Continuing on with our tour of the crazy-fabulous Shelburne Museum (see here for Part 1), we came up the Pet Friendly The Art of Stephen Huneck exhibit. As we walked in I thought, “something about this is very familiar” before realizing that later in the week we were planning to go to Dog Mountain, Huneck’s studio and site of his famous Dog Chapel.
It was nice to see this exhibit with movie about Dog Mountain in advance of that visit. I really liked Huneck’s sense of humor/sense of reality about living with pets! The cover photo is also Huneck’s work (Hanging Winged Cat), and of course I had to take a picture of a black cat with angel wings, it having been just four weeks since we’d lost our awesome Mr. K.
This is called Hello Molly, Hello Sally — ha ha!
Mast of the Universe.
The recreated Manchester, Vt., studio of Ogden Minton Pleissner (1905-1983), an American landscape and sporting painter.
Pleissner’s work Fences, date unknown.
The 1773 Prentis House is part of the Shelburne Museum collection to “serve as a representative colonial home”. However…
…our tour guide explained that what this actually is is a romanticized version of what Colonial life was life. If you look at the rich details in this room, it’s clear your average colonist wasn’t living like this. The house was laid out by Katharine Prentis Murphy; apparently much of her work at other museums has been dismantled due to how unrealistic it is. What a weird museum item this is!
The house’s interiors feature William and Mary furniture, English delftware, stumpwork embroideries, and crewelwork bed hangings. Look at the beautiful detail on this chest of drawers. Yep, just your average farmer!
Just your average Colonial farmer’s dining room, complete with delft china on the walls and mantle piece, and a display rack of very expensive pewter.
Stencil House was built around 1804, and apparently it was popular at the time for itinerant stencilers to knock on your door and offer their services. Look at the amazing stencil work in this room!
Cabinet in the Stencil House.
The stenciling in this house was well-preserved under a layer of wallpaper; in the back of this picture is a brown rectangle on the wall that shows what they discovered when they removed the wallpaper.
At another exhibit in the Shelburne Museum (I lost track of where) was this kit of itinerant stenciler Stillman Taylor, who traveled Massachusetts and New Hampshire from 1825 to 1840 looking for work.
Of course Mrs. Webb (Shelburne Museum’s founder) had an extensive collection of bandboxes, so there were multiple rooms displaying them. These are so fancy, but I especially love the red-striped interior, in which there is more storage inside the hat itself!
These quilts are from the mid-1800s.
According to its website, the Shelburne was the first museum to exhibit quilts as works of art. Their collection includes woven coverlets (hey, we went to a museum devoted to coverlets!), needlework, hooked rugs, and printed fabrics from the eighteenth century to the present. Their quilt collection is one of the largest in the country.
Circa 1825.
Y’all, I am not kidding, this museum has a bit of everything! We stumbled upon a room of miniature dioramas by Helen Bruce. Most of them were commissioned by Mrs. Webb, who apparently loved collecting so much she hired artists to make things for her to collect.
Mr. Darcy, is that you? The details in the dioramas were extraordinary!
Mrs. Webb was one of the earliest collectors of American Folk Art, and her collection is considered one of the finest in the nation; it is housed in a former stagecoach inn.
The Shelburne Museum has 1,400 wildfowl decoys, thought it felt more like several million by the time we were done walking through the many many rooms (on two floors) of displays. It is yet another collection that is among the “largest and finest” in the country, but to me it is just more proof of how over-the-top the Shelburne Museum experience can be!
Other buildings we popped into included: General Store (1840) and Apothecary Shop (pictured), an 1890 jail, an 1840 meeting house, an 1840 shaker shed, and a weaving shop. Did I mention there were a bunch of other buildings we didn’t go into? And did I say just say “wow!” again!
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