Monet, Corot, and American folk art in Shelburne, Vermont

If you love art but don’t drive out of your way to find it, you aren’t ever likely to wander into the Shelburne Museum. It’s out in the country in northern Vermont, a few miles south of Burlington, at least a couple of hours from where you might be vacationing in the Berkshires, the Adirondacks, or the White Mountains.  It’s also the sort of country where the signs say “Bear Crossing” instead of “Deer Crossing.”  We made it our last stop on a weekend driving vacation in New England.

The entrance to the Shelburne Museum doesn't really suggest what's beyond.

Even though there’s plenty of art to see; the Shelburne Museum isn’t really an art museum; it’s an American cultural history museum, akin to the Genesee Country Museum, near Rochester, or Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. Its collections are exhibited in thirty buildings on a sprawling campus that also has plenty of well-tended gardens; it was with some difficulty that we persuaded the wife of our bosom, who gardens, to stop picking the flowers and take pictures instead. A day at the Shelburne requires good walking shoes. If you run out of steam, you can find a bench and wait for the wandering shuttle to take you to the next exhibit you want to see, or back to the entrance.

The place is rich with artefacts of everyday life before the 20th century — a collection of old quilts, a covered bridge, a general store, an 1890 stationmaster’s office, a steamboat that used to cruise nearby Lake Champlain, and so on. Not understanding what we were in for, we didn’t allow ourselves nearly enough time. We devoted the couple of hours that we had mostly to the buildings that featured fine art.

Art lovers like us will probably want to make a beeline for the Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building, which looks like a small version of a Newport mansion and contains a modest but superb collection of 19th-century works by Monet, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Corot, and Remington. These formerly belonged to Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer, a 19th-century robber baron (sugar) who spent much of his fortune assembling a stupendous art collection. Louisine and H.O. gave most of it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but some of the best pieces passed to their daughter Electra Havemeyer Webb, who had a summer home in Shelburne. It is Electra’s varied collections that fill the exhibits at the Shelburne Museum.

The most dramatic of five Monet paintings was a large, glittering The Ice Floes (Les Glacons) (see just above). We were even more pleased with the Corots. There are none of his silver-gray landscapes, but the Shelburne does have several exceptional figure paintings by Corot, including a pre-Freudian Bacchante with a Panther.  On the walls of a room that reproduces Electra’s Park Avenue penthouse bedroom are several Degas pastels of dancers.

Our time at the Shelburne was made especially pleasant by the friendly folk who served as security guards. At most museums the people in uniform seem profoundly ignorant — you won’t get anything but a blank stare if you ask somebody at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art to direct you to the Matisses. But the senior citizens who watch over the collections at the Shelburne — volunteers? — not only know all about the Havemeyer family, but also a lot about the paintings and other exhibits. We like talking art with people.

One building is given to the works of a minor American regionalist painter, Ogden Pleissner, whom we first encountered a few years ago at the Canajoharie Art Museum (see this post), whose oil paintings and pastels remind you of both Homer and Hopper. In another building, the Stagecoach Inn, we found a smile-provoking collection of American folk art — sculpture, decorated furniture, and fancy rugs, as well as paintings. Many of these works are anonymous, and their creators probably didn’t even think of themselves as artists. But there are familiar names as well, including Grandma Moses, Edward Hicks (one of his versions of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians is here), and Erastus Salisbury Field. We were especially delighted with Field’s The Garden of Eden, a deliciously impossible landscape.

The Vermont shore as seen from the ferry

We never did figure out where the Shelburne Museum was exhibiting the other works of American art that it is supposed to own, including paintings by Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Fitz Henry Lane, Thomas Cole, and Eastman Johnson, because we ran out of time. It was nearly sunset on a gorgeous day when we pulled onto the ferry that is carrying cars, for free, to New York State across Lake Champlain from Chimney Point, Vermont while they’re replacing the bridge.

A final visit to the Barnes Foundation in Merion

Our wife rightly rebuked us for saying that Renoir's 1886 painting "Garden Scene in Brittany" (Gallery IX at the Barnes Foundation), reminded us, just a little, of Thomas Kinkade's schlock art

We visited the City of Brotherly Love last month mainly to see the “Late Renoir” exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but also to make one last visit to the Barnes Foundation before its fabulous art collection left Merion forever. (Emsworth reviewed the dismal circumstances surrounding that impending move, and put the blame where it belonged, in this post.) Of course, the Barnes is awash in Renoirs, especially late Renoirs, and we couldn’t help noticing that the ones at the Barnes were every bit as fine, in quantity and in quality, as the late Renoirs that the PMA gathered from all over the world for the special “Late Renoir” exhibit. (The Barnes has a strict policy against lending works to other museums, which must have frustrated the daylights out of the curators of the PMA exhibit.)

