The Very Best Place in Vermont; Or, More About Rich People Behaving Well

Continuing with my theme of superlatives (see "The Single Most Beautiful Teacup in the World" a few posts back), I return now to tell you about the Shelburne Museum, an international treasure tucked between Route 7 and Lake Champlain in the tidy, inviting village of Shelburne, Vermont.

We (kids and I) hauled down there from the Last House yesterday (only 90 miles from our house but a world away culturally). We went partly because it was "lilac day", or whatever the musuem marketing people called it, and because, like almost all Vermont children, my kids love it there and the lilacs made as good a reason as any to go again. There are hundreds of lilac trees on the grounds of the Museum and they are just about at their peak right now. It must be smelled to be believed. And as if that weren't enough, well. I'll let the pictures do(at least some of) the talking.


One Room (of many) in One Building (of many) at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont


This Summer, the Museum has a display of 19th century carousel animals in the Round Barn Where You Buy Tickets (Vermonters Get 1/2 price tickets - Thank You Mrs. McClure.Another Vermont benefactor putting her money to good use)..


Oh the Pottery! So many place settings and so much Staffordshire on display all over. Here's Blue Tea Pot extraordinaire picturing Lafayette at Benjamin Franklin's tomb (ca.1820). It's on display this summer at a minty little exhibition on Old/New, called Design/Rewind in the Vermont House. Jenny, are you paying attention?



The Shelburne Museum is the creation of Electra Havemeyer Webb (more on her below). Mrs. Webb had buildings of historical interest moved from where they were and reconstructed on the grounds of her museum. Every building, at least those that aren't serving as art galleries, is full of artifacts appropriate to the building.






Does anybody else remember that Werner Herzog movie, Fitzcarraldo? Klaus Kinski plays a European megalomaniac who forces South American Indians to drag a steamship over some mountains. I was forced to watch it in a film class in college. (That's what you get for taking film classes, I guess). Well, the Ticonderoga, which is an enormous and real old steamship, was dragged miles from Lake Champlain over specially built train tracks to rest on the grounds here. I was actively hostile at 20 to Herzog after Fitzcarraldo, but I have gotten over it. (I heard him interviewed about Grizzly Man a couple of times and he was so intelligent, but that's another post). Mrs. Webb was right to save this boat which is truly beautiful and a great favorite of us all.


I have been to the Museum many times but I always passed this little place by, until yesterday. It's called the Stencil House - see the interior shot below. Mrs. Webb saved it from demolition in Sherburne, New York. The stencilling is amazing. The nice white-haired lady who was staffing the place explained that itinerant artists some times came back year after year to finish a job (for a few dollars and room and board). There was an unusual chair in a bedroom that I remarked about. She explained that it was an "invalid chair" and that its sturdy construction with a high, barrel-shaped back and substantial arm rests could be used to tie in an old person who might not be able to sit up or might wander... The things you learn about history at a museum.





There's a nice, readable Wikipedia article about E Havemeyer Webb from which I culled the following:

Electra Havemeyer Webb began to collect "in earnest" in 1911, more than a decade before the founding of Colonial Williamsburg and nearly a half century before authentic American antiques would return to the major rooms of the White House. When she began to gather the remnants of an earlier America there was no National Register of Historic Places. Americans had yet to understand that their heritage was interesting and worthy of preservation. Before there was Henry Francis Dupont's Winterthur, Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, or even the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Electra Havemeyer Webb was an ambitious and well-known collector of Americana. She worked with the finest antique dealers of the era, including Edith Halpert and Harry Newman, to assemble encyclopedic and irreplaceable collections of American material culture. The honesty of everyday objects spoke to Mrs. Webb, and she used her significant resources to ensure their preservation. Today the museum's Americana collection is one of the world's finest.



Portrait of Mrs. Havemeyer and Her Daughter Electra. 1895. Pastel on paper, Mary Cassatt. This picture is on view at the EHW Memorial Building on the grounds of the museum and the photo comes from the EWH link at St. Michael's College to the right.

