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The Jewels and the Crown by Leslie Greene Bowman (as presented on September 22, 2001)
Good evening. I hope you have noticed a different Winterthur over the past two days. If we had convened before Labor Day you would have been bowled over by children, thanks to the success of Enchanted Woods. I am probably the first director at Winterthur to hear children daily outside my window this summer, even up on the 6th floor. You have also noticed, we have a new epithet--an American Country Estate. I hope you wandered into the new galleries devoted to our collection's strengths--recent acquisitions, a style gallery, furniture, textiles, and paintings and prints. I'm sorry the ceramics, glass and metalwork installments are not yet open, but perhaps that will entice you to come back in November. You may have noticed that some of our new signage is in place; we have a new 2-day ticket and a much more exciting selection of tours, a new visitors guide, a new design for the Winterthur Magazine, a new estate tour, and a new exhibitions program that over the next few years includes Myer Myers silver, Allen sisters photography, great country estate gardens, and decorative arts of viceregal Mexico. And we have also established a new professorship, … More about that at our annual meeting. And there's more to come….a dedicated issue of Antiques magazine in January, the first-ever Winterthur loan show to the Winter Antiques Show in New York, a travelling ceramics exhibit to the Ceramics Fair in London, and a huge first-a major exhibition of 300 of our masterworks at the National Gallery of Art next summer, the grand finale to our 50th anniversary, entitled, An American Vision: Henry Francis du Pont's Winterthur Museum. We are now considering invitations to send that show out on a national tour in 2005 to 2006. As you have undoubtedly deduced, this isn't just an anniversary. When we set out to plan for our birthday, we had a much bigger goal in mind, we wanted to launch our future. It was time for a new long range plan. We looked at our biggest challenges and came up with some answers that have already changed Winterthur. What were the challenges? There were the usual suspects: audience and revenue. We needed more of both. Then there was the physical plant that needed attention, only in our case it wasn't the main buildings, thankfully those have been attended to, it was a 1000-acre estate and all its agricultural buildings. How can we afford to maintain the barns, and what are we going to do with them? What about all this land? We have 100 buildings and eleven miles of paved road…. There was also the Winterthur culture, a bit inflexible, and fragmented among departments. But the biggest challenge eclipsed all the others for me, and in answering that, I felt we could answer the other concerns. The elephant standing in the parlor, that the guests were politely pretending not to notice, was that Winterthur had an identity problem. What is Winterthur? You've answered the question for years. A museum, with a great library, and a conservation laboratory, and a wonderful garden, and graduate programs. Oh come on, we all know it's really a catalog company! When I arrived two years ago and began interviewing every trustee, every manager, and every division, I was stunned with how often they asked that very question, "What is Winterthur?" The staff wanted a shared identity, not a university campus of departments. The public insists on one. Winterthur needed an identity, something to unify it, catalyze it, excite audiences and attract financial support. Winterthur has many jewels, but it needed a crown to present them to advantage. Ever the curator, I began to do some research. Here's what I discovered. What is Winterthur? Something quite unique in the mid-Atlantic corridor; and one of only a handful left in the country. I'd venture to say that Winterthur is the greatest surviving example of its kind in the nation, certainly among public examples. There are plenty of other museums, gardens and libraries, though none perhaps as glorious as ours. Yet there are precious few American country estates of the caliber that Winterthur once was--and still is today. So few that most people don't even understand the term, much less the real thing when they drive through our gates. Certainly they understand that this was once a rich man's home, but I don't think they understand the tradition or history of the country house, and what Winterthur was in its prime. A country house was not simply a mansion on lots of land. Ahh it was so much more…. When H. F. du Pont set about managing the family home and lands, he was imitating a time-honored British model, and one that was by the 1920's, in crisis. His love of history extended beyond collecting American antiques; he sought to preserve an agrarian way of life that was in twilight, thanks to the very industrial revolution that had brought his family enormous wealth. For centuries in Europe it was land that had provided sustenance, conveyed title and social stature, and governed one's way of life. The manor house was the most visible symbol of an entire agricultural community that supported hundreds of people--a community that consisted of a collection of farms and holdings that provided for the lord and his family as well as all the farm workers and craftsmen on the estate. But the great English country house was much more than a sustainable agricultural enterprise--it was also the cultural nucleus of its community. So much so that by the 18th century, tourism to country houses had become a well established phenomenon. The housekeeper usually served as tour guide, compensated by tips, a lucrative occupation if you worked at one of the great properties. Horace Walpole wrote to the Countess of Ossory in 1783 that his housekeeper Margaret made such sums of money from showing his estate, Strawberry Hill, "that I have a mind to marry her, and so repay myself for what I have flung away to make my