought from her father. Evelina was the daughter of E. I.
DuPont who emigrated from France in 1800 with his parents. He founded E.
I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., manufacturer of gunpowder, which started the
family fortune. Jacques and Evelina’s son sold the estate to Evelina’s
brother General Henry DuPont. The general’s son Henry Algernon inherited
the estate which then went to Henry Francis in 1926.
Early spring picture from Winterthur’s website.
There’s no way to capture the entire house in one picture…..it’s just too
big. This is just one end of it.
The only picture I could get of the house as we passed by on
the garden tram tour.
Winterthur is an incredible place. It was the lifelong
home of Henry Francis DuPont (called Harry) (1880-1969),
horticulturist/collector/philanthropist, and one of the incredibly wealthy
heirs of the DuPont fortune. When he was a young man he started planning for
the day when he would give his estate and collections to the public in the form
of a non-profit organization with endowment to keep it going. With this
in mind he added over 100 rooms to an already huge house for the sole purpose
of turning it into a museum. The rooms were filled with his collections
of antiques, everything pertaining to American art and life from about 1640 to
1860……furniture, china, silverware, metal works, paintings, carpets, etc.
The house now contains 175 rooms. Not every one of
them is a regular room……as long as it has a single piece of furniture it’s
considered a room so it might actually be no bigger than a hallway or
alcove. Some of the ones we saw were very large though. He
collected pieces from all the original 13 states, not just the furnishings but
paneling and other fixtures as well. One of the staircases is from an
early 19th century house in North Carolina.
Harry and his family lived in the museum until he was ready
to turn it over to the public. They had certain rooms they actually lived
in and the rest were devoted to his collections. In other words, no one
sat in the chairs in the display rooms. The three rooms we saw that they
lived in looked just like the display rooms. When they were ready to open
the house to the public in 1951 they moved to a smaller house they built near
the big house which now contains the Museum Shop and Café. “The Cottage,”
which was their way of downsizing, had only 30 rooms (with 13 bathrooms).
The DuPonts had been farmers and botanists for several
generations and Harry inherited this love for the land. He was an
accomplished horticulturist and farmer who did all sorts of experimental
farming and gardening. His goal was to improve production and quality in
whatever he was working on whether it was plants or animals. On his
honeymoon he and his wife traveled around the country looking at and buying the
very best Holstein-Friesian cows he could find. His dairy operation with
his “collected cows” was extremely successful, producing far more milk and
cream per cow than any other dairy. Most of the milk and cream produced
in the U.S. today comes from Holstein-Friesians who are descendants of the
DuPont herd.
Magnificent old Japanese cutleaf maple. Nothing is
planted on the estate that wasn’t there when Harry was alive. They
rejuvenate things by planting cuttings and seeds taken from the existing
plants.
Entrance to the museum galleries on the right and house tour
on the left.
I didn’t get any pictures while we were touring the
house. There are several different house tours but we had time to take
only the introductory tour. This would be a wonderful place to visit
regularly if we lived close enough. There’s a big difference between the
non-profit Winterthur and the very-much-for-profit Biltmore. Winterthur’s
yearly membership is only $65 while Biltmore’s is about $160. Biltmore is
much bigger and has a very different atmosphere. It’s also way more
crowded, although Winterthur apparently can get that way as they had thousands
of visitors when they had the Downton Abbey costume collection on display.
Like most museums they have traveling exhibits. We
were very lucky to be here now to see the Tiffany glass exhibit organized by
the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass in New York. We’ve seen the
Tiffany collection in Winter Park, Florida, but these were different
pieces. Besides, there’s no such thing as seeing too much Tiffany
glass.
Wisteria library lamp - the only piece in a glass case.
Lotus Pagoda library lamp, a design I’ve never seen before.
Begonia reading lamp.
Tropical Landscape window.
They also had several forgeries on display with explanations
of how to tell them apart from the real thing. I don’t expect to ever
stumble over a genuine Tiffany out in the real world but it was very
interesting to see the differences pointed out…..just in case…..
There was no way to squeeze in another place either
yesterday or today so we’re going to stay here one more day and go to Longwood
Gardens tomorrow. We got lucky once again in being able to stay in our
site for another night. This place will start filling up Thursday with “Pope
Peepers” (the KOA host’s name for the hordes of people who are here to try to
catch a glimpse of Pope Francis). Philly is going nuts over his visit,
closing 25 miles of roads in the city. Good thing we hadn’t planned to
see anything downtown.
If all goes well we should get home on Friday.
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