Collecting Chinese Export Porcelain, Elinor Gordon, 1977
Elinor Gordon, a dealer and collector who helped elevate the status of Chinese export porcelain and acquired important pieces for collectors and museums, died on July 22 in East Sandwich, Mass. She was 91 and lived in Villanova, Pa., and Osterville, Mass.
The cause was a stroke, said Lucy Gordon, her step granddaughter by marriage.
She grew up in Brooklyn in comfortable circumstances. Her father was a sales manager for the Marmon Motor Company, and her mother worked as a secretary on Wall Street, but both were left jobless by the Depression.
Chinese porcelain made for the export trade from 1600 to the mid-19th century was highly sought after by wealthy families in Europe and America. Mrs. Gordon developed a passion for it after she and her husband, Horace W. Gordon, bought an armorial plate and platter in 1944.
After learning from the top New York dealers, Mrs. Gordon struck out on her own in the early 1950s, going beyond the familiar blue-and-white Canton ware to specialize in types called famille-rose (named for its pink-and-purple palette), Fitzhugh pattern, armorial (decorated with coats of arms) and Japanese-inspired Imari ware.
“When she started, Chinese export porcelain was something that you purchased to put on your sideboard,” said William R. Sargent, curator of Asian export art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., in an interview published online by Antiques and the Arts in 2003. “Elinor is to be credited for having helped bring it forward as an independent collecting field.”
Elinor found work with the John Robert Powers modeling agency. At 5 feet 4, she was too short for most fashion work, but she found a niche modeling hats. Her face appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and in 1939 Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed her for the cover of Life magazine wearing an updated wimple by Lilly Daché.
In 1943 she married Mr. Gordon, a Philadelphia stockbroker, and together they indulged their shared enthusiasm for Chinese porcelain. He died in 1983. She is survived by his six grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
The New York dealer J. A. Lloyd Hyde became a mentor to Mrs. Gordon, who, encouraged by requests from friends to acquire pieces, decided to set up as a dealer herself.
She exhibited at the first Winter Antiques Show in Manhattan in 1955, selling a rare punch bowl that is now the centerpiece of the Reeves Collection at Washington and Lee University. She returned to the show in New York every year until 2008, and her booth was a fixture at the major antiques shows in Philadelphia, Boston and Washington. At her gallery, attached to her house in Villanova, she organized four shows a year.
At the same time, she helped organize important collections from scratch and steered significant pieces to major collections and museums, including Historic Deerfield, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Winterthur. For the Dietrich American Foundation, she found extremely rare plates and platters decorated with the insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization founded in 1783 by American and French officers who served during the Revolutionary War.
With her husband, Mrs. Gordon published “Oriental Lowestoft” in 1963. She wrote “Collecting Chinese Export Porcelain” (1977), regarded as one of the best and most accessible guides to the subject, and edited “Chinese Export Porcelain: An Historical Survey” (1974).