house quite uncomfortable to me." H. F. knew enough to move out and build another home, you see. But don't forget it was H. F.'s butler Maurice who often took guests around in the early years. If you read Walpole's printed conditions for obtaining tickets to visit Strawberry Hill in the eighteenth century, you will find them remarkably close to the procedures in place at Winterthur in the early years--groups of four by advance reservation, and no children. H. F. had a copy of Walpole's conditions; you can read them yourself in the Life at Winterthur exhibition. So in the 18th century it was the housekeeper who pointed out the five key cultural attractions of a great country house: its history (all the better if it included important personages or colorful incidents); its architecture; its lands, particularly the parks and gardens; fourth, its art collections; and, finally, its all-important library. These five distinctions validated the gentility, learning, and most importantly taste, of the manor lord. What the 18th-century tourist hoped most to gain from visiting British country houses was a heightened sense of taste. I wonder if it wasn't taste as much as history that du Pont hoped to teach…
Winterthur had land as well, but H. F.and his father added much more. It was Harry who "improved upon nature," creating parks by sculpting the hills and ponds into a romantic landscape straight from the notebooks of 18th-century English landscape architect Capability Brown. Closer to the house he perfected the gardens. Between 1927 and 1931 he spent the astronomical sum of $1.8 million on the gardens. Now what about architecture? Winterthur lacked great historic architecture, but Harry overcame this shortcoming by acquiring it by the truckload, and installing it room by room in the huge addition that spilled down the hillside. As for art collections, no problem there. For Mr. du Pont it wasn't Canalettos but Americana. And in case you are wondering how to link the Galleries building from 1992 into the country estate rubric, remember that great country houses frequently had dedicated art galleries. Not unlike the English country lord, H. F. also established an important library. Harry could have stopped there. His counterpart in California did. Henry E. Huntington was quite content to assemble architecture, art, gardens, and library. But Henry Francis du Pont was determined to make Winterthur a true country estate, which is to say, a working agricultural enterprise, a sustainable community. That very conscious decision was a remarkable act in the early 20th century, one considered crazy by some and heroic by others. And while Harry was systematically guiding and improving his farming operations, building new barns, testing milk production, and developing new theories of breeding, his counterparts in England were in desperate straits trying to save their family lands. Between 1918 and 1945, which coincides almost exactly with the period of Winterthur's greatest growth, 450 country houses were destroyed in Britain. Countless more were drained of their lands, their precious art collections, and their libraries to pay death duties--a circumstance humorously characterized in a 1947 cartoon from Punch in which the lord threatens his son, "This is my last warning Charles. If you do not mend your ways I shall leave the estate to you instead of the National Trust!" The dismemberment of the English country estate had begun, and we can be certain that H. F. was keenly aware of it. The surviving Englsih country house had become a monument to a way of life no longer possible in early 20th-century Britain. Harry du Pont was determined to demonstrate that it could still be lived in America, and prove it he did. At its height Winterthur was workplace or home to more than 250 people who tended the orchards, vegetable gardens, greenhouses, sheep, horse, turkey, chicken, hog and beef cattle farms, and of course the star operation, the dairy farm. In this last enterprise, Mr. Du Pont's prowess was equal to his vision in collecting Americana. In 1919 he paid $70,000 for six beauties, four bulls and two cows, the foundation of his herd. Quite a price when you consider it was only ten years later, in 1929 that he paid the stratospheric record price of $44,000 for the Van Pelt highboy. He created what many believe was the finest dairy herd in America, and pioneered new procedures and technologies to increase the herd's milk production. He so improved the Holstein breed that today it is virtually the only breed for commercial dairy herds, and most of the important bloodlines of the breed trace back to Winterthur stock. Henry Francis du Pont did more than found the greatest museum of its kind in the nation. He did more than create an outstanding naturalistic garden. He did more than establish one of the most important libraries and graduate programs in America. All of these achievements were part of a much larger vision. Du Pont created the greatest American country estate, one of the few on par with British examples, nearly all of which had evolved over generations. This is why Jackie Kennedy remarked in amazement, "I just can't believe that it was possible for anyone to ever do such a thing!" In its time Winterthur had few counterparts, today there are none that can approach the quality of its achievements. Only Shelburne and Biltmore come close, and they do not compete in the caliber of collections. Sadly, H. F. knew that the agricultural operations would not be sustainable after his death. And he was right. Even his beloved garden, for a time, went untended. The great country estate gave up its resources to fund a prestigious museum, library, and graduate program. And predictably Winterthur's identity followed suit. The herds were sold, the barns stood empty. The name Winterthur, once monumental in the dairy industry, came to connote a world-class museum. It is only in the last decade that the garden has been retrieved to assume equal billing with the museum and the library.
