Painting a Nation

Electra Havemeyer Webb assembled Shelburne Museum s trove of American paintings in the late 1950s, creating a renowned and rich survey of American portraits, landscapes, marine paintings, sporting art, still lifes, and genre scenes from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. During an era that preferred European modernism and abstraction, Webb s visionary endeavour presented a new story of the United States: an attractive and industrious nation with its own valuable artistic traditions. This hand