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The Ellis Antiques Show

by Jeanne Schinto

The November 3, 2004, preview party for the 45th Ellis Antiques Show was held the night after the national elections and was, as usual, a real Boston event. Authorities and experts held forth at the oyster bar. The aisles were crowded with curators. Erudition was everywhere. Beantown, if anything, is known for its brains. There were also the usual regional auctioneers in attendance, along with representatives from the Boston offices of the New York houses. In the space of just a few minutes and a few square feet, one could congratulate Sotheby's William Cottingham on the sale of the Jeffords collection and hear Skinner's Stephen Fletcher telling tales about landing the consignments that his auction house would sell a few blocks away on the upcoming Saturday.

One thing was different, however, and it was remarked upon. The show, which was held November 4-7, had shrunk. Five dealers were missing. Fletcher, for one, lamented the absence of Delaney Antique Clocks. The family of clock dealers from West Townsend, Massachusetts, was among those cut from the roster due to the limitations imposed by recent renovations to the building where the show has been held for the last few years. "Last in, first out," was how one volunteer organizer put it.

The downsizing occurred because Smith & Wollensky, the steakhouse chain, opened its latest restaurant in The Castle at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers, taking a piece of the space that the Ellis is accustomed to using for its caterers. It was decided to reconfigure the show rather than find another location. Show chairman Kathryn O'Connell said that she and her committee had implemented "little architectural tweaks" to make the best use of its smaller quarters.

One thing that wasn't diminished was the quality of the objects. For five days some of the most superlative pieces for sale anywhere in the country were on display in Boston. An appraiser from Marblehead, Massachusetts, said the quilt in Stephen Score's booth was the best one she had ever seen. Made in Baltimore, circa 1853, it has a pulsing geometric design in blue, red, green, and yellow emanating from a central yellow star. Guy Bush of G.K.S. Bush said that he had never seen a finer ship's wheel table than the one for sale in the booth of Hyland Granby. An American piece from the late 19th century, it had ten spokes, a 72 inches diameter, and was sold by Saturday.

Neither of these declarations was solicited. Nor was the one prompted by C.L. Prickett's pristine Aaron Willard, Jr. banjo clock. Singling it out for praise was, among others, David Wood, curator of the Concord Museum, Concord, Massachusetts, an expert on Concord-made furniture, including clocks, as distinguished from Boston-made pieces such as the Willard family's.

So did it follow that this was a good show? Did Bostonians treat dealers well this year? "This is always a good show," said Priscilla Boyd Angelos, co-owner of Irvin & Dolores Boyd Antiques, established in the 1950's. "I've never had a bad show in Boston," said Sally Kaltman, owner of Sallea Antiques, New Canaan, Connecticut, who has been showing at Ellis for 27 years. Nancy Grimes, owner of New England Garden Ornaments, Inc. of North Brookfield, Massachusetts, said, "I'm doing well," adding that she has many Boston customers who made a point of coming to see her at the show. Gardens are like dresses, we learned from Grimes. "My responsibility is making sure that no two of their garden designs are alike," she said.

If only that were the full story. For dealers exhibiting just yards away from these satisfied ones, white was black. A Continental furniture dealer from Pennsylvania said the only comment he could give was "unprintable." His two booth mates agreed, adding, "Ask us again tomorrow. We might have something more positive to say."

Stephen Huber, the sampler dealer from Old Saybrook, Connecticut, who has been an on-again, off-again exhibitor here, said without hesitation, "This isn't a good show. Not enough high-powered collectors come through. Bostonians don't like to buy their antiques. It's a loss of prestige. They want to have inherited them."

Huber's words call to mind the old saw: We don't buy our hats, we already have our hats. There is still some truth to the Boston matron's celebrated remark. New England remains the heartland, where fresh antiques continue to be harvested from families that bought them new. But the region is home to recent arrivals too, people who have been relocated by the trajectories of their careers, and the houses of these newcomers have lots of rooms to fill.

Buying home decorations, even antique ones, is not the same as collecting, of course. A true collector never says, "But where will I put it?" Nor does he or she call in the designer when a decision needs to be made.

The Ellis committee, for its part, invited a few select Boston-area designers for an event on Saturday night. The idea was for them to tour the show, choosing objects to discuss from a design perspective. While it's true that designers can be spenders, many dealers are still unsure if they are a good or bad influence on the antiques business. Should they be courted or shunned? Will they ever become truly educated customers who will in turn educate their clients?

Some dealers would be grateful if designers simply learned to be a little less insensitive. One dealer told us about a designer (not one of the big names invited by the committee) who asked to "borrow" a $10,000 6é tall 19th-century Continental mirror for a few hours. She wanted to take it to a client's house. She would drive it there in her SUV and have it back in a jiffy, she promised. The dealer was very pleasant, but explained that the mirror customarily traveled heavily blanketed and double-strapped to the inside of a panel truck.

