[I originally wrote this report, part of a larger one on some
performances and art exhibits, between 11-13 May 2004, years before I started ROT. Since the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C., has installed a new show, Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In, and the Washington Post ran
a lengthy article on the artist (which I posted on ROT a few days ago), I
decided to run this archival report on my visit, first, to the DuPont’s
Winterthur, and then to the nearby Wyeth art museum, the Brandywine River
Museum.]
Because
my mother gave me a very heavy iron sculpture for my last birthday and I couldn’t
fit it into the rental car last winter, we decided that she’d drive back to New
York City with me in her car and we’d transport the sculpture then. We
had been talking about visiting both Winterthur, the DuPont estate near
Wilmington, Delaware, and the Brandywine River Museum, the former home and
studio of the Wyeth family of painters (N.C.; his son, Andrew; Andrew’s sisters
and brothers-in-law; and Jamie, Andrew’s son) in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania—just
over the border from Winterthur, about a half-hour drive away. The timing
or the weather hadn’t been right every time we considered it, but I suggested
that perhaps while I was in D.C. we could make one overnight or two day
trips—both sites are about 1½-2 hours from D.C.—since I was going to be around
for almost two weeks this time. Dates didn’t work out for a side trip
while I was in D.C., so we decided to detour on the way to New York—it’s a
short detour—and spend the night between the visits to Winterthur and the Wyeth
museum. I found a motel in Wilmington that accepts pets (there are
websites for this information!), and we made reservations for the three of us (!)
and arranged for entry tickets for the two sites—the motel had a package for
rooms plus the admissions; it was just easier that way. We loaded up the
car with our stuff, the iron sculpture, and Thespis and drove north.
We
got away a little later than we had hoped, but since we packed lunch, we
stopped only for a pee-pee break and got to the motel about 2 p.m. or so.
Winterthur is open until 5 p.m., so we unpacked a little, I walked my dog, Thespis,
and got him settled in the room, we got (misleading) directions to the estate,
and set out to see Winterthur. (There’s road construction, and the motel
staff, though the place advertises its proximity to both sites—as
well as the package deals—wasn’t too swift with directions to anywhere.
Go know.) Anyway, we did get to Winterthur with enough time to see the
estate and take one of the arranged tours. We ended up on the Elegant
Entertaining tour which focuses on the dining and entertaining rooms and the
china, silver, furniture, and more, used for that purpose displayed in those
spaces.
To
explain a bit—Winterthur is a huge estate. Not just the grounds, which
are extensive (it used to have its own golf course!), but the building is
immense. Plus it’s been added to many, many times since it was first built
in the early 1800’s until it was turned over to the state as a museum in
1950. (The name Winterthur comes from Jacques Antoine Bidermann (1751-1817), a son-in-law of Eleuthère Irénée du
Pont de Nemours (1771-1834), the founder of the du Pont family and fortune in
the United States.
The son-in-law, who built the original house was Swiss German, and Winterthur
was his hometown in Switzerland.) They don’t permit people just to arrive
and wander about the house—the ticket gets you entry to the gardens and galleries
(that is, the museum), but you have to purchase a tour to see the mansion
itself. There’s no way to see all of it in one go (it has several hundred
rooms, all told) so the tours are divided into themes. For instance, one
focuses on the living quarters and another, as I said, on the entertaining
facilities. I don’t remember all the other ones, but unless you have a
special interest in something DuPont, it hardly matters—they all get you into
the house to see parts of the mansion and the decorative items in it. The
last DuPont to live at Winterthur, Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969), was a collector of
American decorative arts—furniture, porcelain, figurines, tea services, and so
on—and the house is
a museum in that respect. It can get overwhelming, but a lot of it is
exquisite. The rich did live well before WWII (and not too shabbily
since, I believe), but they don’t all have any taste. (Take, for
instance, San Simeon: Hearst just bought stuff—a lot of it hideous!) But
the DuPonts, especially the last guy who essentially turned the place into a
museum (he built a “cottage” near the mansion for his family to live in so the
collection could be displayed in the main house even before he opened it to the
public), acquired some really lovely American crafts. Much of the
collection dates back to Colonial and Revolutionary times (Revere silver, for
instance), and the last DuPont at Winterthur had a thing about George
Washington so there’s a lot of Washingtoniana in the collection—both stuff
Washington owned (a set of china, for instance) and stuff that depicts
Washington (a number of portraits, including some folk-art likenesses).
According to our guide, DuPont was sort of obsessed with connecting his family
to the founders of America because they first arrived here from France in the
early 1800’s, after the Revolution and the founding of the nation.
I
won’t detail all the various things in the house—that would sort of spoil a
potential visit, and if you took a different tour, it would be irrelevant anyway.
