Shelburne Museum

History

The museum's collection was begun by Electra Havemeyer Webb, one of the first people to recognize the applied and decorative arts of rural America as collectible. Webb was an avid collector of American folk art and founded the Museum in 1947. She took the step of relocating historic buildings from New England and New York to Shelburne, Vermont in which to display the Museum's holdings.

The museum has lost money and was said to have had a deficit of more than $300,000 in 1994.

Collections

The core of the collection was formed by Electra Havemeyer Webb, a pioneering collector of American folk art who founded Shelburne Museum. Mrs. Webb exchanged ideas with other major early collectors, including Katherine Prentis Murphy, Henry and Helen Flynnt and Henry Francis du Pont (who founded Winterthur Museum and credited Mrs. Webb with inspiring him to collect American decorative arts).

Since Mrs. Webb’s death in 1960, the collections have developed with an emphasis on folk art and contemporary art as it relates to the collection. Artifacts provide insight into the craftsmanship and artistic quality of objects made and used by three centuries of Americans. Visitors experience these objects in galleries and period rooms and through interactive exhibitions and demonstrations. Transportation, farming and trade artifacts illustrate America’s industrial development from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. These collections are increasingly relevant to regional audiences from varied backgrounds as the economic base of the community shifts away from farming and small-scale production.

Shelburne Museum’s purpose is to enrich people’s lives through art, history and culture. The collection of approximately 150,000 objects is one of the most extensive and varied collections in the US and is notable for its great range, quality and depth. The outstanding collections of fine, folk and decorative art celebrate American ingenuity, creativity and craftsmanship.

Shelburne’s folk art collection includes 1,400 wildfowl decoys and miniature carvings, 150 trade figures and signs, 120 weathervanes and 50 carousel figures, including all 40 animals from an early Dentzel carousel. The circus collection includes 600 historic posters, letters and memorabilia from P.T. Barnum and the hand-carved 3,500 piece Kirk Brothers Miniature Circus. The Roy Arnold Circus Parade recreates in miniature 112 attractions from the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Bros. and Robinson circuses in 525 linear feet of a special exhibition building.

Textiles include 770 bed coverings (including 500 quilts), 400 hooked and sewn rugs, early household textiles (1,800 samplers, laces and linens) and 2,800 costumes and accessories. The decorative arts collection has 6,650 pieces, including glass, ceramics, pewter, metalwork, scrimshaw and one of the country’s best regional collections of 18th- and 19th-century painted furniture. Over 1,000 dolls, 27 dollhouses and 1,200 doll accessories echo in miniature the museum’s collections of ceramics, furniture and other household furnishings. A major reinterpretation and related publication of the doll collection was completed in 2004. The collection of American and European toys dates from the beginning of the 19th century.

At the museum there are some 3,200 American prints, paintings, drawings and graphics that relate to daily life. American paintings include works by Bierstadt, Church, Mary Cassatt, Copley, Daubigny, Field, Heade, Hicks, Homer, Lane, Grandma Moses, Peto and Andrew Wyeth. A significant group of European paintings and pastels from the renowned Havemeyer collection includes works by Corot, Degas, Manet and Claude Monet; they are exhibited in furnished rooms re-created from the Webbs’ New York apartment, c. 1930, and are the only Impressionism pictures on public view in Vermont.

Collections also include 225 horse-drawn vehicles (described as one of the best in the nation by Merri Ferrell, formerly curator of vehicles at The Long Island Museum of Art, History and Carriages); 1,000 farming implements; and 5,000 hand tools that document woodworking, metalsmithing, coopering, weaving and spinning, leatherworking and woodcarving trades. Craftspeople staff working exhibits of blacksmithing, printing, spinning and weaving. An apothecary shop/physician’s office displays 2,000 patent medicines and turn of the 20th century medical instruments.

The collections are exhibited in a setting of 38 exhibition buildings, 25 of which were relocated to the Museum; the 1871 Colchester Reef Light; 3 historic and 3 replica barns, including a 1901 Vermont round barn; a vintage operating carousel; blacksmith and wheelwright shops; a weaving shop with an operating Jacquard loom; a working exhibit of late 19th-century printing equipment; an 1840 one-room schoolhouse; an 1890 Vermont slate jail; an 1840 general store; a rare 18th-century up-and-down sawmill; a 19th-century covered bridge with 2 lanes and a footpath; general store; the reconstructed doctor's office of noted Vermont physician D. C. Jarvis; an 1890 railroad station; a 1914 steam locomotive and 1890 private rail car; and the 1906 220-foot steamboat Ticonderoga, which is a U.S. National Historic Landmark.

Sale of art

In 1996 the museum sold $30 million of its art to pay expenses. J. Watson Webb, Jr., the son of Electra Havemeyer Webb, resigned in protest. Webb believed that the sale violated the code of ethics of the American Alliance of Museums, which forbids the selling of artworks for purposes other than acquiring more art. The funds from the sale were used to establish a Collections Care Endowment which is used to support the ongoing remedial and preventative conservation, storage and management of the Museum's collection.

Buildings