Incollect Magazine - Issue 2

Incollect Magazine 93 2022 Fig. 2: The Baltimore Drawing Room at Winterthur features Federal period furniture and one of the many shades of green paint used in the Winterthur house. Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Photo by James Schneck. Winterthur, said, “It would be a sacrilege merely to ‘redecorate’ it—a word I hate. It must be restored —and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”  2 Winterthur became the source of much of this scholarship. Du Pont as well as Winterthur Museum director Charles Montgomery and curator John Sweeney brought their expertise to the project and made introductions to curators, collectors, and historians from museums and collections around the country. The Winterthur Program in Early American Culture that du Pont had established with the University of Delaware in 1952, the year after the museum opened, was the first graduate program that focused on American decorative arts. In 1962, Lorraine Waxman Pearce, a graduate of the Winterthur program, became the first White House curator. But Winterthur also served as design inspiration for Mrs. Kennedy’s project. At Winterthur, in rooms like the Baltimore Drawing Room (Fig. 2) and the Du Pont Dining Room (Fig. 3), Mrs. Kennedy saw how du Pont had created beautiful and inviting interiors for entertaining that also documented American history. To bring similar history to the White House rooms, Du Pont assisted the First Lady in acquiring objects that documented the nation’s history and the house’s former occupants. The two also corresponded about design choices, including colors, fabrics, and appropriate styles. Du Pont’s design aesthetic and direction was most evident in the Green Room in the Kennedy White House. While du Pont claimed green was “one of the prettiest colors there is,” the color of the Green Room was not his choosing and had been established in the 19th century. 3 In 1961, the room featured a green silk damask wallcovering with matching window hangings that had been installed during the Truman era. Du Pont’s preference for curtains to be placed inside the window casings so the woodwork would be visible resulted in a plan to re-work the Truman-era curtains in this style, much like the curtains in Winterthur’s Baltimore Drawing Room (Figs. 4, 5, and 6). The Federal period furnishings du Pont chose for the Green Room (Fig. 7) were also similar to those used in his Baltimore Drawing Room. The Winterthur room features fine examples of Sheraton and Hepplewhite-style furniture with straight, tapered legs, clearly defined