Featured Bill du Pont: Impassioned Collector and Connoisseur

August 25th, 2020
Bill du Pont: Impassioned Collector and Connoisseur
by Lita Solis-Cohen
263 0

William “Bill” Kemble du Pont, impassioned and very private collector of American antiques, died tragically in a tractor accident on July 4, leaving the Delaware Valley antiques world without its number one supporter. Over more than six decades, du Pont bought antiques from a battalion of dealers, collectors, and auctioneers when they offered something that met his high standards. A tastemaker, he was ahead of trends. Because his eyes were often bigger than his pocketbook, he sold collections when his focus changed or when he could upgrade a form.

Charming, generous, complicated, patriotic, and a good storyteller, this scholar-collector dedicated his life to preserving history, waterfowl, and open spaces. He was a regular at antiques shows in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Chester County, and York and at auction previews, but he rarely did his own bidding. Two generations of dealers who regularly alerted him to opportunities represented him.

A history buff, du Pont attended the University of Virginia. He spent his life hunting, fishing, conserving wetlands, preserving waterfowl, tending his farm, and buying, selling, and trading American antiques. He served on the boards of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Longwood Gardens, Hagley Museum and Library, and Delaware Wetlands. For many years, he was senior vice president of Ducks Unlimited.

He was appointed chairman to the advisory board for the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife in 1974 by the U.S. secretary of the interior. He was on committees at the Philadelphia and Delaware Antiques Shows. He joined the Walpole Society and the Kentucky Rifle Association and soon resigned from both—not his style.



Bill du Pont (second from left) hosted many groups of collectors, most recently director R. Scott Stephenson and the Museum of the American Revolution’s Collections Society. “Bill had lent his John Schreit long rifle dated 1761, the earliest dated Kentucky rifle, for the opening of our museum and earlier this year gave it to Winterthur,” said Stephenson. “Before we left Rocky Hill he gave the Museum of the American Revolution a wooden campaign chest and a survey owned by Anthony Wayne.” Photo by J. Shaver, courtesy the Museum of the American Revolution.

In the 1960s and ’70s, du Pont added to a collection of high-style 18th-century American furniture inherited from his father, Samuel Hallock du Pont (1901-1974). He bought from Israel Sack, Joe Kindig, John Walton, Philip H. Bradley, and others. His collecting addiction was inherited. When his father had no more room for American furniture, he amassed a world-class collection of gold coins that was sold at Sotheby’s in 1983.

Delaware dealer James Kilvington remembers sitting with Joe Kindig in du Pont’s living room and hearing Kindig say, “Second to the Readbourne Parlor at Winterthur, this is the finest room of Philadelphia furniture in America.” Much of it had come from Kindig.

Harold Sack, who began to deal with du Pont in the 1960s, told a story about du Pont in his 1986 memoir American Treasure Hunt. Sack noted du Pont’s “instinctive flair for antiques...strengthened...with a continuous and serious study of objects, photos and textbooks as well as conferences with leading dealers.”

Bill du Pont proved the thoroughness of his self-education. After Sack sold him a New England high chest with fan-carved drawers in its upper and lower sections, du Pont called and told him he had determined that the upper fan-carved drawer was not original. Harold dispatched his brothers Albert and Robert to Delaware to confirm du Pont’s suspicions, and they said du Pont was right. As luck would have it, Robert Sack knew the cabinetmaker that did work for the New York dealer Sack had bought the chest from, confronted the craftsman, and threatened court action until he produced the original uncarved drawer, which Sack sent down to Delaware.

In the early 1990s, du Pont began selling his Chippendale holdings. He sold at first privately through Alan Miller, then his conservator and advisor, and what remained he sent to Sotheby’s for a sale in January 1994. He had changed his focus to earlier Pennsylvania material, Quaker furniture, and Pennsylvania German furniture and folk art. He was supplied by two generations of Philip Bradleys, Joe Kindig, Skip Chalfant, Jim Kilvington, Vernon Gunnion, and a few others who were able to buy directly from local families or were victorious at local sales.

Curator Jack Lindsey said du Pont was the largest lender to Worldly Goods: The Arts of Early Pennsylvania, 1680-1758, Lindsey’s 1999 landmark exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In his acknowledgments, Lindsey thanks du Pont, “who delayed construction and let me send a truck.” His loans were tagged “private collection.”

William du Pont cornered the market for line-and-berry-inlaid furniture made in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He owned a line-and-berry-inlaid secretary, a Queen Anne high chest, a William and Mary chest-on-frame, multiple spice boxes, and Bible boxes, in all more than a dozen pieces. He had the largest collection of sulfur-inlaid furniture and owned Pennsylvania German painted chests. He considered his Berks County Black Unicorn chest the best painted chest known. His many schranks—carved, painted, inlaid, and architectural—are also among the finest.

