Every December, Winterthur Museum, Gardens, and Library is decorated for the season. The museum’s Yuletide at Winterthur celebration is now in its fortieth year, and the highlight has always been the holiday tour of Henry Francis du Pont’s mansion, featuring extravagantly ornamented trees, flowers, and other decorations that somehow make this legendary collection of decorative arts and furnishings even more breathtaking.
Some of the rooms are also designed to highlight customs of long-ago holidays. This year the McIntire Bedroom - named for noted architect and craftsman Samuel McIntire (1757-1811), who created some of the room’s furnishings - has been decorated as if hosting a formal ball after a winter wedding, c1840. In 18th-19thc America, Christmas Day was only part of an extended winter holiday season of celebration and hospitality that ran through Twelfth Night. With friends and families already gathering together, this was also a popular time for weddings, especially in New England and Virginia. (Two famous couples who chose winter weddings: Elizabeth Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton, married on December 14, 1780, and Martha Dandridge Custis and George Washington, wed on January 6, 1759.) Wedding ceremonies and the festivities that followed were often held in the bride’s home, with dancing that could last late into the night.
In recreating their wedding celebration, Winterthur’s staff included a popular feature of balls of the time: a chalked floor. Before a ball, a design was drawn on the bare wooden floor in either white or colored chalk. Although colored chalk was more festive, white chalk was preferred. In the early part of the century, the white chalk wouldn’t mark the hems of the ladies’s then-fashionable white muslin dresses, and later, by the 1840s, it likewise wouldn’t discolor the white satin dancing slippers that had come into vogue.
But a chalked floor wasn’t merely decorative. According to 1858’s "Domestic Duties; or, Instructions to Young Married Ladies”, a precursor to today’s lifestyle-advice books, “chalking the floor… is not only ornamental, but useful, as I know by experience, in preventing those awkward and disagreeable accidents which a slippery floor inevitably occasions among the lively votaries of Terpsichore.”
Depending on the formality of the ball, the chalked motifs could be quite elaborate. In a letter to his wife, prominent Federalist politician Harrison Gray Otis described the dancing rooms of an 1818 ball held in November, 1818, in Washington, DC:
“The floor of one dancing room was handsomely decorated by a circle chalk'd with white crayons, in the centre whereof was the armorial shield of Great Britain with the motto of Honi Soit, and on different parts of the circumference were drawn the Prince Regent's crest & other ornaments, which were scuffed over before my entrance. The floor of the other dancing room was chalked with a corresponding circle, containing the arms of the US, and similar decorations.”
Winterthur’s representation of a chalked floor is more suitable for a wedding celebration than a diplomatic event. Hearts and flowers form the borders, and the main motif is centered by a pair of swans whose necks curve together into another heart. Winterthur’s version is also printed on removable Mylar to protect the museum’s floors and furnishings. Still, it’s easy to imagine the newly-married couple beginning their first dance in the center of that swan-heart to music played on the pianoforte and perhaps a fiddle, while all along the walls of the room well-wishers watched, and smiled.
Many thanks to Deborah Harper and Amanda Hinckle of Winterthur for their assistance with this post.
Above: The McIntire Room, Winterthur Museum. Photograph courtesy of Amanda Hinckle.
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