He was the only son of Henry Algernon du Pont and Mary Pauline Foster to live to maturity; by the time he was born, his parents had already buried five children.

After graduating from Groton at the bottom of his class of sixteen, du Pont went on to study horticulture at the Bussey Institution at Harvard University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1903.

"[4] Du Pont became recognized as one of the premier dairy cattle breeders in the United States, and the Winterthur herd dominated national awards issued by Holstein-Friesian Association from the 1920s through the 1960s.

[10] Du Pont became interested in antique furniture in 1923 after visiting the farmhouse of Electra Havemeyer Webb in Shelburne, Vermont, and Beauport, the home of Henry Davis Sleeper in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

[11][12] In 1951, he established the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate and moved into a smaller mansion on the property, where his daughter, Ruth, continued to live after her father's death.

[3] In 1916, after a seven-year courtship, he married socialite Ruth Wales (1889–1967), a Hyde Park neighbor of du Pont's Groton classmate Franklin Roosevelt, who attended their wedding.

[6] Ruth had little interest in farming and disliked Winterthur, dismissing the rural estate as "Frog Hollow" and preferring to spend most of the year at their Park Avenue apartment in New York City or their summer residence at Southampton on Long Island.

[citation needed] Established by du Pont in 1951, the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library is the premier collection of American decorative arts in the world.

[2] First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy invited du Pont to chair the Fine Arts Committee that advised on the renovation of the White House between 1961 and 1963.

"[16] At du Pont's recommendation, Kennedy hired Lorraine Waxman Pearce, a graduate of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, as the first White House curator.