After looking at 60 log houses, he finally found one to buy in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and moved it to his farm near Newark, Delaware, called Rocky Hill. He placed it on the landscape to serve as a point of contemplation and furnished it with Pennsylvania German furniture and household gear. The dozen tall hoop-back Lancaster Windsor armchairs around a sawbuck table in the log house are a rare form. No one else has a dozen; few have even a pair.

Former Winterthur curator Lisa Minardi, who watched du Pont upgrade and refine his collection over the last 15 years, said he “changed out one of his many stretcher-based tables ten times; each one was little bit better.”

Bill du Pont often moved his collection around and enjoyed studying the relationship of one form to another. He liked clocks, Moravian chairs, firearms, brass candlesticks, spice chests, and fraktur. He once had a du Pont car from the 1930s, now owned by dealer Kelly Kinzle, who took it a couple of years ago to Pebble Beach, where it won third best in the show. He loved anything wrought iron; his collection of hinges, latches, cooking utensils, and tools is enormous. At one time he owned 100 pairs of iron fire tongs, according to Jim Kilvington, who said “he came by hoarding naturally; his father is said to have owned five hundred burl bowls and a thousand long rifles.”

He assembled an impressive collection of Philadelphia silver, including works by Philip Syng, father and son, and three generations of Richardsons. He bought Delaware silver and had a cupboard of English silver too. He inherited some long rifles and pistols and bought more and collected powder horns and tomahawks.

As his interests changed to collecting the finest early vernacular works made in the counties surrounding Philadelphia, he sent truckloads of good Pennsylvania material to Pook & Pook auctions, where it was cataloged as property of a “distinguished Delaware collection” and always sold well above estimates.

Ron Pook said he has been selling to and for du Pont since even before he became an auctioneer. “When I was a dealer I sold him a lantern clock in an early inlaid case that du Pont treasured because the immigrant had a Pennsylvania case made for works he brought with him from England. The case, dated 1740, was his earliest clock in his collection, and he owned a schrank dated 1741 by the same hand.” He gave both of them to Winterthur last year.

He shared his collection with scholars and advanced collectors and often lent to exhibitions. When he lent his early clock and schrank to the 2011 Winterthur exhibition Paint, Pattern & People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725-1850, they were tagged the Rocky Hill collection. “He knew how important it is to preserve history and provenance, who made it, who owned it, and how was it used,” said Minardi, who wrote about many pieces of furniture in the Rocky Hill collection in the book that accompanied the exhibition and said du Pont was the largest lender.

Bill served on the board of Winterthur for 42 years; only former board chairman John Herdeg served longer. “He never missed a meeting,” said Winterthur director Carol Cadou, who added that 30 objects in the Winterthur collection came from du Pont. “His gifts ranged from a pipe mold to a pole screen with hairy-paw feet and included fraktur, a schrank, an early long rifle, and a tomahawk. He was arranging to give us Joseph Richardson’s high chest, dressing table, and Joseph’s father Francis’s marriage certificate in 2020,” she said.

Cadou said, “Bill was a valuable member of the collections committee and served as a sounding board for acquisitions, always wanting to enhance the Winterthur collection to be able to tell a variety of stories.”

He was the driving force behind Winterthur’s acquisition of the Peter Stretch clock from the sale of the Jeffords collection at Sotheby’s in October 2004, said William Stahl, who was then Sotheby’s Americana chief. “On Bill’s insistence, I took the clock to Winterthur for the collections committee to study it for a whole day,” he said.

Bill loved his big farm and was content to be quarantined there during the COVID-19 pandemic. “He was a true outdoorsman, preferring to mow the fields and prune the trees on his property himself rather than hiring someone do it,” said his daughter, Sabrina. “He was as rugged as he was sophisticated.”

Several years ago du Pont sold The Marsh, a wetland property off the Delaware Bay, where he hunted ducks. He liked shooting ducks and for many years traveled to Scotland to hunt grouse as well. And he shot big game in Africa. Some trophies compete for space in his farmhouse.

“He was an admirer of Jefferson. They both died on July fourth,” remarked Lisa Minardi, who hopes to finish the book on the Rocky Hill collection that she has begun.

