The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 154

Sunday, Dec 29, 1985 The Philadelphia Inquirer 10 LEISURE Looking anew at the wonders that are Winterthur Antiques () 1- fell If From Ira book UZ2K HIMMEL a Charles Willson Peale painting By Lita Solis-Cohen Inquirer Antiques Writer For Henry Francis du Pont, collecting was an intoxicating sport that became a primary occupation. He also was a disciplined collector, making it a rule never to buy anything, no matter how beautiful, how valuable or how unusual, that did not complement what he already had. From the day that his eye was taken by a set of pink Staffordshire in 1923 until he died at the age of 89 in 1969, du Pont managed to collect between 50,000 and 70,000 objects that worked very well together. They are housed at Winterthur, du Pont's great country house, surrounded by 963 acres of gardens, woodland and meadow, six miles from Wilmington. Winterthur is the largest and richest museum of American furniture and the decorative arts in the world.

In the gardens, the second great collection at Winterthur, du Pont's approach was also visuaL Vistas recall English parkland; the spring gar- den, with its drifts of daffodils and bluebells and its blaze of azaleas be- ncath the towering tulip poplars cannot be matched anywhere. Winterthur: The Foremost Museum of American Furniture and the Decorative Arts by Jay E. Cantor (Harry N. Abrams, $49.50) is a perceptive account of du Pont the collector, taste-maker, brilliant designer and horticulturist. Hundreds of splendid photographs by Lizzie Himmel, 100 in color, provide a fresh look at one of the most beautiful places in America.

Moreover, this 227-page coffeetable book is very good reading. Only once docs Cantor use the current Winterthur buzzword "material culture," which seems to confuse aesthetic considerations with sociology and anthropology. Cantor makes it clear that du Pont regarded fine antiques as art. Cantor, who heads Christie's American painting department, was a graduate fellow at Winterthur 20 years ago. He has combed archives for letters and photographs, interviewed people who knew du Pont and put together an anecdotal chron- icle that is both a history of collecting American antiques and the story of how du Pont "turned connoisseur-ship into a tool of scholarship and display into high art." In her photographs, Himmel catches juxtapositions of textures, shapes and colors that make a reader take notice.

Cantor explains the special quality of Winterthur when he writes: "In an effort to coerce the meanings out of objects, they have been combined for reasons beyond their function or visual harmony. The rooms at Winterthur can be under stood as essays in style language in which regional preferences or thematic correspondence are presiding considerations." Cantor uses family photographs, stereopticon views of rooms taken in 1935, sketches and architectural drawings to show how the house was built and rebuilt. Bowling alleys. badminton and squash courts, ping-pong rooms and dancing rooms received old woodwork and period furnishings that du Pont spent hours arranging and rearranging. At one time there were 250 workmen on the estate.

Du Pont was clearly the director of operations aware of every detail, worrying over such matters as whether hot-water pipes might be too close to a favored wisteria and kill it. Friends and colleagues helped du Pont with his enormous project. Boston landscape architect Marian Cruger Coffin, his companion on garden pilgrimages, was responsible for the terraced gardens and other scape design work. New York collector Mrs. H.H.

(Bertha) Benkard was consulted for the fine-tuning of room arrangements, colors, fabrics and accessories. Within five years after he began collecting seriously, du Pont was not simply furnishing a house but creating a museum. New York dealer J.A. Lloyd Hyde traveled abroad in search of ceramics, lighting, textiles and export porcelain that would appeal to du Pont Du Pont quickly became confident of his own judgment, but he enlisted the help of young professionals. Thomas Tileston Waterman, a restoration architect from Virginia, reworked the grand two-story spiral staircase from Montmorenci, an 1822 house near Warrenton, N.C., to fit the stately spaces at Winterthur.

Joseph Downs, the first curator of decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who later moved to the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, came to Winterthur in 1949 with his assistant, Charles Montgomery, to catalogue the collection. He served as the museum's first curator when it opened to the public in 1951. With Winterthur's publication in 1952 of Downs' American Furniture of the Queen Anne and Chippendale a new era of scholarship began. Cantor explains that this book was a radical break with the spirit that prompted du Pont to collect American decorative arts, a spirit that was motivated more by the aesthetic impulse to assemble beautiful things than by the intellectual demand to study and understand them. Du Pont supported the scholarly approach of Downs and Montgomery, who took over when Downs died in 1954.

As the first director of Winter- with 18th-century furniture and iia.v ia io iff rl ft IX Wilmington that holds Henry F. 11 si r.f Winterthur's Marlboro Room, 7 i The country house near thur, Montgomery developed a range of educational programs. The Winterthur Fellowships, instituted in 1952 in cooperation with the University of Delaware, have trained the professional staff of nearly every major American decorative-arts collection in the country. 1 du Pont's great collection as a result of gifts. Cantor tells of a touching one from the children of Mrs.

J. Watson Webb, who had owned the pine dresser laden with pink Staffordshire that had set du Pont on his collecting path nearly half a century earlier. After her death, it was given to him. Winterthur has been open to the public for three decades. Visitors are still taken through the house in groups of four or fewer so that there is, as du Pont desired, "nothing of a museum in the air." The collection continues to grow.