Museum founder, born in New York City, New York, USA, the daughter of Louisine Elder Havemeyer. She studied at a commercial college, learned outdoor sports from her father, and married J Watson Webb in 1910. Immensely wealthy, the couple lived in New York City and Westbury, Long Island. They settled in Shelburne, VT (1949), building a house on the Webb land holdings. Two years earlier, Electra had founded the Shelburne Museum, a centre for American folk art, paintings, and crafts. She collected numerous artifacts and buildings, which she reconstructed on site. Considered an important resource of Americana, the Shelburne Museum was personally supervised by her until her death.
Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960) was an american art collector and founder of the Shelburne Museum. His collection later became the foundation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's European Impressionist collection. Electra's in-laws, Dr. William Seward Webb and Lila Vanderbilt Webb had transformed their family's Vermont property into a model agricultural estate, the Shelburne Farms.
Electra Havemeyer Webb saw the art in workaday objects, and collected items such as hunting decoys, weather vanes, crockery, and quilts. Wishing to share her collections with the public, Webb established the Shelburne Museum on the southernmost portion of the Webb family's Shelburne estate. Her grandson is John Wilmerding, a graduate of Harvard who teaches art history at Princeton and is considered to be one of the finest art historians in the country, with his particular field of expertise being 19th century American painting.
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