Revisiting a Path Not Taken: Winterthur is Delaware to Me

As I read this book, I had to search my brain to recall exactly when, and more frighteningly, how I got to Winterthur. I have reconstructed my memories to be it was when I was either a junior or senior in high school, clearly before I learned to drive or had a reason for heading south. So how and why did I visit? I've decided I must have gone with my mother, by touring bus, sponsored by our town's art and historical society that her garden club was affiliated with. The museum and the gardens wiped out all recollection of traveling. It is a magical place into which you are dropped, back in time and beauty. It marked me indelibly, so much so that when I was unsuccessful when compared to my other collegemates (that is, I was not engaged and without a good prospect), I applied to the University of Delaware to pursue a Masters degree in Americana there. I got in, but I never went.

Winterthur was with me during college, though, directing my ventures off campus to the American Wing at the Met, staring for hours at huge pieces of furniture, baffled and wondering how I could ever become an expert in this arena and acutely aware that the golden ring of curatorship often depended on family wealth and class connections, other recognized personal deficit.

Henry F DuPont was an extremely shy, almost asocial child, much more interested in lilies of the valley than in the blossoming of members of the opposite sex. His distance and preoccupation with land and buildings affects his relationship with his family, Ruth Lord being his younger daughter. Her memories of her family seem as displaced as my failure to remember how I came to be in Delaware.

Here, Slackers, we have a book where not only does the principal character create his own place, but by doing so, creates his own legacy. If you love Winterthur, you cannot dislike DuPont, however aloof and isolated his life. Henry relates to his surroundings primitively: through color, scent and space; he is so conventionally awkward, never learning to spell or drive, he perhaps was dyslexic. To paraphrase Lord in her afterthoughts chapter: her father's inheritance of unlimited amount of money was coupled with his capacity to use it creatively; his innate gifts were an unparalleled visual memory, an eye for color, a remarkable sense of proportion, an untiring talent for detail; a restless drive and touch of genius that impelled him to create his masterworks.

Showing up unexpectedly in this story is the influence of Isabella Stewart Gardner (my G biography from last year) being used as the model for establishing the structure for financing the maintenance and upkeep of the museum.

I liked this quiet book, a book to be read in a park full of flowers in early spring.