Reviews for Guide to Winterthur Museum and Country Estate

The average rating for Guide to Winterthur Museum and Country Estate based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-27 00:00:00 Scot Mcconachie This guide book actually had a family tree for the DuPont family, which was helpful. It also has a little more detail about the history of the house and a few of the rooms. The photos are lovely. There's not a lot of text or detail, but I suppose there's enough for me to remember some of the highlights of our visit there. I have to say that, although I enjoyed our tour of this museum, it has an odd feeling to it. The fact that it really has been turned from a home to a museum is very evident, and I found it off-putting somehow. It's all very artificial. They even moved doors and put up fake windows in some cases. I guess, although I like architecture, when I look at a family home I want to know how they lived and what they did there. Seeing the opulent collections of random objects in fake rooms just left me feeling hollow. That was DuPont's intention, though. He wanted to show off the stuff he collected, not tell the story of his life. That's fine. I'm just not as interested in that personally.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-17 00:00:00 Mark Lyons This book contains beautiful images, but not much verbal content. The book focuses on the domestic spaces of Winterthur, and the transformation by Henry Francis du Pont of manor estate to collection museum. Readers can see the connection between Gilded Age industrialism, the network of wealthy socialites, and collecting. In the course of this brief book readers can follow the transformation of a high society home into somewhat stultifying period rooms, as du Pont collected architecture artifacts and antiques to refashion his home in a museum. A large percentage of the book is dedicated to images of the estate gardens, as the collection and display of horticultural specimens. In the final section - a photographic "walking tour" of the grounds, attention is drawn to how the architectural facades of the estate mask the inner-working of the museum, and how dramatically these domestic spaces were actually transformed during the museum-ification process. Whereas the introductory chapter focuses on the familial history of the estate, as a museum the attention shifts from familial heritage (only superficially represented to visitors) to Henry du Pont's collections. Yet, the bulk of du Pont's collection are strikingly absent from this book. More attention to the contents of the museum collections would have enhanced the book and rendered it more useful. Still, for someone who has never had the pleasure of visiting Winterthur in person, this was a beautiful visual introduction.