A few months ago I wrote here about my admiration for Paul Mellon and the National Gallery. Mrs. Webb had a pedigree as good as his and the money to match. Like him, she had a gift for collecting, which is its own kind of art form and not one that many can practice the way they did. (Oh, how I would love the chance!) They didn't collect the same things, which is probably a good thing for the museum-going public. (Remember MTV's celebrity smackdown with claymation figures? Havemeyer Webb v. Paul Mellon? I would laugh at it anyway).

OK. Kid 2 is clamoring for Club Penguin. Superlatives continue next time when we take up a discussion of the two best movies ever made, and, the two best scenes in the two best movies ever made. I can hardly wait.

Vermont in Bloom. At Last.

I took these pictures over the last few days. These first two are around the Last House.

Yesterday, I accompanied Kid 1, to the Vermont State House in our little capitol city, Montpelier. The tour was great; given by a Montpelier native with a flair for the dramatic. I learned some things I didn't know about state government and lots about state history. I saw a photograph of a famous civil war general at the Vermont Historical Society (Stannard is his last name, first name George, I think, they named a Vermont town after him once he got back). The photo was great, just a little portrait, but capturing something really haunting about him. I must remember to do some research. The statue is Vermont's own Ethan Allen.

The World in a Teacup

My favorite blogger is Juliet Doyle. See her blog, "Musings From A Muddy Island," (link to your right). I think we both found inspiration in my last teacup posting and her comments on them i.e.("The Single Most Beautiful Teacup in The World"). So, in what is either an inspired bit of blogging or a disgustingly cloying display of 40-something tweeness, I am back with a few of my favorites from the China cupboard. I just checked on "Musings" and Juliet has not yet got her teacup photos and commentary going. I have faith however, that between us we can reveal the true and worthy fascination (and fun) of the teacup. Are you still in on this Juliet?



Leading off my teacup show are a few of my favorites. I am particularly fond of the one with the pine cones on it. It's got an American feel(though made in England). The one with the gold rim is just so elegant - I felt underdressed and clumsy just holding it. The black and white pieces photographed on the old chair are from a box lot of 27 that I picked up at auction a couple of weeks ago. The pattern is "Minuet" by WM Adams & Son England and my guess is they are from the teens or '20s. They are a little unusual because they are black transferware, not the more usual blue. I love the pattern and the style and also that these are meant for everyday as "genuine English ironstone" (a.k.a., "clay") not fine china. The demitasse cup is particularly fetching.






These next few are not properly mine; my mother and her husband asked us to store them some years back. It appears likely that I will be their next custodian, however. (Teacups outlive their owners, which is one of the great and sort of scary things about them). The "May" teacup is a little too sweet, but unashamedly so and I think it pulls it off. The others are just plain refined; real emblems of the pinnacle of western civilization that tea drinking represents (at least some of the time - like those times you bother to go to the China cabinet and get out the good teacups).

I know entire books have been devoted to exploring the great and overlooked contributions to the world of the simplest things; an engineer called Henry Petroski published a book in the early 90s about the pencil: The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. Has the teacup book been written? I searched Amazon.com and didn't find it - maybe Juliet and I could take it on? Or maybe a blog post or two, or five, is enough.

The Single Most Beautiful Teacup (and saucer) In The World

Reading through this blog, I doubt one would get the idea that what I do for my real work (for which I get paid and have health insurance etc.) is to handle court matters involving the state custody of mentally retarded would-be felons, or that I used to prosecute crimes of domestic violence and sex assault. With a jobs like those, you wouldn't expect that what I find really exciting is spotting a bit of Royal Doulton or Mintons in a box lot at auction, or some old college pennants, or a drawing or painting or etching that looks like it came from the 1920s or '30s, or a tea cup on the shelf of a local antique store. But it's true. Garrison Keillor once wrote in a story that if you really want to get people talking, don't ask them about their jobs, ask them about their hobbies. I am glad to have my present job; we all need a paycheck and health insurance and at least it's not Dilbert work, but what really gets me going these days is treasure hunting.

