French vs. American Style: the du Pont Estates in Delaware

Nemours dining room, photo by Charles Brown

                

                 Delaware is home to two famous du Pont estates that reflect the distinctive aesthetics of their owners. In 1907, Alfred I du Pont built an 18th-century style chateau on 3,000 acres hat he named Nemours for the French town of his great-great grandfather. Winterthur, on the other hand, evolved from a 12 room house buit in 1841 to a 175-room mansion that Henry Francis du Pont intended to house his collection of American antiques and to serve as museum and resource for American style.

On the American side

This rivalry between French and American style is one of the  themes of the exhibit currently on view at the Winterthur Museum: Jacqueline Kennedy and H. F. du Pont: From Winterthur to the White House. When Jacquelin Kennedy undertook a project to restore the White House to the glory it lacked at the time, she enlisted the help of the H.F. du Pont. He steered her toward American style over French -- the style she had personally preferred

 

He also steered her toward authenticity even at greater experience. The strongest example of that was his advice to spend $12,500 to obtain the actual Zuber wallpaper for the White House Reception Room rather than to commission a copy for a fraction of the cost. Incidentally, the man who sold the committee the wallpaper --Peter Hill -- had purchased it for a mere $50, though he had to take it down himself  before the house in Maryland that had it on the walls was demolished.

Winterthur, photo by Ariella Brown

View of the back of the house from the Reflecting Pool area, photo by Ariella Brown

H.F. du Pont had a great passion for American artifacts, history, and gardening. The Winterthur Museum and Garden (there's also a library, though it was closed to the public when I visited) are all a testament to that. For the cost of general admission of $22, you'd gain a two-day pass that entitles you to museum admission (not in the house itself) with the option for a tour, a house tour (where you only get to see about a dozen out of the 175 rooms) and garden tour that covers a small part of the 60 acres of gardens plus as much walking around the 1,000 acres of the estate as you're up for. 

Most of the ceilings at Winterthur have a perforated coverto allow electricity to get through. I have to say that I find it really detracts from the effect of the rooms so carefully set up to reflect a set period.

      Half of one of the symmetrical rooms in Winterthur, photo by Ariella Brown

                                View on the estate, photo by Ariella Brown

Spring seems to be the ideal season to come to see the millions (yes, that many) of bulbs come into bloom that change over the colors you'll see no less than three time in the space of a month, according to our guide. Another garden highlight are the thousands of azalea bushes that would be at their peak in April and May. But no matter what time of year you visit, you can delight in the Enchanted Woods See photos below:

   Child's playhouse with thatched roof, furnished table, benches, chairs, and a working fireplace in the Enchanted Woods  

You can also indulge your whimsical side at Winterthur by stopping in to see  the Campbell Collection of Soup Tureens right next to the museum building. The designs to range form the subline to the ridiculous with some that would look like what you might find in your grandmother's collection, while others would make you wonder: "What were they thinking?"

                                  3 soup tureens from the Campbell Collection, photo by Ariella Brown

                             What else would you serve turtle soup in but a silver tureen shaped like a turtle?

                 .
On the French side

While Nemours doesn't boast a museum or the particular delights of a child's garden, the architecture of the house and the view of the splendidly appointed rooms, plus the exquisite layout of the formal gardens adorned by fountains that all seemed to work (unlike the ones in Kykuit) and a collection of gnomes beyond the standard bearded men, scattered around the place are  well-worth the cost of $20 for the day-pass  for access to the house and grounds. Both estates offer shuttles to carry you from one point of interest to another if you tire of walking. 

Nemours Estate: all Nemours photos here by Charles Brown

  

Nemour droom

                                                   Nemours conservatory

Four things you get to see in Nemours that are  not on public view at Winterthur: bedrooms, a bathroom made for the house, a laundry building, and a garage with beautiful  vintage cars..

                                         

                                       Laundry required using a washboard in large sinks

As you may have observed, I was able to post a lot of pictures here. That's because there are absolutely no restrictions on photography in these du Pont estates -- only a bar on using flash indoors. In contrast, Kykuit prohibits any photography inside -- even in the garage that houses the cars. It also does not allow visitors to roam the grounds freely at their own pace. Consequently, I would say that the Delaware estates are both a better value and friendlier as attractions. Just they are quite a distance to travel from New York. 

