About the Museum and the Museum Collection
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library is home to the most significant collection of American decorative arts in the world and a hub of scholarship and education in the field. In 1951, Henry Francis (H.F.) du Pont (1880-1969) opened his family home, a 175-room mansion, as a museum to display his extraordinary collection of objects made or used in the United States since 1640. Dedicated galleries house permanent and changing exhibitions developed by our distinguished curators as well as guest curators invited from external institutions. Today, Winterthur’s collection of ceramics, furniture, paintings, prints, glass, metalwork, textiles, and needlework numbers well over 90,000 objects and represents a global perspective on the history of American material culture.
- Our American furniture collection is the largest and arguably the finest in the country, with a wide range of regional and stylistic forms.
- Winterthur’s ceramics collection of about 19,000 earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain objects represents a broad range of manufacturing and design types among American, English, and Chinese wares.
- More than 450 paintings, most of them by American artists, are featured at Winterthur.
- Winterthur’s collection includes about 4,000 glass objects, with work by important early American manufacturers unusually well-represented.
- Winterthur’s impressive collection of American-made and imported metalwork encompasses more than 21,000 objects of gold, silver, silverplate, iron, pewter, copper, and alloys of copper such as brass, bronze, and paktong.
- From quilts to gowns, samplers to bed hangings, Winterthur’s collection includes some of the finest textiles made or used in America.