Wilmington, Delaware Museums

Wilmington is the largest city in the state of Delaware, United States, built on the site of Fort Christina, the first Swedish settlement in North America.

Wilmington was named after Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington, who was prime minister in the reign of George II of Great Britain.

Wilmington has many museums, galleries, and gardens to enjoy, notable among its museums is the Delaware Art Museum whose collection focuses on American art and on the English Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid-19th century.

Virtual Tour of the Museums in Wilmington, Delaware

Delaware Art Museum
Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library
Nemours Mansion and Gardens
Rockwood Museum and Park
Delaware Museum of Natural History

Virtual Tour of the Museums in Wilmington, Delaware

Delaware Art Museum

The Delaware Art Museum holds a collection of more than 12,000 objects. The collection focuses on American art and on the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement of the mid-19th century.

Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library

The Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library is a museum that houses outstanding collections of Americana. It was the former home of Henry Francis du Pont (1880–1969), a renowned antiques collector and horticulturist.

In the early 20th century, H. F. du Pont and his father, Henry Algernon du Pont, designed Winterthur in the spirit of 18th- and 19th-century European country houses.

The Winterthur estate is situated on 979 acres (396 ha), near Brandywine Creek, with 60 acres (24 ha) of naturalistic gardens. The museum has 175 period-room displays and about 85,000 objects in its collection.

Nemours Mansion and Gardens

The Nemours Mansion and Gardens is a country estate with a formal French-styled 17th-century garden and a French neoclassical mansion in Wilmington, Delaware.

It was built to resemble a French château and has 105 rooms on five floors occupy nearly 47,000 sq ft (4,400 m2).

Nemours was created by Alfred I. du Pont in 1909–10 and was named for the north-central French town of Nemours, which was affiliated with his great-great-grandfather, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours.

The mansion is in the Louis XVI style of French architecture and contains 18th-century French furniture and a collection of antiques, works of art, and tapestries.

Artworks range from 16th-century religious works to paintings by the European masters to works by American artists.

Rockwood Museum and Park

The Rockwood Museum and Park is an English-style country estate built in 1851 and designed in Rural Gothic Revival Architecture. The style avoided all the tracery and pinnacles that made Gothic Revival buildings look like churches.

The “Rural Gothic” was the most fashionable style at the time and took its inspiration from rural British buildings of 400 years earlier. Rural Gothic was plain and avoided symmetry.

The six acres of the historic garden of Rockwood, extent from the early 1850s, its landscape referred to as Mixed Style.

The landscape style combined all the best features of the broader English Naturalistic style, which began in the 1730s. This style is characterized by extensive open lawns, sweeping vistas, curving paths, and trees and shrubs.

Rockwood Mansion was built for Joseph Shipley, a merchant banker originally from Wilmington. Shipley spent most of his life in Liverpool, England, where he became wealthy.

When Shipley retired, he moved his entire household from England, bringing his favorite dog and horse, as well as gardener and housekeeper. Rockwood includes much of Shipley’s furniture imported from England.

Delaware Museum of Natural History

The Delaware Museum of Natural History, which was founded in 1957, has extensive collections of seashells, birds, and bird eggs.

The museum’s core collection was based on an array of 1,000,000 seashells, and 100,000 bird eggs and the museum emphasizes the ecology of birds and sea life.

This collection was used early studies by scientists to measure pesticide contamination of wild species.

The museum has been expanded to include exhibits on dinosaurs, mammals, and Charles Darwin.