Shelburne Museum

The 1901 Round Barn three stories high and 80 feet in diameter. It houses temporary exhibitions each year of art, design, and popular culture. Photograph by Mac Carbonell.

As Vermont’s largest museum, Shelburne Museum serves tens of thousands of Vermonters each year in addition to out-of-state visitors who travel to experience its exceptional collections of art and Americana. Shelburne was founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960), a maverick collector who created the museum to share her collections with the public, particularly residents of her adopted home state. The museum’s 39 exhibition buildings house Impressionist paintings, artifacts of everyday life in 19th-century New England, folk art, American paintings, decorative arts, transportation vehicles, and the finest museum collections of decoys and antique quilts and textiles.

Much of the Lintilhac Foundation’s support of the museum has focused on establishing programs that connect schoolchildren and visitors both with the collections and with the art of making art. The VISIONS program, initiated by the Foundation in 2001, created an on-site art history curriculum for local middle school students. Weekly classes are taught in the galleries and supplemented by instruction in the classroom. The program is a creative, proactive use of the museum’s resources to provide real educational value to Shelburne Community School students.

Another program supported by the Foundation is a successful artisan-in-residence program, which brings several of the finest artists and artisans in the region to the museum each year for two-week residencies. Participants work on projects such as cabinet-making, boat-building, decoy-carving, or fine art painting in a demonstration space that welcomes visitors and encourages them to observe and ask questions. Many of the artists and artisans either specialize in reproducing early-American methods and styles, or are inspired by them. The residencies spotlight for visitors links between the museum collections, the creative process, and contemporary manifestations of traditional forms.

Stagecoach Inn was built circa 1787 in Charlotte, Vermont. It was relocated to Shelburne Museum in 1949 and is the Museum's primary gallery for American folk art.

“It’s one thing to see a beautiful 18th-century blanket chest on exhibition,” says Catherine Wood Brooks, former director of education at the museum, “but a visitor’s appreciation is greater still when they observe the log being split, the planks being carved, and they can talk with the craftsperson. A ‘simple’ chest is never viewed as simple again.”

One of the most significant undertakings in the museum’s recent history was the preservation and exhibition of The Brick House, Electra Webb’s Colonial Revival estate located on Southern Acres at Shelburne Farms, about two miles from the museum. The house came to the museum in 2000; a subsequent capital campaign, supported by a major gift from the Lintilhac Foundation, restored its 40 rooms to reflect Mrs. Webb’s occupancy in the 1930s and ’40s when she used the house to experiment with exhibiting folk art and antiques. The Brick House opened to public tours in 2004. The winner of both a Save America’s Treasures® designation and a Preservation Award from the Preservation Trust of Vermont, the house is today successfully restored and preserved as the remarkable, intact country home of the only American woman to create and endow a major art and outdoor history museum.

“Surely there is no house in America of such value to our cultural history that is situated in such a remarkable landscape,” observes Hope Alswang, former president of Shelburne Museum and director of the Brick House’s restoration. “That it is preserved and available for future generations is one of the Museum’s great accomplishments.”