Minardi, now executive director of Historic Trappe, had been du Pont’s curatorial advisor for many years. “I first met Bill in 2004, when I started in the Winterthur M.A. program. By then, his collection had begun to focus on early Pennsylvania German and Quaker material. Whatever Bill liked, I liked, and vice versa. I remember calling him during the opening of the Philadelphia Antiques Show to tell him about a sulfur-inlaid schrank in Greg Kramer’s booth that I thought he should consider; he told me to march back over there and put a hold on it, and he bought it the next day. Bill always pushed me to make new discoveries, whether it was identifying who the initials stood for on his line-and-berry high chest or tracking down a carved gravestone he had read about and we then visited. He supported all of my endeavors—loaning objects to exhibitions, underwriting photography for many books and articles, and even donating old bricks and sandstone (he collected everything!) for the restoration of the Speaker’s House in Trappe, Pennsylvania. He was a huge fan of our new Center for Pennsylvania German Studies, which opened last year, and donated an extraordinary inlaid schrank/desk hybrid; he wanted to give the first major piece of furniture to the museum and hoped others would thus be inspired to donate objects of like quality.

“Unbeknownst to me when I first met him, Bill had long been planning to do a book on his collection. In 2008 he shared this idea with me—then he stunned me when he said that he wanted me to write it! As a young Winterthur curator, I found it hard to believe that he really wanted me to be the author. But he was indeed serious and reminded me often about the project. Work finally got underway three years ago as Bill approached his eightieth birthday. Working together with photographer Gavin Ashworth, we set up a photo studio in Bill’s living room at Rocky Hill and got to work. While Gavin photographed, I dusted, measured, and took notes on hundreds of objects. Bill helped us move furniture in and out of the set, polished all of the silver, and along the way shared the most amazing stories from a lifetime of collecting. It was truly a team effort. The book is Bill’s legacy, and I very much hope to complete the project for him and for everyone in the Americana field.”

Most of the photography was completed at Rocky Hill, but Minardi must track down pieces that left the collection for other prestigious assemblages. For example, a Philadelphia rectangular tea table with a white-painted iron top, figure 135 in American Rococo, 1750-1775: Elegance in Ornament, the 1992 catalog by Morrison Heckscher and Leslie Bowman for the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is now in another private collection. Vernon Gunnion remembers du Pont saying, “It is the most brilliant work by a whitesmith in American art.” The more than 30 works at Winterthur should be included in the book. It will be a scholarly book with studies in connoisseurship like those Minardi has published in American Furniture, the Chipstone journal, and will be filled with stories of acquisition and ownership that live on in the memories of the dealers who were his close friends.

Vernon Gunnion tells about taking du Pont to see a monumental tall-case clock made for Peter Ferree, one of the most ambitious of all known sulfur-inlaid clock cases, with Ferree’s name and the date 1765 on its hood. “It was owned by China Mary in Lancaster,” remembered Gunnion. “China Mary, a Mennonite missionary, returned to Pennsylvania and lived in an old house on Route 30 in Paradise, Pennsylvania, with an Asian companion. I thought I could get the clock privately for Bill,” Gunnion said. “I took him to see it, and he loved it, but China Mary wouldn’t sell it. She gave it to a local auctioneer named Emil Murray in Lancaster. I was curator of collections at the Landis Valley Farm Museum at the time, so I did not think I should represent Bill at the sale, and Bill got Phil Bradley to do the bidding, taking one likely competitor out of the competition. Bradley bought it for a little over $40,000. A local dealer was the underbidder for Richard Dietrich. Bill was so happy he called me and said, ‘Meet me at Bradley’s—I have a bottle of champagne.’ Bill called it ‘the purest tall-case clock known,’ and its purchase cemented our relationship. After I retired I often represented Bill at Pennsylvania sales.”

Gunnion said every December du Pont would call him and say, “Christmas is coming. I need stocking stuffers.” Gunnion would pick out a dozen or so things and take them to Rocky Hill, and du Pont would buy all of them and give them to his close friends and family.

Vernon Gunnion said he was always on the lookout for du Pont. “I remember seeing a very good wainscot chair at one of Skip Chalfant’s open houses, and I gave Bill a call and said, ‘You better get down here.’ He came down and bought it.”

Skip Chalfant said he met du Pont in the 1970s when he was working for the senior Philip Bradley in Downingtown. “The first thing I sold Bill was a full-blown acanthus-carved Philadelphia wing chair,” Chalfant remembered. “I took it down to him, and we looked it over for two or three hours, had lunch, and he said he would buy it, but the only way he would pay for it was if I got Philip H. Bradley down to Delaware to see his collection. He had invited Phil, but he had never come. So Phil and I went to town together and spent the entire day looking at furniture, never stopped for lunch, sustained ourselves with Bloody Marys, and then went to dinner.” After Chalfant opened his own shop in 1982 he sold to, bought from, and traded with du Pont often. He said he delivered Ron Pook’s 1740 dated clock to Rocky Hill. These Pennsylvania dealers all worked together and were friends with each other, and all were du Pont’s good friends.

