Member Library Profile
The Library at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum
Winterthur was opened to the public in 1951 as a museum of American decorative arts. Earlier it had been a private residence of the du Pont family whose members had settled along the Brandywine River, near Wilmington, Delaware, and had founded a gunpowder manufacturing company. Jacques Antoine Bidermann and his wife, Evelina, a daughter of E I. du Pont, purchased the estate property in 1839 and began constructing a twelve-room house on a portion of it. When their house was finished they called it Winterthur after Bidermann's ancestral home in Switzerland.
Winterthur remained in the du Pont family for generations. The main house grew with many additions, a farm was established, and a garden was developed. Eventually the estate came to consist of more than 2,000 acres. Henry Francis du Pont, the last family member who lived at Winterthur, assembled the best collection anywhere of American decorative art objects. In 1930, he established the Winterthur Corporation, a nonprofit, educational foundation, with the intent of opening his home as a museum; in October 1951, Winterthur offered its first guided tour.
Also in 1951, H.F. du Pont and the University of Delaware established the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, a two year graduate program leading to a Master of Arts degree with a concentration on American decorative arts. In the fall of 1952, the first students arrived; they graduated in 1954. The need to provide research resources to help the students in the Winterthur Program and a growing Winterthur staff study the artifacts in the museum occasioned the creation of the Winterthur library, also in 1952.
At first the library consisted of books and magazines. As scholarship advanced and became more sophisticated, other resources were added, including original manuscripts, photographs, and printed ephemera. The idea was to build a collection of different kinds of research resources that would work together well, supporting one another in the research process.
The library's collections encompass a wide variety of written and visual material that promote the interdisciplinary study of American art, material culture, and everyday life. Because Winterthur considers manuscripts, photographs, books, and magazines as part cultural artifacts, part research tools, the library has been actively acquiring such materials for more than fifty years with an eye for their usefulness on many levels. The result is an assemblage that researchers can pursue and interpret in ways limited only by the sorts of questions they ask of it.
The library at Winterthur consists of four collections:
The Printed Book and Periodical Collection contains what its name suggests: 80,000-85,000 volumes and 300 periodical subscriptions. In addition to the circulating collection, it has the library's rare books, trade catalogs, and auction catalogs.
The Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera was created in 1955 by a special board resolution. It was named after Winterthur's first curator, Joseph Downs, who pioneered research in American decorative arts using primary resources. Special strengths of the Downs Collection are craftsmen's account books, diaries, family papers, architectural drawings and records, and other items that help researchers learn about everyday life in America and the American craft tradition. Coverage is from the 17th century into the 20th, and there are about 2,500 record groups in Downs.
The Visual Resources Collection has approximately 170,000 photographs of decorative arts objects; usually one object to a photograph. Photos are accompanied by data sheets about the objects depicted, listing the maker, his life and working dates, bibliographical references, and where the object is located. Visual Resources also includes the Slide Library, which is an in-house resource for staff and students to use for preparing talks.
The Winterthur Archives is the corporate memory of Winterthur. It includes records of Winterthur as a private estate and public museum. One of the most important parts of the Archives is the antiques dealer's correspondence, which charts the growth of the collection of artifacts that H.F. du Pont collected over the years. Among other resources, the Archives has a wonderful collection of historic photographs of the estate and the people who lived here. Winterthur's records management program is administered through the Archives.
Holdings in the four collections complement each other. For example, anyone studying the career of Philadelphia silversmith Samuel Williamson would benefit by consulting each one. The Downs Collection has his original manuscript account books, dating from the early 19th century; the Archives records Williamson pieces that H.F. du Pont purchased for the museum; Visual Resources has 60-70 photographs of his work; and Printed Books and Periodicals has imprints and articles about silversmithing and early Philadelphia. Having so many different things on a single subject or person together under one roof is a great strength of the library.
Winterthur became a client of VTLS in 1997 and went online with Virtua one year later; in so doing it became one of the first libraries to install the system. At Winterthur, Virtua is called WinterCat. Bibliographical records of all formats—printed, visual, manuscript, and archival—are in a single database so that researchers can discover the full range of resources available by performing just one search. In addition, WinterCat offers links to manuscript and archival finding aids, quarterly manuscript and ephemera accessions lists, a bibliography of the library's periodicals, and a list of MA theses written by students in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture.
We very much look forward to sharing our resources electronically over the Internet with larger audiences through databases, image collections, collection guides, and full text reproductions.
E. Richard McKinstryChair, VTLS User's Group
Andrew W. Mellon Senior Librarian
Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum
