Sterling Exhibition to Open at Winterthur

Delaware museum showcases the art and craft of eating implements

A lifetime ago, when I was living in New Jersey, a magazine assignment to write about the Brandywine Valley took me to the Winterthur Museum & Country Estate. I was fortunate that my meeting with the curator who would show me around was on a Monday, the day the museum of antiques and Americana was closed to the public. The velvet ropes were down as she and I walked through the empty rooms a former du Pont mansion. Because I was with her, I was allowed to walk into those rooms and look more closely at the silver and porcelain and glassware and needlework and artwork and.....

If I were still living in the Northeast, I would plan on visiting again sometime been November 1 and February 1 to see "Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005."
The exhibition showcases of European and American dining through the designs and functions of eating implements over five centuries. I love to look at this kind of domestic treasure.

Created and curated by New York's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution, the show features 300 objects, enhanced by Winterthur’s extensive collection of prints, books and manuscripts. The exhibition is organized along such dining-related themes as “Dining on the Move,” “Tools for Food” and “Dining as Celebration,” the exhibition explores how even familiar objects like utensils can reveal a wealth of information about daily life and societal shifts. Visitors will learn that traveling utensils were used before the 1700s, when hosts began providing dining implements for their guests. The modern equivalent is portable dining gear, such as plastic sets for picnics and stainless steel sets designed for airline dining -- at least before we were forced to use plastic knives when there is any food service at all.

Anne Verplanck, the museum's curator of prints and paintings, has created “biographies” for the most common tabletop tools: the knife, fork, and spoon. These utensils have long defined Western dining. The most beautiful are are aesthetic as well as utilitarian. From sublime and precious to the near-silly, the exhibition features remarkable variations on table tools. Highlights are a Northern Italian traveling set with mother-of-pearl handles from 1590, silver chopsticks from Tiffany and Co., double- and triple-bowled spoons by contemporary designer Andre Zweiacker and traveling flatware by Anne Krohn Graham (above right).

Winterthur is the former home of Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969), an avid antiques collector and horticulturist. In the early 20th century, he and his father, Henry Algernon du Pont, designed Winterthur in the spirit of 18th- and19th-century European country houses. A visit to Winterthur immerses visitors you in another time and place. You might feel as if you have traveled abroad without crossing an ocean. I did.

Adult admission to the museum, galleries and gardens (lovely and tranquil even in winter) is $20; students and 62-plus, $18; children, $10. The annual Yuletide display, November 22 to January 4 (closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day), is extraordinary. Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, Route 52 (5105 Kennett Pike), Winterthur, Delaware 19735; 800-448-3883, 302-888-4600 or 302-888-4907 (TTY).