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Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building

Shelburne Museum’s world-renowned collection of French Impressionist masterpieces is exhibited in the Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building. The interior is a painstaking recreation of six rooms from Mrs. Webb’s 1930s Park Avenue apartment in New York City.

The structure is a Greek Revival design based on a house in Orwell, Vermont, that Mrs. Webb admired. After her death in 1960, her children built the gallery to fulfill her wish that her Impressionist paintings and decorative arts come to the Museum. The building was completed in 1967.

While other buildings on the Museum campus provide insight into Mrs. Webb’s mature interests as a collector, the Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building tells something of the forces that influenced her upbringing and personal life. The rooms are a formal combination of English, European, and Asian furniture and decorative objects as well as high-style American pieces, including an elegantly carved suite of furniture by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933).