By Ellery Coleman, tour program assistant

Ruth Wales du Pont was “musically gifted, industrious, and intelligent,” endowed with a witty sense of humor, and perfectly paired with her husband, Winterthur Museum founder Henry Francis du Pont.

Born into New York high society in June 1889, Ruth grew up in Hyde Park, near Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family. An only child, she was raised primarily by her mother, and they were very close. Even as an adult, she and her mother wrote to each other daily any time they were apart, correspondence Ruth’s daughter later described as “unfailingly tender.” Her grandmother, and to a much lesser extent, her father, also played a role in her upbringing. Ruth attended Miss Spence’s School in New York City, where she excelled in her studies and made many lifelong friends. As a child, she took to the piano easily and began taking lessons at thirteen, cultivating a lasting love of music. 

She and Henry Francis du Pont met and started developing a friendship when she was twenty, and in 1912, she attended her first of several house parties at Winterthur. Ruth’s daughter recounted in her book that her mother “never expected to marry,” and had once even tried to play matchmaker for Henry Francis, who was nine years her senior. They eventually fell in love and tied the knot in June 1916. 

In their early years of marriage, H. F., not yet invested in collecting antiques, was focused on his cattle and the dairy operation, horticulture, and breaking ground on new garden projects. Ruth, though a city girl by birth and by preference, agreed to live at Winterthur with her husband and father-in-law, Colonel Henry Algernon du Pont. The couple remained close, but her father-in-law proved to be a difficult person, and Ruth’s mental condition suffered as a result.

To help alleviate her distress, the couple bought a Park Avenue apartment in 1921, where Ruth spent much of her time. Over the years, they added more homes, spending winters in New York, summers in Southampton, Long Island, and weekends and holidays at Winterthur, along with an occasional winter retreat in Florida.

During their first year of marriage, Ruth, a skilled pianist and composer, traveled weekly to take lessons at the Peabody Conservatory (now the Peabody Institute) in Baltimore, and wrote various musical compositions. She continued composing throughout the 1920s, including fashionable ragtime music, dances, and part of an opera based on a book by Edith Wharton. In 1918, the couple’s first daughter, Pauline Louise, was born and named after H. F.’s mother and sister. Ruth’s namesake, Ruth Ellen, was born in 1922. 

At times, Ruth struggled with her mental health. Beginning around 1918, she took “nerve medicine,” and when Ruth Ellen was still a toddler, Ruth sought treatment at a talk therapy clinic in Massachusetts. A busy mother with many social and household obligations, Ruth set aside her studies at the Peabody, though she continued playing and singing at her grand piano in the Chinese Parlor throughout her life. She and H. F. hosted guests frequently, and she oversaw her daughters’ education, content with letting her husband create the museum. The Winterthur home, which she sometimes called Frog Hollow, was not always a place of refuge for her, as she sometimes found it too expansive. 

As she grew older, she continued to travel and entertain. Music was often a respite from her darker moments, and she played piano for her family into her elder years despite arthritis in her fingers. As with her mother, Ruth and H. F. also exchanged letters every day they were apart. Their daughter attributed the success of their long relationship to “an emphasis on loyalty and mutual thoughtfulness.” 

Ruth Wales du Pont died in 1967. Her partnership with Henry Francis helped make Winterthur the gracious place it is today.  

Ruth Wales du Pont Collegiate Composition Competition

March 29, 2026 | 2:00-5:00 pm

Join the American Pops Orchestra for the premiere of original works by the finalists in the orchestra’s competition. Each composition is inspired by Winterthur’s collections, garden, and history. The competition is named for Ruth Wales du Pont, wife of Henry Francis du Pont, who studied music at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. She composed dozens of musical pieces throughout her life and enjoyed entertaining her family and guests by playing on her grand piano.

Learn more.

 1 Peabody Conservatory of Music, Pupils’ Record for Season of 1917, Archives, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

2 Ruth Lord, Henry F. du Pont and Winterthur: A Daughter’s Portrait (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 95. 

3 Ibid., 100.

4 Ibid., 71.

By Tyler Horne, 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, 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 Ann Wagner, curator of decorative arts

Today, cultural institutions seek to understand the nuanced and varied impacts of the War for Independence on colonists and Indigenous Americans, especially those directly involved. In 1976, our nation’s Bicentennial, they focused on artists, including gunsmiths and hornsmiths, who were dedicated to preserving craft knowledge and recreating early arts.

In step with our collection of American black powder rifles, in 2022 Winterthur acquired a special-order Bicentennial longrifle that was designed and produced for the state of Pennsylvania in 1976 (see fig. 1). This is our first firearm by a contemporary artist, and it inspired another artist to create a powder horn to accompany it.