Related: 
Art, Architecture, or Parkland: Contrasting Estates of the Rockefellers
Restoring a garden and some history in Yonkers
A grand vision of Victorian architecture and engineering
Have desk, will travel travel

Chocolate variations

Mark Miodownik devotes nearly 20 pages of Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World to chococolate. Yes, chocolate. Though the cocoa beans are a natural product, it takes quite a lot of processing to turn them into the confection popular around the globe. Miodownik warns readers that the bean in its natural state tastes nothing like the chocolate he loves to eat; he's tried eating right off the plant and regretted it.

He then goes through the history of chocolate consumption. It started out as drink made by the Olmecs and then the  Mayans. That brew did not have the sweet taste we associate with hot chocolate today, though. It was rather bitter, which after explorers introduced the drink to Europe in the 17th Century, it proved less popular than coffee or tea.  Adding sugar wasn't enough to make it wholly palatable as the 50% cocoa fat rendered the drink "gritty, oily, and heavy" (83).

It took two centuries for a Dutch chocolate company called Van Houten to come up with a way  of applying  a press to the to remove the cocoa butter from the roasted, fermented beans. The yielded  the cocoa powder that serves as the basis of today's cocoa drinks, as well as the ingredient that goes into chocolate cakes.

Arriving at the solid chocolate made into bars was actually the real of what Miodownik calls "counter intuitive genius: having removed and purified the cocoa fat, and having pulverized the cocoa powder separately, why not mix them back together again, add in some sugar, to create an ideal cocoa bean" (83).  And solid chocolate was born.

He says credit for the first chocolate bars does not go to the Dutch or the Swiss but to an English firm called Fry and Sons. However, the Swiss are credited as the first producers of milk chocolate. With an abundance of milk powder from the Nestle company, they combined two products with long shelf lives to achieve a milder, sweeter chocolate than ever before (84).

 It's the differences in milk that produce different tastes in and for chocolate around the world. Sounding a rather Britishly biased, Miodwonik describes  American chocolate as having a "cheesy, almost rancid flavor." That results from incorporating milk in which enzymes reduce fat.  In contrast, the chocolate in the UK gains a "milder caramel flavor" from the sugar added to liquid milk that is reduced to a concentrate before being added to the chocolate. Europeans still opt for powdered milk, which he says provides a "fresh dairy flavor with a powdery texture" (85).

Generally, one prefers the taste of chocolate of one's native country, and the differences in ingredients do explain the outrage some British ex-pats felt at being denied their Cadbury chocolate in the US, as per the recent Financial Times article "British tastebuds caught in crossfire of chocolate war." It all due to the uncommon content of chocolate on different sides of the Atlantic.

Representing 100 years of childhood

Representing 100 years of childhood

At the rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day, we have created 90 percent of the data we have in just the past two years. And while 10 percent sounds small in comparison, working with the data of the past presents the same challenges as any Big Data project. You have to consider what to include and what to exclude to come up with the questions, correlations, and contexts that relate to your concerns. They are key to the representation of your data, whether in the form of a report, an inforgraphic, or a physical exhibition.

Some of those essential components were missing in  the  Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.  It’s described as “the first large-scale overview of the modernist preoccupation with children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking. The exhibition will bring together areas underrepresented in design history and often considered separately, including school architecture, clothing, playgrounds, toys and games, children’s hospitals and safety equipment, nurseries, furniture, and books.”

Granted, it is impossible to show everything. Yet, I question the omission of an American Girl Doll. (The company that produced it was sold to Mattel  in 1998 for $700 million). The line was introduced in 1986 and was considered a significant departure from the Barbie style that had dominated the doll market at the time. These dolls represented girls rather than full-figured adults and offered some historical insight with their accompanying books. When they first came out, the $100 dolls also raised questions about how much parents are expected to spend on toys, something worth bringing up in relation to consumerism.

