Incollect Magazine - Issue 3

2022 Incollect Magazine 119 Nevertheless, Mrs. Webb followed her father’s example and continued to collect items that appealed to her regardless of popular opinion. Driven by the visual appeal as much as the history and value of potential acquisitions, she joked about not being able to hold back when it came to acquiring new things. But in fact, Mrs. Webb collected quite strategically and with great foresight, and she assembled her American paintings collection with the intention of juxtaposing well-known American artists with lesser-known painters. Her relationships with art dealers like Edith Halpert, who displayed both folk art and American modernist works at her Downtown Gallery in New York City, greatly influenced Mrs. Webb’s collecting. Ultimately, Mrs. Webb built an impressive and thoughtfully curated American paintings collection that tells an abundance of stories about American life and culture. Art of the People Electra Havemeyer Webb was one of the earliest collectors of American folk art, or art crafted by ordinary people who used and lived with the objects they made. She noted later in life that she “wanted to collect something that nobody else was collecting. . . . At that time, nobody wanted Americana, so I started buying and I’ve never stopped.” Mrs. Webb traveled throughout New England in search of folk art, and by the 1940s she was buying from such prominent dealers as Edith Halpert at the Downtown Gallery in New York City. Shelburne Museum’s pioneering collection of 18th- and 19th-century American folk art is one of the finest in the nation and is currently being reinterpreted in historic Stagecoach Inn, which reopened to the public this year following a conservation project. Examples of painted furniture (Fig. 6), weathervanes (Fig. 7),