In the heart of the Brandywine Valley, where Delaware and Pennsylvania rub elbows, Washingtonians can experience a wealth of art, history, beauty and culture. All that is needed is a car and a map for quick hops from one to another of nine museums guaranteed to cover all bases of interest.
These monuments to all that define the Brandywine Valley are the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa., Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa., Wilmington, Del.’s, treasures, the Delaware Art Museum, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Delaware Historical Society, Delaware Museum of Natural History (sound vaguely familiar?), Hagley Museum and Library, Rockwood Mansion Park and finally, the grandfather of museums dedicated to decorative arts, the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate.
The Delaware Art Museum was founded as a repository for the dramatic illustrations of Wilmington native Howard Pyle. Soon the museum expanded to include the works of N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Edward Hopper and Dale Chihuly.
“The Delaware Museum is very child-friendly,” said Dennis Lawson, the museum’s public relations manager. “There is a special area called Kids’ Corner on the lower level [where] the Elements of Art allows for direct interaction with three reproductions of the museum’s priceless works.”
The museum, which offers free admission every Sunday, also has the largest British Pre-Raphaelite collection outside the United Kingdom.
Sara Monserrat Teixido, director of marketing and communications at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, notes that the center, housed in a renovated industrial building in the heart of the Wilmington Riverfront, is a noncollecting art museum that presents between 20 and 30 exhibitions annually of regionally, nationally and internationally recognized artists.
“[This] month, the Julianne Swartz exhibit features an installation of speakers whispering messages of love and the paintings of Jen P. Harris,” she said.
Child-friendly, the DCCA provides a scavenger hunt tour of the galleries for children and is one of the only free-admission museums in the region.
These are but two of the nine museums with doors open to the art-loving traveler who would never be able to visit all of them in one day’s trip.
The Brandywine Treasures program offers “passports,” special rates to the museums, in conjunction with overnight stays in two of the area’s finest hotels. This begs for a long weekend in the valley and a return trip, as the passport is good for 14 days from check-in.
