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Boston, Massachusetts

The Ellis Antiques Show: Aging Beauty

by Jeanne Schinto

Everyone kept saying how beautiful the show was. They spoke the truth. Art dealer William Vareika of Newport, Rhode Island, brought a Martin Johnson Heade coastal scene of his part of the country that seemed as big as a movie screen; a viewer, transported, could imagine falling right into the middle of it.

We could have spent hours in the double booth of Cape Cod's Hyland Granby Antiques, reveling in the marine art and artifacts—the prisoner-of-war ship model, the paintings by James Buttersworth and Antonio Jacobsen, the John Haley Bellamy wood carving, the rare scrimshaw.

We're a fool for Victorian majolica, and Charles L. Washburne of Solebury, Pennsylvania, had brought some of his finest examples, including a Copeland monkey riding a tortoise's back, representing the fable about sloth and mischief.

There was, however, a problem. The 2006 Ellis Antiques Show on November 3-5, which took place, as it has for several years, inside the fanciful stone structure known as The Castle at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers, was almost as beautiful at the end as it was at the beginning.

The three-day sale followed a well-attended preview party that benefited the Ellis Memorial & Eldredge House and Massachusetts General Hospital's Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. Champagne glasses were clinked. Hors d'oeuvres were passed around. Industry stars, from a Keno twin or two to a full complement of Skinner staffers, stood in the crossroads of the wide, flower-bedecked aisles and exchanged bits of business gossip and news. Some people even shopped in the 35 beautiful booths.

But the truth is that on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, attendance was sparse, even by Boston standards, and sales for most dealers on those days were slow. We visited twice over the weekend, hoping each time that the light traffic and lack of obvious selling activity were anomalies. Now we know they weren't. "Quiet" was the kindest word most often used to describe the show's atmosphere. "Moribund" was the characterization of one who did not pull her punches.

"You go to a little show like [the ones in] Wilton [Connecticut], and they line up for early buying," another dealer said. "That show, in one day, probably gets more people than the Ellis gets for its entire run. When you consider what's going on [financially] in Boston and in its suburbs, you would think the show would be packed every day, but that just wasn't the case."

Is there a polite way of saying that the dowager, now 47 years old, is in need of a major transfusion in the form of new promotional ideas? Joscelyn "Josh" Wainwright of Keeling Wainwright Associates, who must defer to the committee on many of the show's most crucial decisions, would seem to agree. "It is a difficult proposition to effect change in Boston," he said diplomatically. "The advertising, the P.R., all these things—we applaud the efforts of the committee's current chairwoman, Cecily Colburn, to move ahead on them."

This was after we'd told him that we know someone who lives in a mini-Versailles in a Boston suburb, with several hundred thousand dollars worth of antiques in one room alone, but who, we learned a few days before the preview party, had never heard of the Ellis. This was despite her connections to the Boston arts scene, evidenced by the fact that she planned to host a museum curator from the Midwest that weekend. Both of them had been invited to an event at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

To its credit, the committee does seem aware that collecting interests have changed and that they had best keep current with them. "As times goes on, the people who are collecting are different," said Wainwright. "The collectors of twenty years ago are dead. And even their children, who grew up with the material, are either interested in newer things or in other things. And if their parents are still alive, they're waiting to inherit the earlier stuff." In light of this reality, Wainwright said he has encouraged the committee to add new material, different material. "That's why the O'Briens were in."

Wainwright's reference was to new exhibitors Stephen B. O'Brien Jr. and his wife, Cinnie, the Boston dealers who specialize in antique bird decoys and American sporting paintings. "We've been trying to get them into the show for quite some time. And the only thing we really don't like about them is that they're so young, good looking, and knowledgeable," he said.

Indeed, the O'Briens' booth was a popular gathering point on preview party night, during the first hour of which they sold a Frank W. Benson ink wash on paper, whose asking price, said Steve, was "slightly over fifty thousand dollars."

Wainwright also added to the show's dealer roster this year a seller of leather-bound classics, Imperial Fine Books, New York City. Happily, it was difficult to get a moment with Imperial's Bibi Mohamed; her booth always seemed to be crowded, as if everyone at the show at any particular moment was jammed into her booth alone. Finally, on Saturday we spoke to her. This was after we waited while she sold, among other things, Winston Churchill's The Second World War (1948-54) to someone who said he lived ten blocks away. The six-volume set was listed as $14,500 in her catalog.

