Museum Collections

Digital Collections

Winterthur is embarking on several projects to digitize the Museum collections. As the collections come online, an introduction to each will be found here along with a link to the image collection.

Winterthur's Quilt Collection   [Click to see the collection!]

Winterthur has approximately 300 quilts in the collection that range in date from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, with the bulk dating to between 1780 and 1860. Winterthur's founder, Henry Francis du Pont, began to collect quilts in the early 1920s. Intended to furnish his homes on Long Island and in Delaware, the early purchases were acquired as part of the stylish interiors he created that were widely admired by his contemporaries. Almost half of the collection consists of printed cotton wholecloth quilts. These were often acquired for the fabrics from which they were made and were of academic interest not only to H. F. du Pont but also to Winterthur's first curator of textiles, Florence Montgomery. Other types of quilts in the collection were acquired for their beautiful design or their patriotic imagery. Since the opening of the museum in 1951, the collection has continued to grow through the care of subsequent curators and the generosity of many benefactors.

This project was funded by the Coby Foundation Ltd.

If you have comments or questions regarding objects in the collection, please send them to webmaster@winterthur.org.

Please note that not all of Winterthur's collection is searchable online, but we are currently working to make more available. We are pleased to share images of objects on this Web site as an educational resource. For permission to reproduce these images or to obtain images with higher resolution, please contact the Photo Services Department (snewton@winterthur.org).