A teacup!? you say. This blog is descending into old fashioned ladies-pages treacle. But isn't it true that a teacup, so often interpreted and by so many artisans (and artists), that it can be venerated as a work of art? This little survivor was sitting on the shelf yesterday at my favorite antique store in Waterbury, VT. The shop, called M. Lewis, is in an old corner block building in the center of downtown. Yesterday M(artha) Lewis was minding the store herself. She's in her upper 70s, I think, but age has not dimmed her charms. I love her stuff so much (an honorary 70-something myself?) I was keeping her store my little secret in the Blogospere til now. M. Lewis told me as I paid ($16) that she's just back from a 10-day trip to Scotland. Naturally we had a brief natter about the UK and the Isle of Sky (a place she says I should definitely go and visit. I agreed of course).

As for this cup, it was made by Rosenthal in occupied Germany, as the mark shows. I think it is decorated with real silver. I normally gravitate to English pottery but this, among a shelf of teacups, was irresistible. Art. Yes, why not. I read once that architects become famous for their ability to design a chair. In a chair you can find a design for a whole city. So, why not in a teacup?

Off to work. I have two status conferences this morning in cases I am working on but my big excitement for the day will be to get back to M. Lewis for a plate I saw yesterday... Stay tuned.

Motherly in May

The two who changed my status so absolutely and irrevocably and so happily, as they were around this time of year in 2001.



Mother and Mary
Edmund Charles Tarbell
American, 1862 - 1938
From the Collection of the National Gallery Art
oil on canvas, 112.1 x 127.5 cm (44 1/8 x 50 3/16 in.)
Gift of the Belcher Collection, Stoughton, Massachusetts

It's Mother's Day but I'll try not to go all banal on you. I picked this particular painting to show you (thanks to our National Gallery) because it wasn't Mary Cassat or Whistler. (Not that there's anything wrong with them, but I didn't want a picture that might have been co-opted at any point along the way by Hallmark or a museum gift shop as a Mother's Day card). I love what this one suggests about Motherhood, (capital "M" is intentional). It doesn't end when children get old enough to become company. Being a mother is, I have realized, my life's work. Having a mother, and trying to think about her and her contributions to all that is, is like trying to be objective about the existence of air and water. Sine qua non and all that. So, a bow today to to my mother and all mothers.

More Art from the Woolfoot Collection: A Painted Boy Like My Boy





Today's the day to post this image of my favorite painting. I bought it in a heartbeat when I saw it in an online art gallery about two years ago; of course I couldn't afford it (paid just under $500) but I had to have it because it called to me. It is marked on the stretcher, "Buddy 1940." Buddy, as we say in our house, does not look exactly like Kid 2, but the two boys look like they could be brothers. It was painted by the American artist Marian D. Harris. Here's the bit of bio on her available for free on AskArt.com:

Marian D. Harris (Married Robert M. Barton) 1904-1988.

She lived in Wilmington, Delaware from 1927-1932, and died in 1988 in Ventnor, New Jersey. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1922-1926 and at the PAFA's summer school at Chester Springs, PA in 1921-24 and in 1932. She was awarded the Cresson traveling scholarship in 1925. [After this bit you have to be a member to read more].

"Buddy" had passed through the hands of Freeman's Auctioneers in Philadelphia before he got to the retailer from whom I acquired him. (I researched the painting post purchase, of course). I don't think you can now acccess the archived catalog of the Freeman's sale of the work of Ms. Harris. There was a lot of it and I liked a lot of it, though none went to my heart like this one. I expect that a friend or or a family member of hers died and a whole passle of her paintings went on the block, where they sold quite cheaply. About a year or so after I got Buddy a Harris painting called "Janey," in a very similar frame, appeared on Ebay. Janey, to my eye, was not nearly so fetching as Buddy. I didn't bid but I did correspond with the eventual buyer. (She paid very little, maybe only about $100-$200, which would have been a cheap price for the frame alone). I think Buddy and Janey were sold as a lot by Freemans for under $200 - and "Janey" was the one that appeared in the catalog. I think if they had featured Buddy they would have done better.

