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choice of textiles. He loved the color palettes of printed cottons made fashionable in the early twentieth century through the work of designers Elsie de Wolfe and Dorothy Draper and favored the patterns of antique paste and engraved prints (fig. 2) . As du Pont often noted, “Color is the thing that really counts more than any other.” Although du Pont’s window treatments evoked the period of the architectural elements in a particular room, the fabrics themselves bore little relation to what was actually in use in America from the 1700s to the early 1900s. The dealers that du Pont patronized obtained most of their stock in Europe, where vast quantities of antique fabrics were readily available from the late nineteenth century onward (fig. 3) . In fact, many, if not most, of the textiles used to furnish Winterthur never saw the light of day on this side of the Atlantic until the early twentieth century. Fig. 2. H. F. du Pont was a fan of blue and white printed and engraved cottons. Fig. 3. The curtains in Maple-Port Royal Hall are a French copperplate-printed cotton manufactured at the Wesserling factory in Alsace in 1785. — 112 —

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