51st Annual Delaware Show

I pored over my parents’ stacks of the Magazine Antiques, reading articles as well as ads and learning the terminology of the art and antiques world. As a junior at Washington & Lee, I was asked to help catalogue the important Reeves porcelain collection, gifted to the university in the 1960s. I sorted through hundreds of pieces of 18th- and 19th-century porcelain (mostly Chinese export) under the tutelage of Director James Whitehead—whose enthusiasm was infectious—and fell in love with armorial porcelain. With a $500 check from my parents on my 21st birthday, I purchased a beautiful pair of armorial plates at Georgetown’s Peter Mack Brown Antiques. After college I worked in insurance and banking but longed for the antiques world, even opening a shop in Middleburg, Virginia, in 1978. I was barely able to eke out a living, and it became obvious I loved to buy beautiful objects but hated to sell them! In 1982 I was invited to attend a Decorative Arts Trust meeting at Washington & Lee to celebrate the opening of the Reeves Center (the new home for the ceramic collection), and the lecturers were a “Who’s Who” of the Chinese export world: Crosby Forbes and Bill Sargent from the China Trade Museum, Carl Crossman, Pamela Copeland, dealer/scholar David Sanctuary Howard, and collectors Jim and Nancy Flather. I learned more that weekend than I had in ten years prior and discovered that my little collection needed to evolve. David Howard inspired me to always buy the best I could afford, noting that dealers loved to work with serious collectors and would be happy to spread out payments if necessary. This charger, which was made in Jingdezhen, China, ca. 1725, is decorated with the arms of John Haldane of Gleneagles, Scotland. It is the earliest documented example of an armorial porcelain design based on a bookplate. — 35 —