An in-depth look at one of the richest collections of American art,
assembled by Electra Havemeyer Webb, renowned collector and founder of
Shelburne Museum.
Electra Havemeyer Webb assembled Shelburne Museum's trove of American
paintings in the late 1950s, creating a renowned and rich survey of
American portraits, landscapes, marine paintings, sporting art, still
lifes, and genre scenes from the eighteenth to the early twentieth
centuries. During an era that preferred European modernism and
abstraction, Webb's visionary endeavor presented a new story of the
United States: an attractive and industrious nation with its own
valuable artistic traditions. This handsome book features the best of
Shelburne's American paintings, including works by colonial painters
John Wollaston and John Singleton Copley, portraits by William Matthew
Prior and Ammi Phillips, Hudson River School landcapes by Thomas Cole,
Albert Bierstadt, and John Frederick Kensett, and scenes of American
life by Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and many more. The
collection is also notable for its great depth in the works by Fitz
Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Carl Rungius,
Grandma Moses, and Ogden Pleissner.
