By Tyler Horne, Winterthur Tour Program Assistant

If you know the Winterthur collection well, you’re probably familiar with one of its most iconic pieces—a billiard table crafted by cabinetmaker John Shaw between 1797 and 1800. Believed to be the earliest surviving billiard table made in America, it’s not just a piece of furniture; it offers a profound connection to the history of the nation and the experiences of African Americans.

This billiard table was once owned by the Lloyd family at Wye Plantation in Maryland, whose family portraits can also be seen in the Winterthur collection. Constructed from satinwood and mahogany—materials harvested by enslaved people—the Lloyds’ billiard table is displayed alongside cue balls made from ivory, illustrating the interconnected nature of luxury goods and the injustices of the transatlantic slave trade. It also has a direct link to Frederick Douglass, who spent his early years enslaved at Wye Plantation.

Douglass is recognized as one of the most prominent African American abolitionist figures, largely due to his powerful documentation of life under slavery. In each of his autobiographies, he reflects on his time at Wye, where as a child he worked as a footman, among other domestic duties. He describes hearing the sounds of billiard balls echoing through the upstairs room of the plantation’s orangery, starkly contrasting the leisure enjoyed by the Lloyd family with the lives of those living downstairs, who labored to maintain that lifestyle.

In the past year, the billiard table served as a focal point in our Continue the Journey guided tour, which emphasized African American history. This year it will play a significant role in the Architecture of Independence tour, serving as an entry point to discuss African American history in Maryland and across the United States.

With the country’s 250th anniversary just around the corner, the upcoming tour is a good opportunity to look at the larger scope of American history and the diverse groups of people who make us who we are today. Honoring the contributions of African Americans throughout our nation’s history is essential in recognizing narratives that have long been overlooked. Here at Winterthur, we reinforce our commitment to tell a rich and inclusive history of the United States, and we hope you’ll join us in celebrating Black History Month.

By Emily Bavaria, Winterthur museum guide

Each year thousands of guests stream through the doors of Winterthur, often taking specialized tours, eager to see some of our nearly 90,000 objects on display. While it’s easy to focus on the furniture or the objects placed in the rooms and hanging on the walls, experiencing the rooms fully also includes examining the walls themselves. They contain various architectural elements and, in many, historical wallpapers and wallcoverings. Fifteen period wallcoverings are on display in the museum, including early English flock wallcoverings, French scenic wallcoverings, hand-painted Chinese wallpapers, and some of the earliest American wallpapers.

A Brief History of Wallpaper

Wallpaper originated in China, where artists originally hand painted designs on rice paper. Block printing also originated in China, with designs carved into wooden blocks and paint applied to the non-recessed wood, using one block for each paint color. In European homes of the 1500s, wallpaper was considered the poor relation of the decorative arts, and tapestries were still in vogue to cover walls. The earliest decorative papers in Europe were block printed on small sheets and relegated to cupboards and small rooms. By the 1600s, however, wallpaper became common in European homes, some requiring thousands of blocks to create. By the late 1600s, France and England were competing to produce the best wallpapers of the western market, though hand-painted Chinese wallpaper was still considered the finest.

Around this time, flock papers were also introduced, created by block printing a gluten-based adhesive on paper or canvas, then dragging it through wool waste powder for a damask design. In the mid-to-late-1600s, sheets of paper were joined together to form rolls, which encouraged large repeats, so papering a room became more affordable and common. Wallpaper was imported into the American colonies prior to 1700 but not domestically produced until 1760.

The following are a few examples of the fifteen wallpapers on display in the museum.

Vauxhall Room

This room contains some of the oldest wallpaper in the museum. Dated from 1675 to 1730, these flock wall coverings were invented by Le Francois of Rouen in 1620 and manufactured in England. At Winterthur, the wallpaper was restored and installed by James B. Wilson, a decorative contractor from New York, who placed the period paper on modern backing and glued it to a canvas-prepared plaster wall. H. F. du Pont also hired Wilson to paint the collection’s wallpapers each winter.

Centreville Stair Hall

The concert champêtre wallpaper in this room was made near Lyon, France, between 1783 and 1810. A genre of 16th-century painting, this style emphasized entertainment and refreshment in a picturesque setting, and by the 18th century, women were prominently featured along with allegorical or mythological figures. As part of Winterthur’s House Lighting Project in the late 1990s, all fifteen wallcoverings in the museum were cleaned and conserved. The lighting project included moving a water main. It failed, and water flowed down the interior walls of Winterthur, severely damaging this lovely example of French wallpaper.

