A Tale of Two Henrys: Writing About Beauport to Think About Winterthur

Dorian Cole, WPAMC ’24

Arriving back at Winterthur after a week-long voyage to “the North” that involved a stop at Beauport, a forty-room masterwork of architectural salvage and immaculately eccentric interior design choices, I couldn’t help but see our own 175-room chimera-house with new eyes. The similarities are no coincidence, nor am I the first to observe them. After assisting with the decoration of Henry Francis du Pont’s Chestertown House in 1925, Henry Davis Sleeper–the interior designer who created Beauport–consulted on the 1928-1930 expansion campaign that would transform du Pont’s Winterthur into the museum we know today.¹ With that in mind, I spent much of our time touring Beauport thinking about Winterthur, architectural salvage, and the complexities of differentiating history from taste.

One of the most interesting things about Beauport as an historic house museum is that since 2008 the interpretation has acknowledged that Henry Sleeper was, to quote Historic New England’s website, “a gay man living in the early twentieth century.”² Though this early embrace of LGBT+ history was certainly admirable, unfortunately, the general visitor tour of the house confines much of Sleeper’s queerness to a brief mention of his sexuality.³ This approach may be an attempt to avoid pigeon-holing Sleeper by reducing him to his sexuality, but by limiting Sleeper’s queer identity to the confines of sexual orientation, the interpretation disregards the impact this identity had on his artistic production. I cannot speak to whether this is true of the museum’s “Beauport Pride Tour,” offered once a month (twice in June!), but to the general visitor, Beauport is framed as a haven of decorative arts that just happened to be constructed by a gay man. That being said, the tour does highlight many of Sleeper’s eccentricities. For instance, he installed a secret stairway and hidden door that would allow him to appear suddenly before newly arrived guests as if from out of nowhere. He was known for throwing lavish and elaborately-themed costume parties for a social circle of notable people. Some doors at Beauport lead to period rooms, some only to mirrors.

These quirks, while peripheral to Sleeper’s sexuality, reveal his broader queer sensibilities. They express a sense of Camp, the queer aesthetic mode par excellence, which Susan Sontag famously defined as “a vision of the world in terms of style–but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not.”⁴ Sleeper’s own impeccable style–from his artifice-heavy themed parties to Beauport’s repurposing of architectural salvage–uses the real to create a fantasy. In his essay for the Winterthur Portfolio about the queer milieu surrounding turn-of-the-century historicist projects like Beauport, Kevin D. Murphy recounts how Sleeper soldered a number of nineteenth-century pressed glass cup plates into a window as decoration. Allegedly, a collector of these cup plates once fainted in horror upon seeing the display.⁵ Thus, rather than a museum project, we might be better served imagining Beauport as a Camp collage, which removes objects of historical significance from their contexts and from the collector market, while simultaneously elevating their significance as remnants of American material culture to the extreme. Sontag later describes Camp as “the difference…between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.”⁶ Beauport, as a creation of pure artifice, was built from antiques and architectural salvage not to diminish the history of such objects (as the poor fainting collector in this story might imagine), but to exaggerate that history to proportions that, Murphy notes, “bordered on parody.”⁷

Winterthur too embraces a near-parodic fantasy of American history. As I’ve mentioned, some doors at Beauport lead to period rooms, and some to mirrors. Seeing the reflection of Winterthur at Beauport, we are forced to wonder whether Winterthur’s own recycling of artifacts and architecture is best described as didactic or fantastical, as history or collage. In his essay “Crafting Queer Spaces,” Peter McNeil describes his experience visiting Winterthur: “As I stood that winter day in du Pont’s principle [sic] dining room, one of dozens strewn throughout a two hundred room house, I realized that I was not standing in a private museum but rather a queer space. The room, although furnished with ‘correct’ furniture and objects, was emphatically theatrical and hyperbolic…Mr. du Pont almost seemed to sculpt with his furniture. It was more movie lot than residence.”⁸

Du Pont’s own taste, no doubt inspired by Sleeper, permeates every room at Winterthur. His precise eye for color palettes necessitated that some quilts be laid on beds upside down in order to better adhere to the aesthetic of the room he was designing. Likewise, du Pont’s love of agriculture inspired him to frequently change out furniture coverings to match his carefully curated gardens. My aim in pointing these things out is not to criticize the historicity of du Pont’s work but to highlight the artistry and distinct vision of his arrangements, a goal I believe du Pont would appreciate. Shortly after Sleeper’s death, du Pont offered some key advice to the new owner of Beauport. “Naturally the minute you take the things out of this house, or change them about, the value of the collection does not exist, as really the arrangement is 90%,” he writes. Then, in characteristic fashion, he amends his statement, “I have no feeling whatsoever about the Chinese room, as I think it is distinctly bad.”⁹ Today, Beauport remains largely as Sleeper left it with the notable exception of the Chinese room.

¹ “Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House (1907),” Historic New England, accessed September 6, 2023, https://www.historicnewengland.org/property/beauport-sleeper-mccann-house/.

² Ibid.

³ The distinction between LGBT+ and queer is necessary and intentional. While LGBT+ describes a variety of gender identities and sexualities, queer often refers to a nonnormative approach to gender and sexuality that might be understood as counter-hegemonic.

⁴ Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 56.

⁵ Kevin D. Murphy, “‘Secure from All Intrusion’: Heterotopia, Queer Space, and the Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐ Century American Resort,” Winterthur Portfolio 43, no. 2/3 (2009): 220-221.

⁶ Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 57.

⁷ Kevin D. Murphy, “‘Secure from All Intrusion,’” 220.

⁸ Peter McNeil, “Crafting Queer Spaces: Privacy and Posturing,” in Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity, ed. Alla Myzelev and John Potvin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 4.

⁹ “Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House (1907).”