Of course, people get a nostalgic kick out of seeing the toys and furniture they associate with their own childhoods, like classic wooden and Lego blocks, an Erector set, an Etch-a-Sketch, a Rubik’s cube, a Slinky, and a Barbie house.  Still, the toys should have offered more than a trip down memory lane. While  the exhibit points to the rather obvious cause for the proliferation of toys associated with the space age, it does not explore how other toys were also a product of their times.

Aside from what different types of toys represent, there is the evolution within toy lines to consider.  For example, Lincoln Logs also started incorporating plastic and premade windows into its sets.  Tinker Toys evolved from simple wooden forms to plastic ones that included specialized pieces and set in pastel colors that were marketed to girls. These modifications raise questions about materials, imaginative play, and gender that should be considered in such an exhibit.

Without context and explanations, you just have random items that do not signify meaning. As Jean Aggasiz said, “Facts are stupid things until brought in connection with some general law.” The same holds true for data, no matter how big. 

Perspectives on Introversion (this is a long post)

Within the space of a number of weeks, I read

Order these here 

 three books on introverts. I started with most recent and most publicized within that category: Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't StopTalking(2012) 

Unlike the authors of the other two books, Susan Cain is not a psychologist. She actually started out as a Wall Street lawyer. Having recognized her own ability to negotiate based on introverted traits and became a consultant and writer. Her book reflects some careful research and interviews with some insight based on her own experience.  

The pieces of the book may have functioned as separate articles. She talks about quiet strength in heroic figures like Gandhi and Rosa Parks – who partnered with the more extroverted Martin Luther King, Jr.  She runs through the problem for introverts at school who are utterly silenced by the dynamics set into play by group divisions and work places that  that torture introverts with open plans. She also looks at the contrast between Asian (quiet, introverted) culture and American (louder, extroverted) culture and how those caught between two worlds cope.  

While Cain is generally very positive about introvert traits, the book does include sections on faking it as an extrovert, which she calls “self-monitoring.”  It becomes necessary for any introvert whose life’s passion includes the necessity of interacting with groups of people, whether it is a professor who must deliver lectures or an author who must promote her book.

The second book I read on the topic was The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World by Marti Olsen Laney (2002).  I found this one seriously annoying at times. The fact that the author insists on referring to introverts as “innies” made me want to take Dorothy Parker’s advice about a certain novel and throw it with great force. However, I refrained from doing so because it was a library book and I was resolved to follow through on reading, for persistence is one of the great introvert traits.

Laney’s book is just loaded with advice, much of which is not particular to introverts – like pack
sunscreen, drink water (add some lemon juice to pick yourself up) and dress in layers to assure comfort. She justifies the inclusion of such by saying that introverts tend to have sensitive skin and also may be more sensitive to temperature changes with a tendency to be cold. Well, I do slather on the sunscreen but not because of any introvert traits. Such practical but somewhat irrelevant advice is a minor annoyance, as far as this book goes.

 What is more problematic is the way she constructs an introvert. She stresses that introverts are set in a “throttle-down” mode which makes it take longer for them to process information and more stimulant-averse. That may be true, but really I have not found that being an introvert makes me any slower than other people. In fact, I move pretty quickly and efficiently. 

 The thing that most bothers me about Laney is that her book title is completely misleading.  The way introverts come off, poor, delicate, slow creatures who are easily overwhelmed, they really have no advantage. In fact, in order to survive they simply must learn how to act and talk like an extrovert. 

 The lowest point for me in the book is when she offers suggestions to make small talk that include gems like “Isn’t the food delicious?” and “Isn’t this a lovely home?” Yup, that’s just what introverts despise – empty conversation just to fill in the silence.  If you have to resort to such stratagems, you may want to consider Lincoln’s observation, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”  

In contrast to Laney's approach, Laurie Helgoe’s book, IntrovertPower: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength (Sourcebooks 2008)  is the ultimate introvert manifesto. It pretty much say, “We make up at least half the world’s population; we have the right to be ourselves and not conform to any other standard.” She spends quite a bit of time debunking the perception that introverts make up only 1/3 of the world and so are overwhelmed by the majority made up of extroverts. She points to flaws in statistics and identification to make the case for over 50% of people qualifying as introverts.  Cain does touch on the perception of numbers but does not make the larger number central to her approach.