John F. Bivins Jr. (1941–2001), a gunsmith and scholar working primarily in North Carolina, was recognized for his publications and work with the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts at Old Salem in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and for his legacy as a teacher. In 1975 he accepted a commission from the State of Pennsylvania to create their Bicentennial Commemorative Longrifle Project. Two hundred rifles were contracted from Bivins and his collaborating artists for the project; Winterthur’s rifle is number 105. In Bivins’s description, its modestly ornamented architecture was not a reproduction of a Kentucky-style flintlock but “a contemporary statement of an ancient craft” and technically superb.

The Pennsylvania commission offered a full commemorative set including a powder horn bearing the state seal (see fig. 2). Although he is not mentioned in the promotional material, master hornsmith Roland Cadle also assisted with the project.  When I lectured at the Hornsmith Guild’s annual meeting in 2024, Roland Cadle learned of Winterthur’s newly acquired longrifle. He was moved to reprise his role from nearly fifty years ago and donate a powder horn to the museum (see fig. 3). He carved a historically accurate Lancaster-style screw-tip horn with polychrome decoration. He included the seal and colonial landmarks from Fort Pitt to the city of Philadelphia and personalized it with the rifle’s “105” and the Winterthur “W” (see fig. 4). To complete this set, he also made a fringed hunting pouch.

Like many of North America’s cultural institutions, Winterthur is exploring ways to share the nation’s 250th anniversary with visitors. Contemporary artists whose creativity is inspired by historical collections and those dedicated to preserving craft practices speak a visual language all can appreciate. Winterthur is fortunate that Roland Cadle’s deep knowledge and lifelong passion for hornsmithing embodies his conceptual connections to earlier artisans, whether they worked in 1776 or 1976. Likewise, Bivins’s Bicentennial longrifle captures a moment in time that inspired many to try their hand at gunsmithing and to appreciate the historical craft knowledge he helped preserve.

By Matthew Monk, Linda Eaton Associate Curator of Textiles

Each January, Martin Luther King Jr. Day invites us to pause and reflect on the unfinished civil rights work in the United States. At Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, that reflection is often shaped by objects that people made to care for one another, to create feelings of home, and to claim dignity in the face of hardship. Three objects recently added to Winterthur’s collection—a contemporary quilt and two potholders made in Gee’s Bend, Alabama—embody that legacy of resilience, creativity, continuity, and community.

Sharon Williams and her granddaughter Jamica made these quilted objects in 2023, but these objects and their makers belong to a living tradition that stretches back generations in Gee’s Bend, a small, predominantly Black community on a bend of the Alabama River. Williams describes her design style as “My Way,” marked by free-pieced quilting that relies on intuition, bold geometry, and the creative reuse of available materials. Williams learned this tradition from her mother and grandmother and passes it down to her descendants today. Her quilt at Winterthur is composed of cotton fabrics, vintage and contemporary prints pieced together into a dynamic kaleidoscope of patchwork. The quilt is machine pieced and hand quilted. The quilt is also a living lesson between grandmother and granddaughter. It is at once deeply personal and unmistakably part of a collective Gee’s Bend aesthetic.

Gee’s Bend quilts are widely celebrated today, but they were born from necessity. For much of the 20th century, families in Gee’s Bend lived in relative isolation, many as descendants of people once enslaved on nearby cotton plantations. Women used worn clothing, flour sacks, and other textiles at hand to create quilts that provided warmth and protection in drafty homes. In doing so, they developed a distinctive visual language, one that later came to be recognized as one of the most important artistic traditions in American quilting.

The two potholders Winterthur acquired alongside the quilt may be small, but they carry the same powerful story. Also made by Sharon and Jamica Williams in 2023, they use the same free-pieced “My Way” approach, translated into everyday kitchen textiles. Their bold blocks of color and asymmetrical patterns echo the quilt’s design, reminding us that art and daily life are not separate in Gee’s Bend; they are stitched together.

Honoring these objects on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is especially meaningful. Dr. King fought for civil rights, not only in speeches and marches, but in the affirmation of Black dignity, creativity, and self-determination. Gee’s Bend quilts are part of that same story. They are material expressions of endurance in the face of segregation, poverty, and exclusion. They are also material reminders of the power of community to sustain itself through making.

At Winterthur, these works also expand the museum’s narrative of American design, linking the contemporary and modern to the historical. For the first time, our collection includes a contemporary Gee’s Bend quilt and potholders by a named maker, recognizing Sharon Williams not only as part of a tradition, but as an artist in her own right. Her work connects the past to the present, showing that the history of Gee’s Bend, while rooted in a difficult past, is not frozen in time and continues to grow, adapt, and inspire.

As we commemorate Dr. King’s legacy, these three textiles invite us to consider how everyday acts of making can be acts of freedom and expressions of choice. They remind us that the struggle for justice is woven not only through laws and movements, but through the hands of people who, against all odds, kept creating beauty for themselves and their communities in their own ways.