The exhibition Life at Winterthur: Henry Francis du Pont's American Country Estate isn't just our 50th anniversary celebration. We hope someday it is an orientation exhibition in a visitor center. We have begun a guided estate tour to accompany the exhibition. The new ticket structure also has new tours… "Elegant Entertaining," "Private Spaces, Gaming Places." These are not just decorative arts tours-they now also interpret the man and his family and how Winterthur was used as a home. They also help the visitor understand that most of our rooms are not accurate period rooms. They are great colonial revival interpretations. For the die-hard collectors we have revived and expanded our special subject tours, now called "Study Visas" 2-hour, intensive doses of whatever aspect of the collection you crave. The new signage, when it is complete, will include heritage markers on all the significant buildings, so that visitors walking around the estate will understand the meaning of the butler's house, the creamery, the coach house, and the cottage. By making Winterthur an American country estate, we have put Mr. du Pont and his Winterthur back into our Winterthur. And in doing so, we have addressed our other challenges. Our audiences have responded enthusiastically to the new dimensions that the estate vision offers. Our donors have also embraced it-with more than 5 million dollars for new initiatives separate from operating support in the last year. The staff is excited. We have a common purpose and vision. In a first-ever board retreat this past winter the trustees crafted a 25-year vision of Winterthur in which they unanimously committed to our new identity as a country estate. They approved embarking on the first-ever estate wide master plan to help us figure out how to use the land and the agricultural structures, and they adopted a set of strategic initiatives, one of which was a resounding commitment to build on our excellence-the same excellence that fostered all of our careers. During that retreat we allowed ourselves to dream about what Winterthur could look like in 25 years. What if? Here's a description of a day at Winterthur in 2026:
Joggers and walkers enhance the recreational picture as the visitor approaches the woods. A cyclist is silhouetted briefly on the brow of a hill. This is a private park--a supposition confirmed by the glimpse of rustic picnic tables tucked into the trees. This is a wildlife refuge, with deer, fox, geese, wood ducks, blue birds, egrets and eagles…. This is a truly remarkable place. From the entry drive the visitor turns into the woods and mounts a hill to park alongside a captivating historical farmscape. Like the masts of a great steamship, two towering silos draw the eye upward; they are the focal architecture of an enormous barn, now a bustling visitor center. The farmyard around the center is a colorful throng of families and tourists, joggers, bus groups and shoppers. A child wielding an ice cream cone darts out of the old creamery and races his sister to the old test barn, where animals still reside. From the vantage point of Farm Hill, the guest glimpses more farm buildings, and far below, a many-storied mansion. The
visitor center offers a fascinating exhibit and multi-media
orientation to Winterthur, a great American country estate.
The words "country estate" gain new meaning; the history of
the du Pont family unfolds; a small boy grows up at
Winterthur; his profound love and vision result in a grand
design that integrates farms and parks with gardens,
interiors and collections. His uncompromising commitment to
excellence results in legacies of art, education,
preservation, horticulture and agriculture, each of national
significance, and The visitor center is also the departure point for a series of electrically powered shuttles offering tours and transportation to the museum, library, and other parts of the estate. The narrated tour down Farm Hill is a scenic exploration of an old country estate, through woods, past a sawmill, and along old ice ponds, until, rounding a bend, a breathtaking vista of the mansion emerges. A beautiful landscape of parks and gardens encircles it and high on a hill, glimpses of thatched roofs signal the location of Enchanted Woods. The mansion is entered through a museum, with exhibitions, children's galleries, and study centers devoted to Winterthur's world-famous collections of decorative arts, prints, paintings and architecture. Visitors are encouraged to visit the chronological exhibit on the history of styles before entering the mansion. While some prefer the self-guided audio tour of a selection of rooms, most repeat visitors opt for a guided tour of Winterthur's legendary period rooms, restored to their appearance during various stages of Mr. du Pont's lifetime, and telling the story of American heritage through his collecting passions and lifestyle. The study centers combine "open storage" with teaching and laboratory areas for the museum's internationally renowned graduate programs. Visitors pause outside glass doors, watching a curator with white gloves select a tankard off a table of amassed silver, and demonstrate the operation of its thumbpiece. His audience of students is circulating a spoon, and examining its marks and decoration with a magnifying loup. Earphones along the wall allow the visitor to "listen in" on the seminar briefly. An adjacent computer terminal introduces the vast