Incollect Magazine - Issue 3

2022 Incollect Magazine 121 numbers more than 1,200, 400 of which were acquired in 1952 from Joel Barber, a New York City architect, artist, and carver, was among the first to promote decoys as a uniquely American art form with his 1934 book, Wild Fowl Decoys. Setting a Pattern Shelburne Museum’s extraordinary textile collection interweaves intricately stitched pieces from across states and centuries. Electra Havemeyer Webb helped pioneer the study of American textiles and was among the very first to exhibit them as works of art. She was attracted to their bold, graphic patterns, intense colors, and imaginative combinations of design elements, often whimsical and out of scale. The still-growing collection she began at Shelburne is remarkable in its size and quality and includes quilts, woven coverlets, needlework, hooked rugs, and printed fabrics from the 18th century to the present. The fact that a woman championed the cause of textiles as an art form was very apropos, considering that women handcrafted many of the historic and contemporary items in the museum’s textile collection. In the 18th and 19th centuries, most women were expected to craft the bedclothes, draperies, and apparel their homes and families required. The quilts and other bedcoverings that women created were a critical necessity in poorly heated early American homes. Many of these functional pieces are part of the museum’s collection of more than 600 American-made quilts today. The museum’s quilts are world renowned for their exceptional variety and high quality (Fig. 10). The collection focuses on New England and Northern states, but it also includes other distinctive examples, including quilts from the South and Midwest as well as the Amish and Mennonite communities of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Featured techniques in the collection include album, appliqué, chintz, crazy, pieces, whitework, and whole-cloth. The diversity Fig. 9: Captain Charles Christopher Osgood, Osgood Canada Goose Decoys, ca. 1849. Wood, paint, metal, and leather. Gift of Mrs. P.H.B. Frelinghuysen (1953-301.5, 4 & 3). Photography by RL Photo. of methods and materials demonstrates not only the richness and variety of quilting traditions across time but also the creative possibilities of building and expanding upon them. Museum visitors can enjoy rotating exhibitions of the quilts, in addition to hooked rugs, woven coverlets, and samplers in the Dana-Spencer Textile Galleries. Most of the pieces in these collections were produced in 19th-century New England. Notable 20th-century examples include a remarkable group of 50 statehood rugs by Molly Nye Tobey (1893–1984) and a collection of contemporary hooked rugs by Patty Yoder (1943–2005). A Whimsical Experience Mrs. Webb’s circus collection provides an overview of circus and childhood material culture. She was so delighted with her acquisition of the miniature Arnold Circus Parade in 1959 that she had an utterly unique, horseshoe-shaped building designed to display it. The parade extends nearly the entire 518-foot length of the Circus Building. In time, that same building has come to house many additional circus acquisitions as well, including the Kirk Bros. Circus, a 3,500-piece carved miniature three-ring circus with an audience. The collections also include more than 500 historic circus posters from Barnum and Bailey, Ringling Brothers, and other major shows. Historically, circuses and carousels did not have much to do with one another. However, both carousels and circuses were popular entertainments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and both were highly sensory experiences — a whirl of color, movement, and glittering surfaces, accompanied by music. Mrs. Webb surely responded to these visual qualities in the circus- themed objects she acquired for her museum. In that sense, it seems perfectly logical that the Circus Building today also contains approximately 40 different turn-of-the-century carousel figures made by the Gustav Dentzel Carousel Company of