There’s so much stuff, anyway, that it’s really the overall impression that
remains. There are a few remarkable items, however. In one room
that’s decorated in a Chinese motif, with furniture modeled after Chinese
designs and fabrics, the wallpaper is a hand-painted Chinese paper from the
18th century. DuPont found it unused in a warehouse someplace, having
been imported then forgotten or abandoned for 150 years or so, and he bought it
and installed it in this parlor. The paper, however, was taller than the
room. Instead of trimming the paper as someone else might have done,
though, DuPont raised the ceiling around the walls to accommodate the foot or
so of extra paper height. (He didn’t actually raise the whole ceiling,
just created a sort of reverse trench—I think it’s called wainscoting, but I’m
not sure.) In another room—a kind of entrance gallery near the original
front of the house (the main entrance was moved from one side to the other at
some point during one remodeling), he installed a beautiful, graceful spiral
staircase he shipped from a 19th-century North Carolina (I think—the
south, anyway) home that was being demolished. The kick is that he waited
until he and his family were on a world cruise to have the stairs installed at
Winterthur so it was a surprise for his family when they got home. Better
living through chemistry, indeed!
Aside
from the mansion, there are acres and acres of landscaped grounds. DuPont’s
other interest was farming and gardening, and Winterthur had been a working
dairy farm for most of its existence. (The milk was reported to have been
especially good, by the way. And
Winterthur even had its own railroad station to take the milk into Wilmington
for sale.) But the farm is no longer, of course, (though the railroad
station is still standing) and the grounds are one garden or
landscaped terrain after another. DuPont planted flowers in such a
way that something was always in bloom at any time of the year, and the trees
are of many varieties, including some exotic species imported from places like
Japan. The basic entry ticket gets you into the garden, and there’s a
half-hour tram ride around the grounds that’s included—a truly delightful treat
on a spring or summer day. You can also walk the grounds—there are trails
and paths, and places to stop and sit—all planned by DuPont for his own
enjoyment and that of his guests. You can also dismount the tram at
several places to poke around a children’s fantasy garden or some special area
and then get back on—the driver will wait. We did this ride at the end of
our visit and it was a really nice way to end the day. It was only
unfortunate that we were there so early in the spring that most of the gardens
weren’t in flower yet.
It
is a peculiarity of the Winterthur set-up that though your tour admission is
only good on the day you buy it (I don’t know if you can reserve in advance—you
can the basic entry, obviously, since that’s what we had done), but the
gallery-and-garden ticket, the basic admission thing, is good for two days, so
you can come back the next day if you want. We did that—instead of
driving off to Chadds Ford immediately the next morning, we stopped at
Winterthur—there’s a route to Chadds Ford that goes right by the estate
entrance, so it’s not even off the route—to do the galleries, which, as I
indicated, is the museum. After the drive from D.C. and the tour of the
mansion, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to trudge the galleries, see the
garden—even on the tram—and check out the soup tureens (I’ll pick that up in a
moment—I forgot it), so we took advantage of the return policy. The
galleries are exhibits of furniture-making and styles, painting techniques, and
other craft work. (There’s even an entire 19th-century furniture and
clock workshop, house and all, from Long Island on display.) There
are also changing exhibits which are more or less interesting depending on what’s
on and what you’re interested in. There’s also a little film about life
at Winterthur that’s interesting and kind of sorts out what you’ve seen (or
will see, depending on the order of your visit).
Now,
that soup tureen exhibit: Believe it or not, it’s Campbell
Soup’s collection of tureens. It used to be at the Campbell
factory in Camden, New Jersey, but when the factory closed, the collection was
given to Winterthur and it’s housed in its own gallery off the terrace behind
the mansion where the garden tram picks up and lets off passengers. And
believe it or not, it’s an interesting exhibit. There are tureens from as
early as the 18th century up to contemporary designs—both silver or gilt and
porcelain. Some are whimsical—a lot of animals—and some are truly
elegant. We checked this out while we were waiting for the garden tram,
which worked out perfectly. It’s a nice little lagniappe.
From
Winterthur on the second visit, we drove along the two-lane highway north to
Pennsylvania and Chadds Ford. It’s a very pleasant drive, especially on a
nice day. (There are some strip malls at the beginning of the road—before
Winterthur—but afterwards, it’s just countryside and little towns for the half
hour to 45 minutes it takes. It’s much nicer than either the Interstate,
or the larger highway from Wilmington north to Pennsylvania we’d have taken if
we hadn’t returned to Winterthur—which is all strip malls and fast-food outlets
without respite. And I suspect the driving time is the same, so why not
take the pleasanter route?
Obviously,
a visit to the Wyeth museum is most interesting if you have an interest in the
Wyeths’ art. I don’t, really, but since I do have an interest in
contemporary art in general, it was worth the short ride and a couple of hours
stop along the way. The Wyeth family is
a phenomenon, of course: three generations of successful artists. N.C.
