Artistic Affinities: On the edge of something new at the Shelburne Museum

Editorial Staff Art

Electra Havemeyer Webb, the founder of the Shelburne Museum, was a collector of astonishingly wideranging interests. Her diversity of tastes is reflected in holdings that include carriages, decoys, weather vanes, and antique bedcoverings, as well as paintings by Manet, Courbet, and Monet, and the steamboat Ticonderoga. Yet with its pastoral Vermont setting and a campus dotted with examples of vernacular New England architecture, the museum is primarily associated by many with its outstanding collection of folk art and Americana.

The Real American Grotesque

Art, Exhibitions

A group of circus posters at the Shelburne Museum illustrates the routine stereotypes and exploitative practices of circus owners as they battled one another for primacy. Fig. 3. History and Medical Description of the Two-Headed Girl, published by Warren, Johnson and Company, Buffalo New York, 1869. Pamphlet with woodcut illustrations, 7 by 5 inches. Shelburne Museum, Vermont, gift of the …

Four Seasons at Shelburne

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2013 | IN HER FIRST ANNUAL REPORT, in 1948, Electra Havemeyer Webb, founder of Shelburne Museum, expressed her desire for “a building or adequate space in one for educational programs and loaned exhibits.” The new Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education, which will hold exhibitions, lectures, films, concerts, and workshops, even during the challenging months …

The present learns from the past

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

September 2009 | The Shelburne Museum and The Magazine ANTIQUES have a long history together. Within a year of the museum fully opening in 1953, Alice Winchester, the magazine’s editor, introduced it to her readers as “one of the…most unusual museums” in the country, its “collection of collections” assembled over a lifetime by Electra Havemeyer Webb, whom she described, with …