The Very Vermont Shelburne Museum

It’s got the best art of everyday American life.

O n my way to Montreal — where I am now, to see the retrospective of the work of the Armenian-born, Quebec-raised photographer Yousuf Karsh — I stopped at northern Vermont’s Shelburne Museum. Shelburne, Vt., is south of Burlington, which, with 40,000 people, is the state’s only city. I hadn’t visited the museum for a few years. Vermont is a tiny place, but it’s a gradually widening string bean, with Shelburne near the top and me at the base, near the Massachusetts border. It’s far.

I spent part of the afternoon there. Shelburne Museum is unique. It’s best known for a superlative collection of folk art. Its founder, Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), was one of the pioneer collectors of American paintings by itinerant artists, textiles, duck decoys, furniture, carriages, cigar-store Indians, and, really, all crafts and accoutrements of everyday life from colonial to Victorian times.

Webb’s example led others to collect folk art and, later, leave their art to the Met, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and other big museums, along with folk-art museums across America. Webb, heiress to a sugar fortune, also collected buildings, and this is one facet of the Shelburne’s singularity. Set on 45 acres, the museum displays its art in nearly 40 buildings, 25 of them historic, almost all moved there by Webb. There’s a steamboat, an old schoolhouse, a covered bridge, an old jail, a barn, and a lighthouse as well as old houses. Shelburne isn’t like Colonial Williamsburg in that it isn’t a re-creation of a coherent village. Rather, it’s a collage, or an impressionist take on country life. Shelburne Museum is closed during the winter, so I was there to walk the grounds and view its many buildings.

Through New Year’s Day, Shelburne is beautifully lit for Christmas, an evening light show that’s new this year and covers a chunk of the property and about a dozen buildings. I was there when the lights came on at 4 o’clock, with fresh snow on the ground. It’s very pretty.

The museum is also celebrating two massive — for Vermont — fundraising drives. Last month it finished raising $5.25 million to endow its director’s job in honor of the distinguished American art historian John Wilmerding. Wilmerding, who taught at Princeton for years, is one of the founders of American art history as a specific discipline. American art history isn’t of the same vintage as, say, the study of the Renaissance. Until the 1960s, American art was considered by academics to be derivative and, worse, tangential to the American zeitgeist, seen, again by academics, as all about making and spending money. The museum also raised $2.5 million to establish the Judith and James Pizzagalli American Paintings Fund, to finance exhibitions or acquisitions.

The Pizzagalli family owns a big construction business in Burlington, so the money’s local. Wilmerding is from a wing of the Havemeyer family, so fundraising for that fund was more national. Still, raising money for the arts in Vermont is very difficult. It’s a poor, rural state for starters. High taxes chased lots of people of means to Florida. Vermont’s got some rich people but not many, and those few are tackled for money by our hospitals, private schools, local theaters, homeless shelters, food banks, and churches. I was initially amazed that Shelburne got so much money but far less so after my visit. It’s doing everything right. Nothing succeeds like success.

Since I used the word “impressionist,” I’ll note that Shelburne is distinctive in another respect. Its French Impressionist paintings are of died-and-gone-to-heaven quality. Webb’s parents, Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, rich as all get out, brought Impressionism to America. Electra got her share, and so Shelburne owns, amid the hats, swan tureens, weathervanes, and doll houses, a stunner Manet gondolier painting. Splashy in every respect, it brings Venice to Vermont and always leaves me speechless.

I visit many museums. They’re all distinctive, driven by collectors, donors, a regional aesthetic, curatorial vision, and, of course, what money’s available. Some work better than others. Shelburne Museum strikes me as a place that knows its mission and advances it with confidence and élan. It promotes scholarship, getting history from the teapots and the baby rattles, but it also promotes pleasure.

Unlike most museums, it’s not an anxious place. It’s in Vermont, first of all. Putting aside our screaming lunatic senator, who’s from Burlington, Vermont’s mellow. Shelburne’s a chichi suburb, but everything quickly peters out to meadows, deep woods, and mountains. Electra Webb was a tail-end Gilded Age figure, which is not to say the museum is rich. Its endowment income covers about 30 percent of its $7 million budget. Webb was from an era in which curiosity about America’s past, the Old Days, was deeply felt, not in a mood of grievance and scorn but in a search for old ways and authentic American design. Shelburne’s collection, display strategies, exhibitions, and books reflect the founder in this respect. A more welcoming and informal place is hard to find, as I know well from previous visits during the museum’s open months.

Why are these 110,000 objects and motley old buildings in Shelburne? Electra’s husband, James Watson Webb II (1884–1960), was from Burlington. Though a Vanderbilt and a polo champion, he considered himself a Vermonter. Starting in 1947, when her collection went public, Electra bought and moved old buildings from their original locations in towns in Vermont and upstate New York to the Shelburne site. Each building evoked some aspect of small-town life, its exterior at least and often the interior, but, mostly, the interiors are display spaces.

Some of the buildings have one act. Webb’s last great purchase was a 4,000-piece circus parade carved from wood and dating from 1902. The pieces are every element of the classic circus performance, from processing horse to a carousel tiger, giraffe cage, and acrobats. The whole thing is displayed to spectacular effect, all 518 feet of it, in what’s called the Circus Building.