array of virtual classes and lectures available from Winterthur, online--on topics ranging from decorative arts, and art conservation to horticulture, landscape design and land management. An adjacent classroom devoted to ceramics is unoccupied, and the visitor wanders, enthralled, among rows and shelves of great pottery and porcelain, part of a collection that has been developed to the stature of the furniture collections, and one that has gained Winterthur new respect in international circles. In the next gallery, a furniture conservator is bracing a newly glued joint on a chair, while an interpreter answers questions from onlookers, and explains the meaning of an x-ray showing nails piercing the mortise and tenon joint. On the web, and on a posted schedule, visitors learn when they can watch craft demonstrations as well as conservation in action. Special subject tour options vary daily, not only in the museum collections, but in the library, conservation laboratories, gardens and estate at large. The library is the newest building at Winterthur, adjacent to scholars' housing and accessible from a separate entrance off Route 52. It is the finest collection of its kind, and annually attracts scholars from all over the country. Like the museum collections, it is digitized and accessible from the web, except for those publications still protected by copyright. Exhibit areas display and interpret a fraction of the repository's outstanding holdings. A special subject tour reveals incomparable treasures. Leaving the mansion/museum, the visitor buys a picnic lunch in the café, and wanders through one of America's most beautiful gardens, before heading beyond to the parks and woods. An old greenhouse restored as a picnic house provides a perfect lunch spot. An exhibit inside shows old photographs of the garden and estate. Similarly restored greenhouses dot the estate to provide shelter and interpretation, while a few remain close to the coach house, bursting with flowers. The rhythmic beat of a horse-drawn carriage reminds the visitor that he has seen few cars, other than those massed in the parking lots of the visitor center, the library, and the conference center. The conference center, north of azalea woods, is popular for events and corporate use. On this particular day in 2025 there is a board retreat in session, envisioning Winterthur in 2050. Well, it's time for dinner, and time to hear some closing remarks from H. F. du Pont. My first research efforts were devoted to determining his vision for Winterthur. He loved Winterthur more than any place else on earth, and he had a very clear vision for it. In 1961, Winterthur embarked on its first 25-year plan. Two consultants were hired and they interviewed H. F. His answer is often quoted:
And so it shall.
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Reunion
Weekend and Conference
Now
let's compare Winterthur more closely to the British model.
How carefully H. F. nurtured and addressed each component of
a great English country house. The estate already boasted a
distinguished history through its association with the du
Pont family. Here you see the famous portrait of Pierre
Samuel du Pont that hangs in the Marlboro Room. But H. F.
actively enhanced the historical appeal by creating
vignettes of historical objects that celebrated many of
America's greatest figures--Franklin, Washington, Lafayette,
Revere. Take for example his famous grouping in the du Pont
dining room with the set of six Revere tankards under the
Benjamin West portrait of the signers of the Treaty of
Paris.
Yet
we still have nearly 1000 acres at Winterthur; we still have
the parks he created surrounding the house and gardens. We
still have most of the barns. We still have the greenhouses.
We still have the train station that brought guests for a
fabled weekend in the country, to dine on Winterthur's
bounty, wander in the gardens, and recreate on or in its
croquet, golf, swimming, squash, tennis, bowling, billiards,
and bridge facilities. We still have the sawmill. We still
have the quiet meadows and woodland paths. And because we
have the land, we have an opportunity to restore
Winterthur's historic identity--a great American country
estate. That was the crown that held the jewels.
Winterthur
is the cultural and pastoral keystone in a beloved stretch
of greensward that relieves the eye and spirit from
relentless suburban density. Encountering the estate through
its original entrance, the visitor is touched by unfolding
vistas of land…meadows, woods, rolling hills. Cows
grazing along the drive confirm Winterthur's history as a
working farm, the origin of one of the greatest dairy herds
in American history. Today it is a magical place apart, a
place of excellence and inspiration, a place of peace and
meditation, a place of stimulation and revelation, a place
of learning and fun, a place of nature, art, history,
science and beauty.
each
part of the Winterthur experience today. The visitor designs
his own experience from a rich range of tour options that
includes self-guided walking tours of the estate. First-time
guests appreciate a suggested one-day highlights itinerary.
A restaurant and guest cottages suggest that an overnight or
two could be an unparalleled experience. There are plenty of
options for families--Enchanted Woods, interactive
children's galleries, a family farmyard, craft
demonstrations, nature walks, picnics and children's play
areas.