Luigi Lucioni, Shelburne House, 1937. Private collection. The painting was commissioned by Electra Havemeyer Webb, founder of the Shelburne Museum. It may have been to memorialize her mother-in-law, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, who died in 1936. I became familiar with Luigi Lucioni (1900-1988) while covering art auctions and shows in Boston for Maine Antique Digest, but I had never seen such great examples in person until I went to the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, for the Lucioni retrospective exhibit on view there through mid October. Since we were staying at the Inn at Shelburne Farms, I was naturally drawn to this rendering of the place by the Italian immigrant (he arrived here at age eleven) who is associated both with Vermont and New York. Designed by Robert H. Robertson, the Queen Anne style manse was completed in 1899 for William Seward Webb and his wife, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb. With grounds landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, the 3,800-acre estate was originally meant to be a "model farm" for the breeding of Hackney horses for Vermont farmers. Today it's still a working farm. In the dining room, the manager told us, about eighty percent of the foods served are sourced from the very place. That includes cheeses, which we saw being made in the dairy. You know you're in the right place when you see a guy using a scythe instead of a weed whacker to cut away tall grasses around the bases of trees. And this is no Williamsburg. He wasn't in period dress. He was just someone doing his job noiselessly in the twenty-first century.
The curve of Lake Champlain, with the inn in the distance, up on the hill.
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