Elinor McIntyre Gordon, a noted authority on Chinese Export porcelain, died July 22, after suffering a stroke while vacationing on Cape Cod. She was 91.
She brought rare grace and style to her more than half-century-long career as a dealer, making her final professional appearance at the 2009 Philadelphia Antiques Show in April. She exhibited at the Winter Antiques Show from its founding in 1955 until 2008.
In 2003, Gordon became the second recipient of the Antique Dealers Association of America’s Award of Merit. “She embodies the virtues of the Chinese Export porcelain that she loves. She is strong, beautiful and refined,” keynote speaker Gail Fitzgerald Serfaty said in presenting the prize to the woman sometimes called the “Empress of China.”
“Elinor represented connoisseurship at its very best,” said Arie L. Kopelman, chairman of the Winter Antiques Show. “Her marriage of passion, knowledge and fairness translated into trust from customers who bought from her over many years. On top of that, she was one of the warmest, most charming women I have ever met. She was the whole package, a reassuring presence and friend to so many who came to regard her as family.”
“I secretly adopted her as my role model. She was a true grande dame, so gracious and ladylike, super smart and always on top of her game. It was a thrill for me to watch my young staff meet someone like Elinor for the first time,” said the show’s executive director, Catherine Sweeney Singer.
The daughter of James A. McIntyre, a sales manager for the Marmon Motor Car Company, and his wife Helen, Gordon was reared in New York City. A sultry brunette with limpid blue eyes, she began modeling for the Powers Agency at 17, appearing in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar , and, stunningly, on the January 1939 cover of Life magazine in a photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt.
In 1943, she married Horace William Gordon, a career stockbroker who as a boy drilled with the Knickerbocker Greys at the former Seventh Regiment Armory in Manhattan. He died in 1983. The couple, who for decades resided in the Main Line community of Villanova, Penn., have six grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
Gordon’s professional debut coincided with a surge of popular interest in Chinese art made for the West. The Gordons bought their first porcelain, a pair of armorial plates, in 1944 from New York dealer Otto Wasserman and soon were customers of other leader specialists of the day, among them Mildred and Rafi Mottahedeh, Philip Suval, S.P. Conover and J.A. Lloyd Hyde. Annual buying trips took the Gordons to England, the Netherlands and Portugal.
They were perhaps most influenced by Hyde, the New York dealer who advised Henry Francis du Pont and Mrs Lammot du Pont Copeland, among others. Hyde’s lavish, slip-cased book Oriental Lowestoft , containing many pieces from du Pont’s collection, was published in 1936.
“I never, ever visited my mother in New York without stopping to see Hyde,” Gordon once told Antiques and The Arts Weekly . “He took time to teach people. I tried to emulate him in that respect.”
Gordon favored porcelain made prior to 1830 for the American market. Her stock included famille rose, Fitzhugh, early Imari and armorials. She was known for rare china made for members of the Society of Cincinnati, the fraternal organization whose first president was George Washington.
She debuted as a show dealer at 35, exhibiting at a fair benefiting Emergency Aid at the old Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. Tutored by managers J. Gresham Wilson and Russell Carrell, she was before long exhibiting at charity shows around the country.
Publications extended her reputation. In 1963, the Gordons produced Oriental Lowestoft (Chinese Export Porcelain ) , an informative guide illustrated with photographs Horace took of their collection. Elinor edited the 1974 volume Chinese Export Porcelain: An Historical Survey , a compilation of articles published in The Magazine Antiques between 1923 and 1973. It was republished in 1984 as Treasures of the East . Her book Collecting Chinese Export Porcelain first appeared in 1977.
Pieces with Gordon’s coveted label found their way into every top public and private collection of Chinese Export porcelain, including those of the Peabody Essex Museum, Historic Deerfield, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Winterthur and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
In 1963, the Gordons began working with the late H. Richard Dietrich, founder of the Dietrich American Foundation in Chester Springs, Penn. “They were really Richard’s first advisors. Their names are all over the early accession records from the 1960s and 1970s,” former Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Jack Lindsey told Antiques and The Arts Weekly in 2003.
The centerpiece of the 4,000-piece collection of Mr and Mrs Euchlin Reeves, now at the Reeves and Watson Center at Washington and Lee University, also came from Elinor Gordon. Gordon brought the circa 1785‱810 bowl decorated with an American flag and the hongs of Canton to her first New York fair as an attraction. She was taken aback when a persistent Louise Herreshoff Reeves (1876‱967) insisted on owning it.
“Horace told Elinor to discourage Mrs Reeves by putting an outlandish price on the bowl. Mrs Reeves thereupon pulled out her purse and peeled off $100 bills up to $1,500. Mrs Reeves took the bowl back to Providence, R.I., on the train, holding it on her lap all the way,” curator Ronald Fuchs recounted.
He added, “For me, Elinor was always the history of the field, a living connection to the great dealers and collectors of the past.”
Between the 1960s and 1980s, Gordon advised the Fine Arts Committee, a group organized by former deputy chief of protocol Clement E. Conger for the purpose of refurbishing the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the US State Department. Gordon described the Chinese porcelain in the collection, most of it chosen for diplomatic or historical significance, in the July 1987 issue of The Magazine Antiques.
“In a quiet way, she helped more people, promoted more noble causes and sustained more fragile spirits than any of us will ever know,” observed Wendell Garrett, Antiques Magazine’s editor at large.
“She encouraged us when we were new to the business and we became close friends,” said Washington, D.C., dealer Charles Hollingsworth, who with his partner Bradley Kyser occasionally helped Gordon in her booth and visited her each summer in Cape Cod.
With her sense of fun and fine appreciation of the absurd, Gordon was cherished by colleagues. “Elinor was an elegant role model for our field. When she spoke, we listened. She made great sense. We are enormously fortunate to have known her,” said ADA board member Arthur Liverant.
Gordon attributed to her success to endurance and commitment. “If you stick with something long enough, something is going to come out of it. I love what I am doing,” she once said.
A memorial service was conducted July 28 at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Penn. Another service will be at 2 pm on Monday, August 3, at St Peters Episcopal Church in Osterville, Mass.
Gordon’s many friends are also invited to attend a celebration of her life at 10 am on January 27 at the 2010 Winter Antiques Show. ⁌aura Beach
