Winterthur Museum Galleries (6/5/2025)

Thursday, June 5, 2025

Before heading home, we stopped at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, in Delaware.

The special exhibition was The Afric-American Picture
Gallery, based on essays of the same name (1859, by
William J Wilson under the pseudonym "Ethiop")

Wilson was responding not only to the absence of Black art and printed images in antebellum culture, but also to the mass circulation of degrading images of African Americans, from the minstrel stage to the printed page. Wilson’s gallery turned to the burgeoning press, and a growing black periodical industry, to provide an alternative visual archive of Black America, a visual archive wrought in textual form. The essays were printed in seven installments in the Anglo-African Magazine, the preeminent Black monthly of the time.

The exhibit was curated from objects in
the collections of Winterthur, including
this trivet (1770-1800, PA) that resembles
a sankofa/a symbol, rooted in the Akan
culture of West Africa, that encourages one to
reflect on his past and learn from his history  

The author describes himself sitting in
an armchair where he surveys picture gallery;
Chandelier (1840-1860, by Cornelius &
Company) and Armchair (1840-1860, by
John Henry Beller)

Picture I is described as a Slave Ship that here is
represented by a textile titled Traite des Negres/
The Slave Trade (1830-1840, by Frédéric Etienne Joseph
Feldtrappe after a 1791 engraving by J R Smith
of a 1791 painting by George Morland)

Picture II is The First Martyr of the Revolution,
represented by a diorama, Crispus Attucks, The First
American Martyr, 1770 (1940, by Charles C Dawson)

Picture IV: Sunset in Abbeokuta is represented by a
landscape painting of Africa: View of Cape Palmas,
Maryland in Liberia (c 1835, by John H B Latrobe),
an idealized picture of what might await freed
Blacks who would return to Africa

Picture V: The Underground Railroad is
represented by the book Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852, by Harriet Beecher Stowe)

Picture IX: Mount Vernon is represented
by a bust of George Washington,
who was a slave owner

Picture X: A New Picture describes the
"gallery boy" who wishes to hang a picture
of himself, and here is represented by
America (1800-1830) that includes a
young Black boy reading a book

Picture XII: Two Portraits That Ought
to be Hung Up, being of a Slave Holder and 
a Slave Catcher; the latter is represented by a
government-issued slave badge (1819) that
 was worn by the enslaved in Charleston, SC

Picture XV: Artist showed an artist's studio

Picture XVII: Artist Creations is represented
by two items; first a Silhouette (1803-1820
attributed to Charles Willson Peale, but
could have been by Moses Williams, an
enslaved person who was freed by Peale
and earned his living cutting profiles)

Second is a Jar (1843-1863, by
David Drake, an enslaved artisan)

Picture XXI: A Head of Phillis Wheatley
is represented by the book Poems on
Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
(1773, by Phillis Wheatley)

Not related to a specific picture, this quilt (1861, by
Priscilla Ballenger Leedom) has a center design of an eagle
drawn by a Black youth, Lewis Halbert, making it an
example of "cross-cultural and generational collaboration"

Picture XXVI: Condition, City-Life is represented
by a caricatured depiction of Black Philadelphians
in Life in Philadelphia/A Black Ball (1830-1835,
designed by Edward Williams Clay), which ridiculed
free Blacks who had made it out of poverty

Picture XXVI: Condition, Farm-Life is
represented by a Sampler (1843, by a
Black child, Lucy Davis) that includes
an offensive religious poem

The poem: We love the Lord, he came to save/ Poor Negro from the sinner's grave/ Though we are black and mean and vile/ Lord Jesus on poor Negro smile.

Picture XXVII: The First Convention is
represented by a dressing bureau (1840,
by Thomas Day, who attended the Fifth
Annual Colored Convention in 1835) (KSS)

Drawer pulls of the dressing bureau (KSS)

On our way to the Campbell Collection of' Soup Tureens,
we saw this model of the Winterthur mansion,
which we visited on 11/24/2023

Winterthur was the home of the du Pont family, and in 1880 Henry Francis du Pont was born there. He took over management of the Garden in 1906, and then the entire estate in 1914. He had a passion for collecting historic American furniture, art, and decorative objects.

The Campbell Collection of Soup Tureens was initiated in 1966 by the chairman and president of the Campbell Soup Company, and was donated in 1997 to Winterthur.

Ormolu-brass tureen (1720-1750, probably French
or possibly Italian, in Baroque style)

Tin-glazed earthenware tureen (1755-1760, by factory of
Justus Brouwer in Delft, Holland)

Tin-glazed earthenware tureen (c 1760, by factory of
Jacques Chapelle in Sceaux, France)

Porcelain tureen on nickel stand (1972,
Sèvres factory in France)

Silver tureen (1766, by Zacharias Deitchman
in St Petersburg, Russia)

Silver écuelle/two-handled bowl with lid
(1706, by Georg Caspar in Vienna, Austria)

Porcelain tureen (1773-1774,
Meissen factory in Germany)

Porcelain tureen in the form of a water buffalo head
(1750-1760, in China for the Western market)

Silver tureen (1805, by Paul Storr in London, England)

Fused, plated tureen in the form of a sea turtle
(c 1830, probably Birmingham, England)

Earthenware tureen in the form of a frog
(1983, in America)

Porcelain tureen (c 1750, in China for the Western market)

Salt-glazed stoneware tureen in the form of a melon
(c 1760, in Staffordshire, England)

Next: Winterthur Garden.