The real boy and girl are clamoring for me to open the barn so they can drag out all the toys I tried to get rid of last fall. (WHusband instead insisted they be saved and stored in the barn.) Oh well. The joys of Motherhood.

In Other News

By the way, I found the other cup. I had put it in the cupholder in the minivan! What good thinking. Here are the two of them, together again, as they have been since 1880.

This Little Brown Cup and A Happy Day; Vermont, Town & Country

I spent my early married years and my first years as a lawyer in Burlington, Vermont and returned for another stint a year ago before our most recent retreat to the Last House. (We've had the Last House right along but for work reasons I have been pulled back and forth to Burlington these last 12 or so years). I love Burlington, the kids were born there and we had a little house there that I loved; if I had a trust fund I would keep a place there too but no trust fund forced a choice and the choice was for the Last House. Burlington is only an hour and a half away (not too bad by Vermont standards) and as it is never better than it is in these few weeks in May when the flowers and the flowering trees are first blooming I went down yesterday.

It was another "Mommy's Day Off" and the sun was shining. I had the mate to the above-pictured little brown cup in my bag (more on that presently). After dropping the kids at school, it was off to some discount shopping at the Christmas Tree Shop (no Christmas trees, just loads of discount merchandise) and then, even more fun, the Bailey Library at the University of Vermont.

UVM enjoys the best spot in the city, at the top of the hill that ends in Lake Champlain. I brought this cup, which I bought at auction in a box lot a few weeks ago, to do some research on the mark at the library. Mostly the cup provided an excuse to get into town on a beautiful day and to go to the library (I love all libraries, as you may know if you have been following along, and a big university library on a spring day, with all those 20 somethings studying [and not studying] took 20 years off me too for a little while at least).

Here are a few shots of UVM and Burlington as it appeared yesterday:






The research was highly satisfactory. I still don't know who made these cups (I have a pair) but I learned from the Town & Country Pocket Guide to China that is was made in 1860. Note that this is not the cup I brought with me. I was worried all day I would break it, but instead, I lost it. The rest of today is going to be spent cleaning the Last House, so I am hoping it will turn up. I know I put in the car... (My boss told me the other day that my nickname among my coworkers is "Lucy" as in "Lucy Ricardo"; I always seem to have some "splainin' to do.") The cup I had with me was made on April 12, 1860. Since I didn't have my UVM library card with me (Lucy!), I couldn't check the book out and I can't decode the month on this one without it. I think I'll scout around ADDALL Used books for my own copy. After tracking down that information, I spent another hour looking through a beautifully photographed book of English Pottery from the Fitzwillam Collection. Oscar and Hammerstein can have "raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles etc." Give me an old tea cup, a library, and time to myself; these are a few of my favorite things. Off to the Madhatter for a turkey sandwich and Old Navy for bargain fashion for Kid 1. Just great.

Back in the Country Today





This morning was grey and rainy, but when I got outside I found to my surprise that it was not cold. It was positively benign. This kind of soft spring day in this season of the year shows the countryside around here at its very best. I complain more or less constantly about having to drive so much for school and work. There is a silver lining, however, in the scenery that I roll passed. I am always rushing in the morning and don't have time to take pictures, but today I meandered back from school and the neighbor is doing pick up. This means that another day (for cleaning) stretches ahead (I love working part time!). So today, on the way home, I stopped in a couple of places that always catch my eye during my ride up Route 100 and snapped a few pictures for the record and your viewing pleasure. These were taken about an hour ago (9:30 AM or so) in Hyde Park, Westfield, and Troy, Vermont. This scenery is part of what keeps us from cashiering the Last House for some more ordinary place closer to work and civilization.

