52nd Annual Delaware Show

this mirage was a natural metaphor since I had long imagined the opportunity to do my graduate work there. My time studying architecture and art history at Oregon as well as the summer fellowship at Historic Deerfield were preludes to my two years in residence at this great repository of Americana—175 rooms of American furniture with almost 90,000 objects. While I was prepared for the depth and quality of the collections, the subtle beauty of the place astounded me. Indeed, I had come upon a remarkable vision, and it was real. One of the first museum rooms I visited was the Queen Anne Dining Room, a beautiful arrangement of rare New York armchairs, covered in linen dyed in a blue- resist pomegranate pattern (fig. 1) . The chairs encircle an oval table in a room sheathed in early paneling, restored to its original warm pale green. The decoration impressed me deeply. As we stood in the room, we had a far-ranging discussion about the origin and authenticity of the furnishings, especially the unique chairs. This was my introduction to the combination of scholarship and beauty that is at the heart of the Winterthur experience. In 1984 I was selected to be a Winterthur Fellow and participate in the two-year course in American material culture that draws upon the extraordinary museum and library collections. As Fellows, we were encouraged to independently study each of the rooms and their furnishings. This gave me the opportunity to closely observe Mr. du Pont’s remarkable ability to communicate his knowledge of history in an artful way. The question “what does this object say about the people who made and used it?” often led off discussions at Winterthur. Those exercises in connoisseurship were opportunities to develop the skills necessary to identify objects by comparing them to related examples. Looking back, they trained my eye and broadened my talents as a decorator, enabling me to create meaningful and, I think, beautiful rooms. Most certainly, Winterthur instilled in me the rigor of a trained curator. Along with my academic training, the time I spent in design apprenticeships at the decorating firms of Parish-Hadley and Kevin McNamara helped me understand that a fine room needs an object of focus around which a decoration scheme can be developed. That object might be a work of art, a treasured heirloom, or perhaps something of merit recently found. It can be modest or grand, but it must have a personal appeal or resonance with the owner of the room. I also believe that the best rooms always contain something antique and something new, a combination that can be as bold as the contrast of a modern piece of art with an antique cabinet or the employment of a fashionable color or furniture arrangement that includes old things. And, of course, at the core of great decoration are color and texture along with the care taken to create visual relationships between design elements, a skill mastered beautifully by Henry Francis du Pont. — 20 —