American paintings have their own house. Shelburne has a very good American paintings collection. Sunrise through Mist by Fitz Henry Lane from 1852 is one of its Hudson River School stars, though there are many others. John Peto’s Ordinary Objects in the Creative Artist’s Mind from 1887 is a grand trompe l’oeil picture. Charles Deas’s The Death Struggle from 1845 is there. The mentally troubled Deas had an unusually pungent sense of drama. Shelburne has a good collection of sporting art, too. It’s mostly hunting and fishing scenes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We’re living at a time when Pajama Boy is an icon, but back then, men of all classes, even artists, did outdoor sports. Even John Singer Sargent, at 300 pounds, loved to fish. Winslow Homer would have used Pajama Boy for bait. Neurasthenia was the illness of the epoch, and outdoor life the best remedy.

The last exhibition I saw at Shelburne, five or six years ago, was Wild Spaces, Open Seasons. It was a close look at hunting and fishing in American art. It was one of the best shows I’ve seen, and not because I like either. I used to be a good shot and bagged a deer when I was a teenager. Rather than cry on my pillow, I was quite pleased and ate venison with gusto. Fishing, alas, is the most boring thing in the world. I like fish, but there are professional fishermen and fisherwomen harvesting rivers, lakes, and oceans on my behalf.

I loved the show for its technical savvy and mission focus. Shelburne did it in partnership with three other museums, among them the Amon Carter. All the museums used their best hunting and fishing pictures as anchors so their permanent-collection treasures were highlighted and contextualized. The catalogue is handsome and the scholarship the best. The exhibition had purpose and coherence. I see many crappy exhibitions and think of Wild Spaces, Open Seasons as a model for a good show. Why, today, are purpose and coherence so hard to find?

As a trendsetter in the collection and display of the things of everyday life, Shelburne attracted some important hauls of art, like Terry Tyler’s collection of Vermont firearms. Tyler, from Dorset in southwestern Vermont, not far from where I live, was an electrician and town constable who assembled the definitive collection of guns. Many have deliciously intricate silver and brass ornament and engraving. Electra Webb was an avid hunter, so these things have a simpatico home. The genius furniture collector Brooks Buxton, a seventh-generation Vermonter, gave his furniture collection to the museum a few years ago. It’s a connoisseurship feast.

With so much land, and with buildings scattered around its campus, Shelburne is a pretty-enough setting during the spring and summer. I think of it as an indoor/outdoor museum and suppose many of its 100,000 or so yearly visitors come as much for the grounds as the art. Smartly, the museum’s raising money to enhance its gardens. One by one, it’s doing a systems renovation of the buildings.

Shelburne is planning an exhibition of the work of Luigi Lucioni (1900–88), the unsung hero of American Art Deco painting. Born in Italy, he lived in Manchester, Vt., for years. He painted portraits, still lifes, and landscapes in a crisp, clear Art Deco style. As a realist, he’s lost in the goop of Abstract Expressionism. As a realist and a Vermont artist, Lucioni is a good subject for Shelburne. He needs to be rescued from obscurity.

The museum acquires art, mostly, like the Tyler guns and Buxton’s furniture, from locals who give their collection or give Shelburne first dibs on buying it. But earlier this year, the museum made a coup of a purchase, the kind I like the most. It bought John Singleton Copley’s portrait Mrs. John Scollay (Mercy Greenleaf) from 1763. I like Copley, the first truly good and inventive American painter, but there’s a lot of Copleys. This one’s essential because Shelburne already owned its pendant, John Scollay. The two paintings were separated, possibly in the 1950s. Electra Webb bought John Scollay’s portrait in 1959. In 2020, Shelburne picked up the scent of the portrait of his wife.

The museum doesn’t have big bucks for acquisitions. Disciplined and focused, and with caring, conscientious donors, it raised a small ton of money and bought the Copley at auction in December 2020. These things are the stuff of kismet. Americana sales attract very nice people, to be sure, but they’re more oriented to snuff boxes, duck decoys, and corkscrews. With the paintings sales over and collectors of flat art spent, Shelburne had a clearer field. Now the two Scollays are reunited. Things that ought to happen don’t always happen, alas, but in this case it did.

Since I’m on a few not-for-profit Vermont boards and raise money, I was curious about Shelburne’s fundraising. The museum is far from New York, which means it doesn’t have much angst in its genes. Unlike the Clark in Williamstown, Mass., or the Fenimore in Cooperstown, N.Y., two places that are, roughly, peers of Shelburne, it isn’t even a tangent of the New York art scene. This is good. It’s its own thing and a Vermont institution.

With a Havemeyer and Vanderbilt pedigree, though, it gets some New York exposure, and Vermont’s not Montana. The state, after all, borders New York. About a third of its trustees are New Yorkers. A third are from Chittenden County, which includes Burlington. Burlington and its surrounding towns do have an entrepreneurial vibe. Hippie crunch was invented there. When the hippie invasion happened in the late ’60s and early ’70s — and I remember this — a good deal of flotsam and jetsam invaded. It created an ambiance that brought creative business types to Burlington as well as potheads and zonks. The very good University of Vermont is there, too. I think Shelburne is, with the theater company in Burlington, the blue-chip arts philanthropy.

I’ll report on my Montreal visit and the Karsh exhibition next week.