Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, April, 2001 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

Electra Havemeyer Webb often told the story of her acquisition of a cigar store Indian in Connecticut when she was just eighteen years old, a purchase that horrified her proper mother, Louisine Havemeyer, the great pioneer collector of impressionist art. Electra's passion for folk sculpture grew from there, as is well documented through the collection she amassed for the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. By 1988, when we devoted our February issue to the museum's holdings, its folk sculptures included carrousel animals, whirligigs, weather vanes, decoys, trade signs, and some forty tobacconists' figures of all sizes and types. But it did not include that very first figure Mrs. Webb had acquired in the early 1900s, and whimsically named Mary Connor after one of her nannies. It remained in her private collection and, until last year, stood in the Brick House, also in Shelburne, where she and her husband, James Watson Webb, lived from the mid-1940s. Recently their son, James Watson Webb Jr., left the house to the She lburne Museum, which concurrently purchased the contents, uniting this seminal figure with the collection it spawned.

Equally significant to the story of the museum and its founder, Shelbume has also acquired two unusual paneled rooms inset with panels of hand-blocked wallpaper from bandboxes of the 1830s, which Mrs. Webb had innovatively installed in her house in West-bury Long Island, New York, about 1925 (see photographs below). When she and her husband moved to Vermont, the rooms went to the younger James Watson Webb, who installed them in his house in Los Angeles. After his death, subsequent owners salvaged the rooms for the museum before razing the California house.

Bandboxes were the luggage of the mid-nineteenth century, carried by men and women alike. Some were made of wood, others of pasteboard, but the element that gives them such charm is the brightly colored wallpapers that were used to decorate them. Mrs. Webb collected hundreds of bandboxes for the museum, but to appreciate them at home she had the novel idea of dismantling the boxes, flattening out the panels, and, Ironically bringing the wonderfully decorative wallpapers full circle. The museum is fortunate indeed to now be able to display this additional evidence of Mrs. Webb's visionary imagination.