The actual day dress and hat worn by Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Crawley, Lady Grantham in Downton Abbey — rich heavy cloth
Described, who funds it, how the Duponts grew so (obscenely may I use the word) rich — gunpowder. The gardens, the exhibits, dwelling of course on Downton Abbey, the fetish dresses. How it functions as a social facility faute de mieux.
Dear friends and readers,
As my header and picture tell immediately, I have been to Winterthur Museum: this past Thursday afternoon and evening. I have decidedly mixed feelings about such places: I asked more questions of our guide than anyone else (note: she was grateful and wanted questions she could answer to fill out the time allotted to each of several rooms in the central house she showed us), especially who owned this house originally (the Duponts — they owned everything worth having at one time in Delaware), who’s funding it now: there’s an endowment by the Duponts substantially added to by philanthropists, selling memberships to local people for activities like lectures, evening receptions, tours. Winterthur Museum is one secular local social and cultural center; the university is the other. At each stop of this tour I noticed how the particular Dupont she was often talking of (a male born in the early 20th century who became a collector, connoisseur, sportsman, lover of art, builder of museum rooms and garden) spent enormously on each whim however art-oriented he might have: move whole ceilings, change contours to accommodate every detail of an 18th century wallpaper handed scenes around a room from China, have opera music piped in from miles away to where he was golfing. The guide picked up on my perspective (drift?) and became just a trifle defensive, regaling us with the two schools of art and conservation supported at the Winterthur (by fellowships? she didn’t say? or students loans?), to one of which she had been and gotten a degree in fine arts and is paid now for working there.
The gardens are beautiful and extensive; there are treasures of pottery, sculpture, home furnishings of all sorts, musical instruments, specific objects owned by this famous person and that; an indoor garden all bewindows; we were invited to look at the rooms the family once used and those originally built to be shown to the public. There is a research library — for American artefacts and architecture. I regret I didn’t buy at the gift shop a pair of exquisitely filligreed earrings in the Downton Abbey style, and a light weight woven jackets, lovely dark blue threads woven into this light lacey cloth, again a Downton Abbey style. Had Jim been alive, I probably would have, but don’t have the urge to treat myself the way I once did (indeed it feels somehow downright wrong), and told myself he’d have said I couldn’t wear it, as it was too delicate so I was getting a bogus relic. But when I noticed a colleague and friend had gotten herself an exquisitely embroidered scarf, Downton Abbey mode, I wished I had (they sell for $30 and up).
I had the same response which Jim and I shared when we were taken through a castle-like house, now a full-fledged week-long-trip place at Asheville, North Carolina, where a similarly super-gargantuan rich family filled a huge building and made a garden, Biltmore (a bus takes you) that ordinary people are invited to visit. The unexamined adulation of such places supports the present oligarchy and its past — and forgets that but for a brief time (1930s to 60s) there was in the US an attempt to make life more decent and share the goods, fulfilling occupations, enjoyment, and security with the average person. We did not have to be grateful for the crumbs off the table of the 1%.
What I enjoyed most of the museum itself was the most foolish thing probably: the rooms given over to the actual costumes worn by the actors and actresses of Downton Abbey. I felt my heart-strings tug as I heard the familiar strains of the music coming from the corridor as I climbed the marble stairwell. The museum knows the draw of this place and it is advertised everywhere in the museum. The information about what we were seeing was accurate: the Grantham family dresses and some of the suits are a mix of style then with style today. The staff had rebuilt the bell system — that is the sort of thing that grates. Are we to celebrate this? Here and there perpetual films were going of this or that episode where a costume we were viewing could be seen. Of course this was a tiny percentage of the stock the program costumer and her assistants have made but it was sufficiently wide that you could see each of the main characters’ sort of dress (two each for each of the daughters for example, a couple each for each of the older upper class family women). Unfortunately, I was taking photos with my cell phone and even with a real camera I am not exactly competent so while I tried to get some of the hats, I seem only to have captured two (the above and this one below):
Summer dress and hat worn by Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Crawley — light cotton (muslin?)
I had predicted and indeed found the “creations” for the married Lady of the house (Cora) stood out for the work, material, expense, lavishness over all the other females.
One of Cora’s evening dresses: my photo doesn’t capture the heavy and delicate working of the embroidery up and down the front of Cora’s dress — the varied textile dress is expensive
I have favorite characters so I am glad I managed to photograph Mr Bates’s working clothes as worn by Brendan Coyle and his bench, even if smudged:
I like Joanne Froggart as Anne Smith but must agree with her (as she’s hinted) that her outfits are so dull (and there is but one of Sophia McShera as Daisy’s and one of Leslie Nicol’s as Mrs Patmore), and in this exhibit none from the time of her being a lady’s maid — to tell the truth I have better photos to share from the books I’ve bought. Who makes a fetish of a servant’s outfit?
Remember Rose Leslie as Gwen, the housemaid, whom the Winterthur people are aware was a popular favorite once —
I note that the choice of fetish items show a class perspective and emphasis at work — minimal for the servants and several for the family each time. There is the one typical housemaid outfit we first see her in, one for Siobhan Finneran as Miss O’Brien, the lady’s maid; here is but one the glitter and richness of Phyllis Logan’s layered dress as housekeeper: an expensive set of sewn varied textiles and chains:
In the physical place, you can see the stiffness of Rob James-Collier’s outfit as a footman:
The costumes did seem to be almost all from the first season. Winterthur did not go to this expense for more than one and the beginning of another (to get in Shirley MacLaine’s garments doubtless). All of them looked remarkably comfortable as styles (they simple hang on the body)
Post World War One coat and hat – this kind of semi-sexy outfit was there, the fur expensive, rich velvet gold cloth
— as long as you didn’t remember the women wore corsets underneath to provide the form of body that the dress was to wrap round and cling to.