Corot: "Woman Reading" (Grand Gallery at the Barnes Foundation)

On this visit to the Barnes we purposely devoted more time to works we’d had to rush past on previous visits. Amidst the riches of Cezannes, Picassos, and Matisses, we hadn’t paid much attention on previous visits to the sprinkling of earlier masters — El Greco, Hals, Gerard David, Titian, Goya, Courbet, and Corot – throughout the galleries. What pleased us most this time was a first-rate King David Playing the Harp, in Gallery V, for which we have unfortunately been unable to find a digital image. (The Barnes continues to prohibit all photography; we wonder if that will change when the pictures are in their new quarters.)

Horace Pippin: "Giving Thanks" (Gallery XII at the Barnes Collection)

And while we had the impression that Albert Barnes didn’t think much for American art, this time around we noticed more of it than we remembered. Particularly appealing were three gentle domestic scenes by Horace Pippin from the early 1940s, surely some of his very best pieces. Seen in person, these have more of a layered, almost collage-like appearance than a two-dimensional image will suggest. Pippin had no formal art training, and we suppose Barnes, who had a strong patronizing streak, put Pippin in the same category as the untrained French artist Henri Rousseau, whose work Barnes collected extensively.

A wonderful Picasso from his Rose Period, "Figures with a Goat" (Gallery XXIII at the Barnes Collection)

We much prefer Pippin to the French painter. His paintings have depth and solidity and human feeling; the nonsensical fantasy paintings of Rousseau don’t. In fact, we don’t really care for Rousseau at all; he didn’t get perspective and his figures are oddly proportioned. On this visit we noticed that Barnes also collected the self-taught painter John Kane, who painted, of all things, scenes of Pittsburgh.

William Glackens: "Bathing Scene" (Gallery XII at the Barnes Collection)

We knew already that the Barnes Foundation had paintings by Albert Barnes’s friend William Glackens, the American impressionist, but we didn’t remember as many of them as we saw this time around. Also jumping out at us for the first time, scattered here and there, were a couple of paintings by one of our very favorite American impressionists, Ernest Lawson, he of the thick layers of paint and the jewel-toned palette.

Amedeo Modigliani: "Nude - Mahogany Red" (Gallery XXI at the Barnes Foundation)

Several galleries on the second floor at the Barnes were already closed in anticipation of the collection’s moving to downtown Philadelphia next year; only as we were driving home did I start remembering some of the paintings that we didn’t see, like Matisse’s in-your-face Fauve portrait, The Red Madras Headress.  We were told the Barnes will stay open into next spring (2011), although more and more galleries will be closed in the intervening months.

One thing we do know: the new home of the Barnes Collection won't be sitting on acres of lawns and gardens, as it has for decades

We wonder what the Barnes Collection will really be like in its new home when it opens in 2012.  Supposedly the galleries as they are now at the mansion in Merion will be recreated in the new building so that the paintings, sculptures, and decorative pieces can all be arranged once more exactly as Albert C. Barnes dictated.

Matisse: "Seated Odalisque" (Gallery XIX at the Barnes Foundation)

Averse to change as we are, we suppose that’s a good thing — although after a number of visits to the Barnes we’ve concluded that the paintings are not best appreciated hung so close together, with so many on a given wall.  The eye tends to wander too easily from one painting to the one next to it, even when you’d rather stay focused.

And too many of the paintings are hung so high that you can’t examine them at close range — and others are off in corners so that you can see them only from one angle. It must also be said that the light in some of the galleries is inadequate; if anything changes at the new location, we hope it will be refinements in the lighting system.

We also have to wonder: will it really be possible for more people to see Barnes’s collection in the new location?  In our most recent visits to the Barnes, the galleries seemed to be crowded to capacity.  Without putting the collection in larger galleries and hanging the pictures farther apart – neither of which seems likely to happen – the Barnes won’t be able to let in more patrons at any given time than it does now.  They’ll be able to attract more patrons only by keeping its doors open longer hours and more days.  More patrons and more revenue are surely necessary if the Barnes is to stop losing money as it has in Merion; we can’t imagine that operating expenses at the new downtown facility will be much lower. 

This congenial domestic scene, "The Luncheon", is perhaps our favorite Renoir at the Barnes Foundation (Gallery XIII)

Our final visit to the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania was the pleasantest.  We made our reservations through a friendly, chatty phone lady; inside, we didn’t run into any of the surly security and crowd-control people that we’d seen in the past.  Finally — too late to matter — the Barnes Foundation has learned a little about public relations. 

Why are they moving? See this post.