This first comprehensive survey of the life and work of Luigi Lucioni (1900 1988) places him in the context of fellow Regionalist painters Grant Wood, Charles Sheeler, and Maxfield Parrish. Lucioni is known for meticulously rendered still lifes, landscapes, and arresting portraits drawn from his close-knit circle of queer New York artists and cultural figures, including Paul Cadmus, Jared French, George Platt Lynes, and Lincoln Kirstein. In the early 1930s, Lucioni discovered Vermont, whose landscapes reminded him of northern Italy. It was there that he met Electra Havemeyer Webb, who was to become his single most important patron. For more than 50 years, the New York City based artist spent every summer painting landscapes of trees, barns, and buildings in Vermont with sharply observed realism and a cool, precise style. Key scholars examine Lucioni s oeuvre, materials, techniques, and his role in American modernism.

Bird decoys were used for hunting in North America until the advent of hunting regulations in the early twentieth century, when decoys started to be prized and collected as masterpieces of American folk art. This handsome book is the first examination of the historic and unparalleled decoy collection at Shelburne Museum. Featuring new photography of 250 of the museum s most important and artistically carved decoys, it includes examples made by the most respected American carvers: Charles Osgood, Lem and Steve Ward, John Blair, Bill Bowman, Nathan Cobb, Jr., Lee Dudley, James Holly, Jr., Nathan Horner, Albert Laing, Joseph Lincoln, A. Elmer Crowell, and Charles Shang Wheeler. The story of the collection begins with Joel Barber, the pioneer decoy enthusiast and New York architect, artist, and carver, whose gift of 400 superior examples established the collection in 1952. Several essays provide groundbreaking scholarship on the origins, construction, and attribution of bird decoys, imparting critical advancements to our modern understanding of this revered tradition.

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 handsome book features the best of Shelburne s American paintings, including works by colonial painters John Wollaston and John Singleton Copley, portraits by William Matthew Prior and Ammi Phillips, Hudson River School landcapes by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and John Frederick Kensett, and scenes of American life by Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and many more. The collection is also notable for its great depth in the works by Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Carl Rungius, Grandma Moses, and Ogden Pleissner.