Bill was the consummate host. Jim Kilvington remembers dinner at the farm on July 3, 2013. “My wife and I, Bill’s daughter, Sabrina, and her husband, Conrad, and Bill and a girlfriend were at the table when Bill reminded us that 150 years ago the Union Army stopped Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War. After dinner we all watched the movie Gettysburg. Bill loved American history; he knew all about the generals and collected objects owned by General Anthony Wayne.”

The younger Philip Bradley had helped du Pont with New York sales for the last decade. In January 2016 at Sotheby’s he bought a circa 1731 tall-case clock with a movement by John Wood Sr., made for Margaret Thomas Lewis, with the case attributed to her father, Thomas Thomas of Radnor Township, Chester County. The father’s and daughter’s initials, “TT / ML,” are inlaid on the door. The clock was in the sale of the collection of Irvin and Anita Schorsch at Sotheby’s and sold for $162,500. It had been exhibited at Winterthur in Paint, Pattern & People.

Bradley said he was not always successful for du Pont. In 1998 at a Horst auction, Bradley was the underbidder when a 1768 George Hoff clock in a case with pewter inlay sold to Richard Dietrich for $118,000. It is now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was also runner-up when Chipstone bought a pewter-inlaid clock with a Rudy Stoner movement at Pook & Pook on October 3, 2015, for $192,000. “Bill wanted one of these clocks with pewter inlay to pair with his sulfur-inlaid clock made for Peter Ferree,” said Minardi, Bradley’s wife.

According to du Pont’s daughter, her father always wanted to expand and improve his collection and had a target list of things he wanted to acquire scribbled on pads throughout the house. She recalled his photographic memory and marveled that he knew the history of every piece in his collection and in other collections too.

Carol Cadou said, “The book was to be a collaboration between Bill and Lisa and Gavin Ashworth. It is important that the photography be completed before the collection is dismantled.” Winterthur will publish the book. It will combine du Pont’s connoisseurship and storytelling with Minardi’s ever-expanding scholarship, and it will document the creation of an extraordinary private collection of furniture and furnishings with classical proportions that reflects the confidence men had in themselves when they were striving for independence and creating a new nation.



Originally published in the September 2020 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2020 Maine Antique Digest

 

I tried posting a link to this article, didn't work which means, I have probably violated copy write laws.
Not to be morbid here but, when is the estate sale? I have several dealers who knew/sold objects to him looking into that.
I would guess with a collection of Americana of this quality, Christie's or Sotheby's in NY probably has an inside track but I wouldn't count out Pook who he knew well.
I have been saving my nickels & dimes ever since I heard the news of his passing last summer.
Though many of his furniture pieces & other objects will be in the stratosphere price-wise, there are always opportunities for lesser pieces in a collection of this caliber.

 

Joe Kindig - I recognize that name. He was a previous owner of my Chippendale chair and had responded back by email about my queries. Thanks for posting this fascinating piece about this most interesting man. It is a rare glimpse for me into a world I know little about. He must have had substantial wealth if he lost bids on single items in the 6 figures.

 

OH BOY! substantial isn't the word for it, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company is I think the largest chemical company in the world.
French immigrant who was a chemist, fled France during the revolution there and set up shop here making gunpowder.
One of the richest families in America.

 

I didn't want to assume he was related. The article made him seem low key

 

Yes well, the first sentence of article, "very private" collector, keywords there. Guesses he didn't flaunt his name or wealth but a very wealthy man.
Odd that he died in a tractor accident, he was 80 something years old! WAY too old to be fooling around with tractors. That common man life he apparently lived on his farm cost him his life.

 

He seemed to have the means to enjoy his life how he wanted. He lived his life to the fullest measure and created a testament to his skill and love of antiques - the book. In this light, I don't see the tractor accident as an example of an 80 year old making a rcitical mistake by working with equipment he was experienced with, just someone who wasn't going to let age make him change how he was within the world.

 

I guess, still, kinda reminds me of Prince Phillip who INSISTED on driving himself in a bit of common man behavior, was at fault in a car crash a year ago or so & injured 2 women. He was not charged or prosecuted but, NO MORE TOOLING around town in your Range Rover! NO MORE! driving yourself AT ALL!
Guesses the Queen read him the RIOT ACT and, that's THAT!
He was 97 years old at the time of the accident.

 

Sounds like he was QUITE a guy!!! AND didn't let his age (it's ONLY a number, after all!) hold him back!!!! I think he went out saying "WOO HOO!!! WHAT a RIDE!!!!"

 

What a guy and what a collector! There's something reassuring about reading an article about this gentleman in the hellish year of 2020. It seems to hearken back to a better time.

 

James,
Thinking about the book, perhaps, you should consider one so your knowledge doesn't die with you.
Kiko

 

a life well lived...........

 

Indeed