Electra Havemeyer Webb

American antiques collector

Electra Havemeyer Webb (August 16, 1888 – November 19, 1960) was a collector of American antiques and founder of the Shelburne Museum.

Electra Havemeyer was born on August 16, 1888. She was the youngest child of Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847–1907), President of the American Sugar Refining Company, and Louisine Elder (1855–1929). She had two older siblings, Adaline Havemeyer (1884–1963), who married Peter Hood Ballantine Frelinghuysen, and Horace Havemeyer (1886–1956), who married Doris Dick Havemeyer. Her paternal grandparents were Frederick Christian Havemeyer Jr. (1807 1891), and Sarah Louise Henderson Havemeyer (1812 1851). Her maternal grandparents were merchant George W. Elder (1831–1873) and his wife, Matilda Adelaide Waldron (1834–1907). She attended Miss Spence's School and traveled with her family to the American West, France, Italy, Spain, Egypt, Greece and Austria, but did not attend college.

Although she spent her youth among the finest examples of European and Asian material culture, Electra Havemeyer Webb's own collecting took a radical turn. Although she lived with more than twenty extremely fine Impressionist works from her parents' collection in a penthouse at 740 Park Avenue during part of the year, she decorated a small pink farmhouse on portion of her in laws' estate with the simple New England furniture and craftwork. Quilts, tiger maple furniture, and hooked rugs filled the homey rooms of her country house. Although a woman of tremendous means, Webb's Vermont home was modest and comfortable in scale. Her "Brick House" survives today as a rare and intact example of the Colonial Revival, providing an intimate glimpse into the life of a pioneer collector of America and founder of the Shelburne Museum. The home was in the Webb family until 2000 when the structure and its contents were acquired by the museum. Following a 4.4 million dollar campaign by the museum to restore the home to Mrs. Webb's decor, the museum was recognized by Preservation Trust of Vermont in 2005 for their efforts in preserving the Brick House. Since 2004, it has been open to the public by reservation for guided tours during the summer months.

The closing of one of the Webbs' other homes, this one near the polo grounds at Old Westbury, unintentionally birthed a museum. The question of what would become of her cigar store Indians, hunting decoys, and weather vanes had to be settled. In 1947 Electra Havemeyer Webb gathered with her friends to create Shelburne Museum. Located on U. S. Route 7 in Shelburne, Vermont, Webb's museum became a haven for the handmade objects of another era. A two hundred year old tavern shelters one of the finest collections of weathervanes, trade signs, and primitive portraits on the continent. A rambling old farmhouse is filled with spectacular assemblages of mochaware, pewter, and staffordshire. The finest collection of carriages and sleighs in North America rests in a unique horseshoe barn. Period homes, filled with outstanding collections of early American furniture and accessories, dot the grounds. Rather than confine her eclectic collections to a single modern gallery, Webb chose to create an institution that would showcase her "collection of collections" in fine examples of early American homes and public buildings. A general store, meeting house, log cabin, and a steamship dot the grounds. The entire museum reflects Electra Webb's passion for American art and design, as she treasured a variety of objects. Five rooms from her Park Avenue apartment were installed in a memorial building after her death in 1960, bringing Webb's collection of works by Monet, Manet, and Degas to the museum grounds. A large pastel by Mary Cassatt, showing a young Electra Havemeyer with her mother Louisine, enjoys a place of honor in the entry hall. Electra Havemeyer Webb began to collect "in earnest" in 1911, more than a decade before the founding of Colonial Williamsburg and nearly a half century before authentic American antiques would return to the major rooms of the White House. When she began to gather the remnants of an earlier America there was no National Register of Historic Places. Americans had yet to understand that their heritage was interesting and worthy of preservation. Before there was Henry Francis du Pont's Winterthur, Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, or even the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Webb was an ambitious and well known collector of Americana. She worked with the finest antique dealers of the era, including Edith Halpert and Harry Newman, to assemble encyclopedic and irreplaceable collections of American material culture. The honesty of everyday objects spoke to Webb, and she used her significant resources to ensure their preservation. Today the museum's Americana collection is one of the world's finest.

Electra's parents in law Dr. William Seward Webb and Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt had transformed a collection of rambling lakeside farms on the shore of Vermont's Lake Champlain into a model country estate. The core of property, the Shelburne Farms, survives today as a nonprofit foundation dedicated to fostering innovative agricultural practices. Recalling her first visit to the Webb estate as a young girl, Webb declared: "I felt as though I was in dreamland"; she was smitten by the beauty of Vermont's Champlain Valley. On the Webb estate she enjoyed horseback riding, the 113 foot steam yacht and one of America's first private nine hole golf courses. The pastoral landscape and lush grounds of Shelburne Farms would be replicated at Electra Havemeyer Webb's museum. Shelburne Museum is well known for its fine collection of lilacs, peonies and New England perennials.