Dueling identities: the influence of the family on the Winterthur Museum

Abstract

Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969) spent his life assembling one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, collection of American decorative arts. In the process, he turned his family home, Winterthur. into a museum. But what was this home? This thesis focuses on the private house, in particular, the 1902 architectural transformation, when it was changed from a Greek Revival villa into a Gilded Age country place. ☐ This 1902 experience acquainted young H. F. du Pont with the possibilities of architectural transformation, and the theoretically limitless world of period room decoration. Du Pont came of age just as an intense architectural competition ignited between his father and his father's siblings, two of whom owned important historical houses, Washington Irving's Sunnyside and President James Monroe's Montpelier. In 1902, Montpelier and Sunnyside contained nascent period rooms, domestic shrines devoted to the house's illustrious former inhabitants. In a parallel development, as the du Pont family acquired greater wealth and social status at the turn of the century, their own domestic relics became highly valued heirlooms. This complex turn-of-the-century history of architecture, family and material possessions have bearing on the current museum: its' location, physical size, and parameters of the collection.