Federal Parlor

This room features an arabesque-style Parisian wallpaper created around 1791 by Jacquemart et Bernard, produced with Etruscan-patterned wood blocks. Its designs align along a central axis and feature neoclassical themes, influenced by archeological discoveries of ancient art in places like Pompeii in the mid-1700s. It was purchased in 1794 by Oliver Phelps for the dining room in his Suffield, Connecticut, home, and H. F. du Pont acquired the wallpaper when highway construction threatened the house.

Philadelphia Bedroom

The Philadelphia Bedroom is papered with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper from the late 18th century, with exotic birds among tree peonies, chrysanthemums, and cherry blossoms. More exclusive and expensive than French or English block-printed wallpaper, it was hand-painted in China and exported to France. This room was installed in the museum by Rudolph Guertler of New York. He mounted the period wallpaper on muslin and rice paper with new paper designed around the old, a common practice used by H. F. du Pont, who often combined contemporary wallpaper with period wallpaper. The room contains 29 panels, 14 of which are original, dating from 1770 to 1790.

Imlay Room 

The wallpaper in this room was purchased in 1794 by John Imlay, a Philadelphia shipping merchant, from William Poyntell’s shop on South Second Street in Philadelphia. Winterthur purchased the wallpaper in an upstairs parlor of the Imlay mansion, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the wallpaper from a downstairs parlor as well as the 1794 receipt. Because the price of the upstairs paper purchased by Winterthur was less expensive than the downstairs paper purchased by the Met, it is generally accepted as domestic wallpaper and among the oldest American wallpapers on display.

We hope you enjoyed this glimpse into some of the beautiful wallpapers at Winterthur. As you enter the museum doors, whether on a self-paced tour or one of our specialized tours, be sure to take in the exquisite walls surrounding each carefully designed room, knowing there’s a story behind each one.

By William Donnelly, Winterthur’s Associate Preventive Conservator and WUDPAC Affiliated Assistant Professor

As Winterthur’s preventive conservator, I safeguard the health of the collection, its environment, and its long-term care. Preventive conservation functions as an umbrella discipline, encompassing and coordinating many aspects of museum stewardship. At its core, it’s a community-centered approach to cultural heritage preservation—whether practiced in an institution, in private collections, or by volunteers supporting local churches, veterans’ organizations, and community groups.

One of the areas I oversee at Winterthur is integrated pest management. A dedicated team of preventive technicians maintains a network of monitoring traps that alert us to potential issues with the building envelope (which separates the interior of a building from the exterior, and includes the roof, walls, floors, windows, and doors) and possible infestations affecting collection areas. When pests are detected, we apply targeted eradication methods, including low-temperature and carbon dioxide treatments.

I also work as a professor in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation and I advise students on object treatment and preventive strategies, which occasionally involve pest mitigation. Many students are interested in working with ethnographic and indigenous materials, which require cultural sensitivity and specialized handling. With that in mind, I decided to pursue a museum studies certificate through the Institute of American Indian Arts.

The program consists of ten courses, and I am currently completing the ninth, which focuses on Indigenous Intellectual Property (Indigenous IP). The course explores how legal frameworks intersect with cultural values. United States intellectual property law mainly protects individual rights, while Indigenous IP is rooted in collective ownership and designed to endure indefinitely. This contrast reveals how conventional legal systems often fail to encompass the cultural realities of Indigenous communities.

When I began the certificate program, I expected to learn primarily about the care and handling of materials. While I have gained those practical skills, the deeper lessons have been far more transformative. I now understand that community-centered work requires entering a project without an agenda. Most importantly, I’ve learned more of what it means to preserve cultural heritage. When communities define their own goals and have a true stake in the outcome, the results are more authentic and lasting. Many Indigenous traditions rely on oral histories to carry forward identity and knowledge. Sacred or ceremonial objects, when needed for rituals, are passed down with the understanding of their care and, when necessary, the ability to reproduce them for future generations.

At Winterthur I often encounter family archives that serve a similar purpose—preserving stories and memories through meaningful objects. Whether in a museum or family home, these collections link people to their pasts and ensure their stories live on. In a world that can feel fractured, it’s grounding to remember that preservation connects us through shared human desires: to be remembered, to honor our histories, and to safeguard the legacies entrusted to our care.