A Tale of Two Bike Paths; Vermont Communities Rich & Poor

People who aren't from Vermont often think of it as unitary and undifferentiated. Of course that's not true. Where ever there are three people you'll wind up with at least two groups. I didn't think of this when we bought our farm here 15 years ago. But I was young and stupid. Of course, Vermont is as socially stratified and divided into "desirable" and less desirable areas as anyplace else. Ask any real estate agent. Of course, because it is a genuinely quirky and idiosyncratic place, it attracts at people who have all kinds of ideas about what constitutes "desirable." Some of these people want to be alone, or in the small town atmosphere made famous in the old show, Northern Exposure. Some people have the E. Annie Proulx take on life - God save us from the kind of people who would only want to live in "nice neighborhoods." The town where the Last House is located is a lot the fictional Cicely, Alaska of Northern Exposure. No Stowe real estate agent would recommend it to a couple from New Jersey or Connecticut!

I have learned a lot from living in a place so much different from the New York suburban subdivision where I grew up. The village where we live now is a place I imagine would be approved by Annie Proulx. But most people from away (meaning the "flatlanders" who inhabit the rest of America) tend to want something a little more like home when they move here or even when they visit. That is one reason why Stowe, perhaps the most famous tourist destination in the state, is the way that it is. Stowe is home to Mount Mansfield, the State's tallest mountain, and the most famous ski resort in Vermont. It has been a tourist destination even before skiing, because of the mountain. It has been combed and groomed to appeal to outsiders: lots of second home owners, retirees, what have you. As a result, unlike almost every other town in Northern Vermont, it has a large tax base. It's transitory and permanent population demand cultural opportunities and at least a couple of places to get ethnic food beyond Chinese. It has rich people who want high quality services, plenty of police and fire protection in Stowe.

I love to go there because it has places that sell coffee and don't also sell gas. It is easy on the eyes. I accept that it is faux Vermont. Fine. A little faux goes a long way to make life in a poor state, a state that is still either the most or one of the most rural states in America, more interesting. One of the things I like best about Stowe is the Stowe Rec Path. I have blogged about it before but when I got back there the other day I had my camera with me and so now you can see how nice it is - and how "Stowe" it is. Check out the signs that greet the visitor within 30 feet of the parking lot. It's positively Swiss. Can you tell that the town fathers are really worried about dogs or dog poop?(And who can blame them?)





Newport, the Shire Town nearest to the Last House also has a bike path. It is gravel, not asphalt like Stowe, but it is gorgeous in its own way. It follows part of the shoreline of Lake Memphremagog, which is a beautiful lake. If you don't ask a native where it is, however, you would never know about it. I had lived here for years before I knew it existed and it's practically hidden. Also, when the rail line was converted to a bike trail, no one planned ahead for any parking. There is an office park at the head of the trail, but all the business owners have posted very unfriendly warnings: "no parking for bike path use!" The Stowe Rec path, by contrast, is very well marked and has several parking areas; it also has picnic areas, benches, and art installations along the route. Newport - well, someone put a picnic table in one place that seems to be available for public use. Your Stowe tax dollars at work.

Here are a few more pictures I took yesterday on my first Rec Path walk of the Spring. Next time I get to the Newport path I'll take some and give you a little more basis for comparison.





You handful of regular readers will note a few changes to the old Blog tonight. I like them. Somerset Maugham famously said "people ask for criticism but they only want praise." He was right. If you have some praise, leave me a comment. Otherwise, keep it to yourself.

Speaking of Dogs, Have I Mentioned England in this Post? No? OK. Hold On.

By way of a little postscript here, we went for a walk on our one morning in Bath during the England trip with our host. He goes on this walk every morning with his dog. He drops off the kids at their schools and then he and the dog go to a beautiful walking path on the outskirts of the city. He didn't bother with a leash at all. Bike riders, children going to school, other dogs, all much in evidence on this path. His dog went running over a soccer field next to the path that was marked with signs saying "Don't let your dog foul this field." (As near as I could tell, his dog didn't foul the field but it looked like just good luck). All the other dog owners we met had dogs off leash. The owners and the dogs greeted one another - the dogs making me nervous... Not under control, anything could happen! Of course I didn't say anything and it was clear to me that the only one who felt the least bit of anxiety about all these loose dogs was me. (Those Stowe signs had done their work). I suppose this is proof that the English really are a nation of dog lovers.


Here's a picture of our friend and his dog (note leashlessess)

And a shot of the view he took us to see on this little hike.