Vermont Craft and Cuisine - Day 4, Part 1: The Shelburne Museum
Originally published at BlackTabi Blog. You can comment here or there.
The first thing we did on Thursday was to head back to Shelburne to visit the Shelburne museum. I don’t actually have any photos of the museum. It was hot, I was still sort of sleepy, and we spent much of our time in exhibits that didn’t allow photography anyway.
Going into it without having read much about the museum, I was expecting it to be sort of centered around recreations of old Vermont historic sites. I figured out pretty quickly that I’d completely underestimated the place as I looked over the map. The museum itself was founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb, and actually consists of 39 buildings. Many of the buildings are actual historic buildings that were relocated to the museum grounds and arranged in a sort of village complete with rolling landscape and gardens. Others are recreations or built to house specific collections.
The first building we visited, the Kalkin House, is a piece of contemporary architecture assembled out of old shipping containers. Stark and modern, both inside and out, it’s a small self-contained condo like space. I’m not sure if it was just the heat, but while I liked a lot of the design it seemed dusty and hot and not very pleasant, but I liked looking at all of the innovative design (the kitchen island had a bunch of refrigerated drawers for storing food instead of a standalone fridge!).
Next, we made our way to the Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building. This building is interesting because it’s constructed to look like a Greek Revival style building from the outside, but it was craftily designed to house six rooms from Mr. and Mrs. Webb’s Park Avenue penthouse in New York. Because of this, the collection shown in the building includes furniture from their home as well as part of their collection of impressionist art. I surprised myself by being able to pick out pieces by Rembrandt, Mary Cassatt, and a handful of others - I must have studied a unit on the impressionists at some point that stuck with me.
Thinking that it have been a happy coincidence to have stumbled across an air conditioned building, we poured over the map to consider which other buildings might also have air conditioning to protect their precious content. We noted that the Webb Gallery, the next building over, was showing a photography exhibit featuring Ansel Adams and a landscape photographer I hadn’t heard of, Edward Burtynsky, and made a bee-line for it. It’s probably blasphemous for me to say this, but what I really enjoyed about this exhibit was the juxtaposition of the two photographers work rather than just the fact that we got to see a bunch of Ansel Adams works up close and personal. The way the exhibit is designed, there are many rooms featuring AA’s work, a tribute to the beauty of nature unsullied by humans. Every now and again, the flow of pristine black and white prints is interrupted by a room of Burtynsky’s work - gigantic full-color prints of places in nature that have been deeply changed by human hands. Huge pictures of oil fields, stripped quarries, and other images of human destruction scream from the walls with a sort of savage beauty in contrast to the sedate photos of pine trees and rock formations. To add to the environment of the exhibit, now and again a display case pops up holding a few blades of grass, a chunk of granite, or other artifacts from the natural world. Overall, it was an extremely moving exhibit that really caused me to pause and ponder the beauty of the untouched landscape in contrast with the strange and otherworldly beauty shown in places of great human destruction.
Inspired by curiosity, we headed next to the general store and apothecary shop nearby. These turned out to be a few of the historic buildings that have been transported to the museum site. The general store had been built as the Shelburne post office in 1840, and was relocated to the museum in 1952. The shop itself was very hot and close inside, but filled with fascinating items. Browsing the wares, I thought back to shop visits I’d read about in books by Laura Ingalls Wilder or Louisa May Alcott and could easily see why a trip to the store in town was such a big deal. Even I, living in this age, saw a fair number of buttons, trims, combs and baubles that caught my eye. We moved on to the apothecary shop next door and giggled over some of the remedies and powders, then upstairs to shudder at the historic dental implements.
After our brief foray back in time, we burst out onto the porch for a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, we quickly realized that the hot, breeze-less air didn’t hold much promise of relief, so we again consulted the map for buildings likely to have climate control. We took a quick walk over to the Beach Gallery which is currently housing Tally Ho! The Art and Culture of the Fox Hunt. Probably not an exhibit that would have been the first on my list had it not been for the air conditioning, we did have a nice look around at the paintings and riding outfits. Matt decided that had he been an gentleman of the times, he would have rather enjoyed the sport. We decided that Isaac probably would have enjoyed the large families of dogs owned by fox hunting families - we saw a few paintings of masters pictured with their dozens of hounds frolicking at their feet.
Our final stop at the museum was the Circus Building. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the building was shaped like a horseshoe on the map, which was interesting in itself. Inside, we found the entirety of the hand-carved Arnold Circus Parade. Build on a one-inch to one-foot scale, the intricate model boasts 3500 pieces assembled along the length of the 518 foot building (the parade after which the collection is modeled is reputed to have been two miles long). The horseshoe shape was evidently chosen so that nobody would see the end of the “parade” before they actually reached the end. As the parade figurines curve around one wall, a stream of memorabilia, circus posters and photographs lines the opposite wall. Included in the collection are bottles of meticulously recreated circus scents (popcorn, cotton candy and lemonade…we did note that all of the smells appeared to be pleasant. No eau de gorilla or giraffe cage in the lot), and advertisements for the circus side show characters.
After the circus building, we only had a bit of time before needing to meet back with our group, so we spent the remaining time looking at the various items available in the museum gift shop at the front of the museum grounds (museum gift shops are the best for interesting browsing!). The museum itself is enormous, and we only saw a small part of the available exhibits. I’m looking forward to going back on our next swing through Vermont to see some of the things we missed on this trip (and hopefully in cooler weather). This is definitely a site you’ll want to visit several times in order to take everything in.