 I admit I found this book a lot more fun to read than Laney’s. It also flowed rather more organically than Cain’s. She does touch on Japanese culture, as Cain did, but in a much more brief and personalized way. The focus of the book nearly always comes back to Helgoe’s assertion of being an unapologetic introvert.  That is someone who does not buy into the argument that she is missing out on the fun that extrovert have: “The Socially Accessible introvert looks like an extrovert on the outside and sees extroversion as a bar that he or she can never quite reach. These individuals are often very successful in social arenas, but fault themselves for not having fun.”  That leads to feelings of “alienation from self” which can result in depression (p 27).  

 

Her positive spin on introvert traits really resonated with me, like the definition on p. 7: 

being an introvert does not mean you’re antisocial, asocial, or socially inept. It does mean that you are oriented to ideas…. It means that you prefer spacious interactions with fewer people. And it means that, when you converse, you are more interested in sharing ideas than in talking about people and what they’re doing. In a conversation with someone sharing gossip, the introvert’s eyes glaze over and his brow furrows as he tries to comprehend how this conversation could interest anyone.   It is also important to recognize that it’s not just a matter of preference, but of survival:
“For introverts, being ‘talked to death’ is very much like being beaten on the head. … most of us feel drained of life energy. Talk can hurt us, and protecting ourselves from harm is not rude” (133).

 In contrast to Laney’s advice for making conversation in social situations, Helgoe insists that you can be an introvert when interacting at a party: “Be real. If you want real, be real. You don’t have to keep small talk small. You can be polite without selling out. You can acknowledge someone without grinning from ear to ear. Let your depth be evident in your manner, and the people you meet will actually meet you.” (p. 153)

Along the same lines, (on p. 127) she offers ways “to ‘go deep’ with people you find through introvert channels:”

Don’t…

Introduce topics that bore you – i.e, ‘Where do you work?’

Ask questions that can be answered with ‘fine’ – i.e., ‘How are you?’

Do…

Ask question you don’t know the answer to – i.e., ‘When did you first know you wanted to teach?’

Ask for personal definitions – i.e., ‘Help me understand. When you say the film was ‘dark’ what does that meant to you?’

Observe. Notice how it’s going. Allow silence. Don’t try too hard.

Helgoe includes the biographical detail that she came from a family of ten children but chose to have only two because of her introverted nature.  While very devoted to her husband and children, she does not feel guilty about taking time – even overnight retreats – for herself. Like Cain, she likes to coffee bars, and will park herself in one for hours. But her preference is to travel out to one not in her neighborhood. In the inverse of the assumption of the “Cheers” theme song, sometimes she wants to go where no one knows her name. She wants to be around people that she can choose to engage with – or not – with no obligation to catch up and converse if she wishes to remain alone in the crows.

The three books touch on the pleasures and perils of mixed marriages, as conflict is inevitable when an introvert is wedded to an extrovert.  Cain offers a nice example of a compromise that does not make either side give in (see the-marriage-of-opposites), while Laney says she and her husband take turns selecting vacation destinations (I noticed that Amazon includes The Introvert and Extrovert in Love: Making It Work When Opposites Attract by Marti Laney PsyD MFT and Michael Laney (2007), though it has only 9 reviews)

All three introvert writers are women married to extroverts. They also all happen to be mothers – with Cain and Helgoe both identifying their children as boys, while Laney is already a grandmother.  So they do have much in common, and the books do, inevitably offer some overlap. However, each has her own take on what is central to the introvert experience. 

Cain’s is quiet, Laney’s seems to be a slower pace, while Helgoe’s is escape from intrusion.  Now, if I were to come up with my own take on introversion, it would be autonomy – being allowed the space and the independence to do what one wants without having to check with another. 

For the chemistry that underlies the difference in preferences for pleasurable outlets between introverts and extroverts, see Introverts and Extroverts: The Brain Chemistry Behind Their Differences

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The Great Introvert
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