"This is actually our first good selling day," Mohamed said. Her hordes were mostly lookers. "But we're pleased as first-timers. We've always wanted to do the Ellis, and we're so happy that Josh called us. I love Boston. Its bookishness reminds me of London. We'll definitely be back next year."

Another dealer who did well despite the odds was Robert Lloyd of Robert Lloyd Inc., New York City, who specializes in American and English silver. He had brought Boston material to the show, including a circa 1740 John Burt porringer and a Rufus Farnam cup dated 1806 that commemorated the 20th wedding anniversary of John and Sarah (Howe) Barnes of Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Lloyd didn't sell either of those items, but he did sell a different porringer, by Rhode Island's Jonathan Clarke, as well as a tankard by Burt, along with other pieces of English, Irish, and American silver, several 18th-century English wine glasses, and an 18th-century Dutch brass tobacco box. A pleased Lloyd told us that he sold not only a broad range of objects but in a broad price range, from $1000 to $20,000.

Priscilla Boyd Angelos of Irving & Dolores Boyd, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, whose wares are American and English, had her own success story to tell, and a few words of advice to fellow dealers about price points. For, isn't it another hard truth that when and if the committee does get a crowd like those of yesteryear to attend the Ellis, it will surely include people who will want to learn why antiques cost as much as they do—even if they are people with fat wallets? (Many of those new people may already know about auctions, like the one at Skinner's Boston gallery a couple of blocks away from The Castle, where more than $4 million worth of material was sold during the Ellis's run, some of it high-flying, but some of the rest going at wholesale.)

"I sold eighteen chairs, three different sets of six; two sets were Windsors; the third was formal," Angelos said. "I also sold an eighteenth-century oval chair table that was huge, six feet by four feet, and a tiger maple slant-front desk. I had someone look at my desk, which was ten thousand dollars, and the desk in the [C.L. Prickett's] booth, which was thirty thousand, and they asked me what the difference was. I said, 'If you have the money, that's a far better desk than mine.' This was a young couple, twenty-five years old. I don't have the quality that some of the dealers have, but I'm right in my little niche, and I do fine with it."

Angelos was aware that a few dealers in her section of the show didn't do well. "But I definitely feel I try to price right and move things," she said. "It's too long and hard of a week to come home not having sold." In addition to competitive pricing, Angelos stressed the simple power of her presence. "The things don't quite sell themselves as easily as they have in years past. Another dealer asked me to lunch, but I can go out to lunch when I get home. You'd better be there to deliver your sales pitch. I sold to new customers and also to very supportive committee members. But you must be vigilant."

The committee member who bought from her stopped by her booth more than once before he found her free to accept his check, Angelos said. Angelos stands in contrast to the dealer who, on Young Collectors' Night, roped off his booth and left the premises.

Another young group, the students from Boston's North Bennett Street School, where cabinetmaking and other handcrafts have been taught since 1885, traditionally is invited to come to see the show on Friday. They like to examine the construction of the furniture. William Ralph of Newbury, Massachusetts, who was helping out in the booth of R.M. Worth, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, said the students were particularly interested this time in Worth's circa 1830 Philadelphia cylinder desk ($28,800), which they were able to compare to New York City dealer Carswell Rush Berlin's example, attributed to Anthony G. Quervelle ($115,000). "They can't touch the goods at museums," said Ralph. "Here they can."

Maybe a slogan capturing an idea as simple as that one should be stressed in publicity materials, and plenty of them, for the Ellis next year.

"I wish there weren't quite so many new ideas," the protagonist of John P. Marquand's classic novel of Boston Brahmin culture, The Late George Apley (1937), writes to his son, John. "Where do they come from? … I try to think what is in back of them and speculation often disturbs my sleep. Why is everyone trying to break away from what we all know is sane and good?"

Still, change does inevitably happen, and those who fail to realize it may suffer the consequences. Here's a cautionary case in point. In the booth of Vose Galleries, Boston, there was a stunning portrait, Miss Peggy Bush in the Blue Mandarin Coat by Frederick A. Bosley, one of several that Bosley painted of his daughter Elizabeth's friend and classmate in the 1920's. "There is another Bosley portrait behind the reception desk at the Four Seasons Hotel," Abbot "Bill" Vose told us. "Its subject may be the same model. We sold it to them about twenty years ago, out of the gallery." A call to the Four Seasons, however, brought the news that the hotel's Bosley is gone. "We sold the old stuff and replaced it with contemporary art," the media office said.

For more information, contact the Ellis Antiques Show office at (617) 248-8571 or see its Web site (www.ellisantiques.com).