The committee organized other events for every night of the show, each one an attempt to increase traffic and raise money for its charities: the Ellis Memorial & Eldredge House, established in 1885, and the Massachusetts General Hospital's Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. A reserved ticket to the Thursday night Young Collectors' Reception cost $100 ($115 at the door). The soiree ("For collectors and enthusiasts under 50!") received decidedly mixed reviews from dealers. It seemed to us that the closer your booth was to the bar, the less well you endured it. One dealer said, "Young collectors' night is a joke. It's a chance for them to drink too much and talk and kiss their friends. Meanwhile, we're like the far-off cattle in the field."

That particular dealer is over 50, but negative comments did not entirely correlate with the advancing years of the commentators. Charles Mastellone and Phil Tyler, both 24, hardly qualify as crotchety. Nonetheless, the dealers' assistants made faces when asked how they had enjoyed the evening. "It's a lot more fun for the guests than the dealers," Tyler said. "It's not easy to be in the mood for a party after you've already been at the show for eight or nine hours."

Thirty-five-year-old Jeffrey Tillou, by contrast, is a young collector apologist. Don't underestimate them, he counseled. And don't undercount them, either. "I have tons of young clients," he said. "And they're smart enough to want one single good item rather than a lot of mediocre, problematic stuff. That doesn't mean they won't buy a six-thousand-dollar chest and then buy up when they can get a twelve-thousand-dollar one."

William Vareika, the father of a teenager, is tolerant of youthful collectors too. Furthermore, the art dealer from Newport, Rhode Island, cautioned against assuming that all members of the under-50 club have the same taste. "I don't presume that younger collectors are interested in twentieth-century art," he said. "They're like collectors of any age group. There's no telling what they'll be interested in."

Vareika possesses another virtue besides tolerance: patience. "Most of the people who buy art from me at this show come every day," said the dealer who has been doing this show since 1998. "They return again and again to look. They may return with their husbands or their agents. Traditionally, they buy on the last two days of the show."

It may be unfair to hold up Vareika as an example. "This is the only show I do," he said. "It's just the right distance from the gallery. Seeing me here in Boston gives people an incentive to drive the hour and a half to Newport. For the next month, I'll be getting phone calls." (He didn't have to wait that long. By Saturday, two paintings were going home on approval.)

Vareika and a roomful of others took time out early Friday evening to attend another event organized by the Ellis committee. It was the slide lecture of John Wilmerding, the eminent collector and author who recently donated 51 works by 26 American artists—a pantheon of our greatest limners, from Homer to Eakins—to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. How his collection evolved was the story he told his audience.

"It begins just a few blocks away, on Newbury Street," Wilmerding said, since he bought his first painting, Fitz Hugh Lane's Stage Rocks and Western Shore of Gloucester's Outer Harbor from Boston's Childs Gallery in 1965, while he was a student at Harvard. He bought his second painting, Mississippi Boatman by George Caleb Bingham, from Vose Galleries and reckoned he was now a "collector," suffering from "the only disease that you can enjoy."

Wilmerding, a great-grandson of the Henry O. Havemeyers and a grandson of Electra Havemeyer Webb, had collector models (and art philanthropists) near at hand when he was growing up. He also had the money to pursue his collecting passion. Granted, less of it, relatively speaking, was required to get into the game back then (that first Fitz Hugh Lane cost him $3500), but it's also true that American paintings were still plentiful. He recalled a bygone time when "works of amazing importance" would come fresh to the market "almost on a weekly basis." Both the Vose family and Charles Childs, he said, "were continually turning them up."

He recalled too a friend who bought three works in one afternoon in New Jersey for a few hundred dollars—works by Martin Johnson Heade, Frederick Church, and John F. Peto. He sold the Heade to Wilmerding the same day; he sold the other two shortly afterward. He knew on that day he wanted to become an art dealer, Wilmerding said of his friend, who is Stuart Feld of Hirschl & Adler.

When we returned to the exhibitors' space downstairs, we guessed that any dealer would love to see a collector on par with Wilmerding walk in. But like the artists he collected, great collectors have always been scarce.

Before we left that evening, we passed by Peter Pap's Oriental rug booth once again. We had been unable to speak to him on three other visits to the show. Even on the night of the preview party, he was always on his cell phone or his laptop. Here he was again, tap-tapping. This time, we decided to interrupt him to ask for his comments.

"My main comment is that business has changed dramatically," said Pap. "Now we go to shows and view them as a wonderful way to meet with new clients and find out what they're interested in. It doesn't mean we won't be doing any business, but the business goes on later." So that explains the heavy use of technology, we said, and he did not disagree. "People are more careful," he went on. "They want to know what they're buying. It takes time and patience. You have to be in it for the long haul."

Pap also had a secondary comment he wanted to make. "At least in my field, as the market has slowed over the last two years, my selection is better than it has been in ten years, because dealers don't stop buying. When they see good materials, they don't pass them up. We're all waiting for the uptick, laying in provisions. Think of us as chipmunks with our cheeks full."

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