Wyeth (1882-1945) was most famous as an illustrator, especially of boys’
adventure books. (His fortune, and the money with which he bought the Chadds
Ford property, came from his illustrations for Treasure Island back in the early years of
the last century. His illustrations, for both books and magazine stories,
are on display in one gallery, and many of the books are still in print with
his pictures and cover art. You can buy copies in the museum shop, wouldn’t
ya know.) Andrew (1917-2009), of course, was a big name in contemporary
art for years, and he even made a big splash not long before his death with the
Helga series—the portraits of his long-time model and mistress. Andrew’s
two sisters (Carolyn, 1909-94; Henriette,
1907-97) and
their husbands (respectively: Franceso Joseph Delle
Donne, 1919–2007; Peter Hurd, 1904-84) were far less well-known than he was, but
they all had careers in art and some of their works are on display at the
Brandywine River Museum, too. Finally, Andrew’s son, Jamie (James,
formally; b. 1946) is currently enjoying renown in the field, though not as
great as his dad’s. (He may be best known for a series of portraits he
did of Nureyev—some of them were once exhibited at the John F. Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts—for which he followed the dancer around for months or
years and watched him perform and rehearse. There’s a whole gallery of
Jamie’s works, including many of the Nureyev paintings.)
Most
of the museum is devoted to the Wyeths, of course, but there are other
galleries—it’s three stories high, with several galleries on each floor—one
with Hudson River School works and one of other illustrators (in some cases
with both the original drawing alongside the published version). However,
what makes the museum worth a short trip if you are at Winterthur anyway is
that it’s such a lovely setting. The museum is modern, built into the
building that was N.C. Wyeth’s studio (and home, I believe), and the galleries
are like spokes off a round corridor on each floor, but the place was a farm,
so it’s surroundings are rural and wooded, with a creek that runs by the
back of the museum. The circular corridors are all glassed in with long
expanses of windows looking out over the wooded creek, but more delightful is
the little cafeteria (we arrived in time for a late lunch, which we had before
viewing the galleries) which looks right out at the creek, near an old bridge,
and there are several bronze sculptures reposing along the creek bank just
below the cafeteria windows. (Amusingly, the bronze sculptures are a cow
and a pig—Miss Gratz by J. Clayton Bright, 1984,
and Helen by André Harvey, 1989; the Wyeths weren’t
sculptors.) Even if you’re not particularly interested in the Wyeths’
painting, the Brandywine River Museum itself is a nice place to stop.
(You can even skip the galleries if you are really uninterested, and avoid
paying the entrance fee—I don’t recall how much that was, since we booked the
tix in advance through the motel in Wilmington—and just have lunch in the
cafeteria and watch the creek roll by.)
The
museum has a side tour to a nearby farm where Andrew painted, but we skipped
that both because it was more than we wanted to see and because we were pretty
touristed-out by then. (Remember, we had stopped at Winterthur again on
the way up.) I gather there are a few—but not many—of his paintings
there, too, but it’s mostly the old barn he painted (as a subject—he wasn’t a
house-painter) and used as a studio that’s of tourist interest. The art
is all at the museum for the most part. I wouldn’t recommend this as a
trip in itself (unless, of course, you are
a Wyeth fan—then definitely it’s worth a special trip), but it’s worth making
what amounts to a stop on the way to or from New Jersey/New York if you go to
Winterthur. (As I think I indicated above, you can return to New Jersey
without going past Winterthur and through Chadds Ford. There are two
routes: one is backtracking to I‑95 and getting back on the road across the
Delaware Memorial Bridge and onto the Jersey pike; the other is to follow the
U.S. highway—I think it’s 202, but I’d have to look at a map again to be
sure—the road off 95 that takes you into Wilmington, north to U.S. 1 and
going east (it’s designated “north” because 1 is a north-south road) across the
Commodore Barry Bridge (across the Delaware River at Philly) and getting on the
pike farther north than the Delaware Memorial. (Chadds Ford is on U.S.
1—the museum is right off the road—but west/south of the intersection with the
highway. In other words, if you go the “scenic” route—that other highway
is one strip mall after another—you also end up on U.S. 1, just a little
further back. It’s an insignificant distance, however.)
[Andrew
Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In runs from 4 May through 30
November at the National Gallery of Art, (202) 737-4215; www.nga.gov.]
Today, 15 June 2014, is Father's Day. I've been thinking about my late dad, whom I still miss even after 18 years. I can't even keep track of the number of times some idea or topic will come up to which I'll respond by adding: "You know what Dad used to say about that . . . ." I want to refer ROT-ters to my memorial post in honor of my father, "Dad," published here on 20 June 2010. Have a look back and share the thoughts with me.
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