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.