Shelburne Museum

I have been to some great museums in my time. I was lucky enough to live for most of my life across the river from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The steps made famous in the movie "Rocky" make up the approach to this wonderful museum at the end of the Ben Franklin Parkway. It's in Fairmount Park, a beautiful tree-laden, statue filled park along the Schuylkill River in the City of Brotherly Love. It will always be one of my favorite museums. And Philadelphia is home to other world-class museums as well, like the Franklin Institute and the Rodin Museum.

As I said, I have been to a lot of great ones: the Louvre, the Musee D'Orsay, the Pompidou and others in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art and all of the other great museums of Washington, DC, MoMA and the Metropolitan in NYC, the Gibbes in Charleston, SC, the Uffizi and Accademia in Florence, Italy, Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey, the Vatican museums in Rome, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Huntington Library and the Getty Museum in California, the Tower of London. And so many others. Unlike my great friend Sharon, I LOVE museums.

But much like the Grounds for Sculpture museum near Trenton, NJ, I believe that Sharon would love the Shelburne. It is unique and one of the great museums that I have visited, and as you can see from the incomplete list above, I have been to a lot of the great ones.

Here is the link to visit the Shelburne online: http://www.shelburnemuseum.org/

But you should go there yourself. Here are some snapshots of my visit there last week with my sister Dana.

A nearly perfect rose in one of the Shelburne's many gardens.

Outside and inside the Ticonderoga, a side-wheel passenger steamboat built in 1906.












The Round Barn, built in 1901 and made famous by American folk artist Warren Kimble, in the distance while on the 1920's vintage carousel.












A lighthouse built in 1871 which now houses works by Warren Kimble. This American flag is my favorite.

This is just a taste of all there is to see at the Shelburne. Dana and I could not get into everything on our one day there. We purchased an annual membership as we need to go back to experience the rest of this great American museum. It is truly a Vermont treasure.