Electra Havemeyer Webb and Edith Gregor Halpert: a collaboration in folk art collecting

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Henry Joyce

Webb was firm that she did not want to buy large numbers of folk paintings, but she did acquire several examples from Halper, mostly portraits that she saw as furnishings for her historic houses (see Pl. IX). She also bought a handful of decorative flower paintings on velvet, but evidently decided that they were not good enough for the museum and returned most of them to Halpert. (37) In October 1953 she paid Halpert five thousand dollars for Edward Hicks's Penn's Treaty with the Indians (Pl. VII), the only exceptional painting she ever bought from the Downtown Gallery. She wrote, "I like it very much although I hate to pay that much for n Pennsylvania painting." (38)

Another avenue for acquisitions appeared in the fall of 1953. Webb wrote Halpert that she had recently been in Newport, Rhode Island, where she had seen "our mutual friend [Maxim] Karolik [1893-1966]," the widely known collector of nineteenth-century American paintings. "He adores you and I must say, I think him terribly amusing. He calls me the 'antique Mrs. Webb.' I know what he means, hut little does he know how I feel it in another way" (39) (she had been ill on and off all year). Four years later, without a word to Halpert, Webb bought sixty-one paintings from Karolik for $45,750. Ironically, he had purchased some of the twenty primitives in the group from the Downtown Gallery. (40)

Although she was not interested in buying paintings from her, Webb continued to acquire fine sculpture from Halpert, and that became the focus of their correspondence. In the same month as the Hicks purchase, they had extensive discussions about a celebrated sculpture entitled Liberty (Pl. yin), by Eliodoro Patete, an Italian American about whom little is known. It had been owned in the 1930s by Juliana Force, who ran the Whitney Museum of American Art for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and was later owned by the modernist sculptor Elie Nadelman and his wife, Viola, who founded the first American folk art museum in Riverdale, New York. (41) Halpert remarked,

It is a famous sculpture that I have had offered to me a number of times .... It is considered by everyone but me an outstanding example of folk art and I am referring it to you, as my personal reaction should not be taken into account whatsoever. (42)

Webb replied that she knew the piece very well, "and...like you--I never admired it as I did the pieces that you and I like so much" (43)--namely what Halpert described in a subsequent letter as "highly simplified objects," (44) such as the TOTE weather vane. Nonetheless, Webb asked for Halpert's candid advice about whether Liberty was suitable for the museum, and in the end, Halpert opined that "it will add self confidence to the Shelburne Museum collections, and it should be bought." (45) At one thousand dollars, it was the most expensive folk art sculpture Webb ever acquired.

Webb and Halpert continued to correspond until two months before Webb's death in November 1960, and their endearments in these letters reveal how much they enjoyed the exchanges. In one Webb described Halpert as her "dream woman" and the "Fairy Godmother to the museum." (46) In July 1953 Webb wrote: