Museum accessions.(Shelburne Museum in Vermont acquires items collected by Electra Havemeyer Webb)(Brief Article)

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 ...