Winterthur Exhibition Challenges Who Defines the American Furniture Masterpiece
WILMINGTON, Delaware — July 1, 2025 —
Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library will open a major new exhibition this fall that questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in American antique collecting: what makes a work a masterpiece, and who has the authority to say so. Challenging Masterpieces: Art and Identity in American Furniture opens September 26 and draws on more than 70 objects from Winterthur’s permanent collection to trace how the concept of the masterpiece took shape, whose work it elevated, and how that canon is being reconsidered today.
The exhibition anchors its inquiry in a landmark object, an extraordinary 18th-century Philadelphia high chest acquired by Winterthur founder Henry Francis du Pont at a record-setting 1929 auction. That single purchase illuminates how market forces, collector taste, and cultural assumptions converged to define what the field would long regard as the pinnacle of American craftsmanship. The exhibition uses that history as a starting point for a broader examination of attribution, identity, and aesthetic value.
By bringing together furniture, decorative arts, and archival material, the exhibition invites collectors, scholars, and visitors to consider which makers were written into the canonical record and which were overlooked, and to engage with the ongoing work of expanding the field’s understanding of American artistic achievement. Challenging Masterpieces offers one of the most substantive museum examinations of collecting history and connoisseurship to appear in recent years.
Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library is located in Winterthur, Delaware, and is recognized as the premier museum of American decorative arts. Additional information, including press materials, object photographs, and captions, is available through the museum’s communications office. For media inquiries, contact Lisa McVey, Communications and PR Manager, at 302-888-4803 or lmcvey@winterthur.org.
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