It was an exhibit of textiles the rich could use as imagined by the ITV costume workshop. it might have been interesting to see information about the dress designer, materials, who made the dresses (how much paid?). There were also objects the Grantleys used (beyond the re-built bell system):
Gloves worn by the actresses — kid is the slang
Crockery used — the same kind as Jim and I used to see at Landmark Trust houses
I did go into other parts of the museum — found an 18th century sack dress and noticed that a couple of the later 19th century ones did resemble aspects of the Downton Abbey costumes.
Of course if this man and his family of Duponts had not wanted to spend their money this way, we the public could not have this functioning funded social facility and pretty space. But it testifies to the continued domination of private property and huge fortunes as the controlling factors in US society that we owe such places to private foundations: of course the discourses they will support will not be those that undermine their positions; we see everything from a limited perspective of the privileged. The guide mentioned in passing that the basis of the Dupont money was gunpowder. All that slaughter and destruction of the Civil War enriched the Duponts, modern uses of chemistry in industry (and one of its results the spread of cancer) are the bedrock of this dream place.
Michelle Dockery’s silk layers Christmas ball dress from the first season; this is next to Dan Steevens’s tux (rather like a needed Ken doll) behind which is played over and over his proposal on bended knees to her in the snow
The museum several years ago allowed EC/ASECS to have its banquet in the museum (I’m not sure where); this year we were allowed to use a beautiful area for a reception for snacks, sweets and drinks and enjoyable talk, and then for another hour to wax exhilarated reading 18th century poetry and verse playlets aloud to one another. Peter Staffel, our master of ceremonies, chose to end these on Gray’s brilliant “Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” which for me nowadays especially evokes an ambivalent response too to conclude the festivities.
’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.
Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.
The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?
Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.
Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A Favourite has no friend!
From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
This is significant: the first version of my URL on Downton Abbey was excised over the word “obscenely.” Now it’s there again without it but someone says “the write-up is silly,” but “the photos of the lovely dresses are there,” to which replied:
My write-up is rightly critical and evaluative. You won’t be able to ignore it. Besides there are not that many photos — as the museum has only select outfits from the first and beginning of the second season. If it’s pictures you want, buy the expensive companion books.
I often have the same mixed feelings when visiting National Trust houses. One we went to this summer last lovely and had lots of fine furniture and books; however, the wonderful vista from the terrace was achieved by tearing down the village and building further away. As a result the estate workers had further to walk to work. This was not an uncommon occurrence. Also, as you mention, the source of the wealth for some of these estates was dubious, to say the least; on the other hand, these wonderful places wouldn’t have existed except for this private wealth.
Clare
I wish that if they had been originally built by this egregious and fabulous wealth (dependent on tiny salaries and long hours for so many, including the servants), they were now not presented or maintained in the spirit which celebrates this order. If say, there was a general foundation, and that had a set of values (much destroyed in the last 30 years), not only the rhetoric, but what we see would be different. Maybe the gardens would not be much different, but in the house other kinds of exhibits, other people talked of — as who made these objects, where they were from, and (ideally) exhibits about gunpowder and the workings of the Dupont family.
What is really learnt when we go? I don’t blame the average person for coming to see the fetish exhibit as there the huge expense has been put into a story for them — not a good story, an utterly misleading one, but ironically now in consonant with the spirit of the whole.
The Getty, equally a creation of super-wealth, has done much better this way — in what is shown. It feels more impersonal because of this. Maybe more public money goes into it. The “lessons” (the rhetoric I heard from the guide and the little placks) taught at the Biltmore were much worse perhaps because further south in the US.
One reason that Country House course was so poor was the professors didn’t want to teach us for real about the houses: where did the wealth come from that built them? what was done there, including politicking of all sorts.
From a friend; “Your description of Winterthur brought back powerfully many trips .. to Wilmington … once we went there to an Episcopal church–more a campus–for a social justice conference. I couldn’t get over how lush it all was and found that in fact it was the DuPont family church–any need, they write a check. They keep it pristine, splendid. I couldn’t help contrasting it to the poor black churches … so much need, so little money. And Winterthur … –they bought all the early American artifacts in circa the 1920s — George Washington’s china, the many portraits — and it was all part of constructing the WASP identity-the DAR sensibility — versus the immigrants. The rooms are as much a fantasy aesthetic of the “Colonial,” a construction of early 20th c upper class taste, as they are actually Colonial. It is strange and unsettling–all that money. And museums and houses grate on me too now–they have to tell such a sanitized and false story. I remember in the 70s and 80s, they could and would tell a more unvarnished truth … “
I went into the other parts of the museum briefly — where I saw that sack dress. Yes filled with early American objects from the upper class.
The so-called living areas set up by Dupont were like movie-sets only more crowded. I will say that at the Biltmore we were shown a set of livable rooms it was said the “family once lived in;” this tour guide claimed one of the rooms we saw was once lived in.
People shrug and say, well think how he didn’t have to use his money this way. I didn’t think to say, why is this a good way to use his money? To create a staircase we can all ooh at?
When we first went to London, the first time, Yvette was far more impressed by the Tube than any museum or art work; she was a young child and didn’t “know” enough to value the bought pictures in a museum over the creation of the social society at the time.