Betty Ring: Scholar and Collector Honored for Her Contributions to the Antiques Field

Born Betty Ruth Abrego in Beaumont, Texas, in 1923, the fifth-generation Lone Star native spent much of her young life traveling, a fact that may explain her Olympian tolerance for the chain hotels and rental cars that have been a mainstay of her life on the road as a researcher. Her father, a dredging engineer, moved his family from Texas to New York, New Jersey, South Carolina and Delaware, capping his career with projects in Egypt and Japan.

"All my mother ever wanted was to be in Houston near her family, but she never complained," recalls Mrs Ring, who returned to Texas for high school. She left the University of Texas after two years to marry Gregg Ring. The son and grandson of prosperous Houston attorneys, her husband of 62 years founded a successful business related to the oil-drilling industry.

Seven children were born to the couple between 1948 and 1963. Much occupied with parenting, Mrs Ring spent free moments reading about American antiques, which she began collecting in the mid-1950s. For Christmas in 1965, Gregg Ring indulged his wife with a complete set of The Magazine Antiques (he was equally tolerant when she asked for Boston's early newspapers on microfilm). She read Antiques from cover to cover.

"It was her graduate school," Antiques editor-at-large Wendell Garrett has said.

Houston's blossoming preservation movement, in which Ima Hogg and her friendly rival Faith Bybee played leading roles, was an inspiration to Mrs Ring. Attorney James Hogg (1851-1906) was the first native Texan to become governor. His culturally minded daughter Ima (1882-1975), a founder of the Houston Symphony in 1913, began collecting American antiques in the 1920s. In 1957, she donated her home, Bayou Bend, and its contents to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The Hogg and Ring families were acquainted. As a young man, Gregg Ring sometimes drove his grandmother out to visit Miss Ima, whose father was a friend and colleague of Gregg's grandfather, Henry Ring. When Betty Ring joined Bayou Bend's docent program in 1967, Miss Ima took a special interest in her young protégé and her husband. She invited the couple to attend her symphony dinners. Always gentlemanly, Gregg Ring obliged, though privately the quiet, courteous sportsman preferred the country life.

"About six months after my son Christopher was born in 1963, my sister-in-law called to tell me that the Heritage Society was looking for volunteers for its Kellum-Noble house," Betty Ring recalls. Built in 1847, Houston's oldest surviving brick building is located downtown in Sam Houston Park, along with seven other Heritage Society properties. Mrs Ring immersed herself in her new duties, quickly rising to the top of the organization. She joined the society's board in 1965 and served as its president from 1975 to 1977.

Mrs Ring was soon involved in Bayou Bend, as well. On view by appointment since 1961, the historic house museum opened full-time in 1966. The first crop of docents was trained by Jonathan Fairbanks. Winterthur director Charles Montgomery loaned his sharp, young hire to Miss Ima for a summer after the persistent heiress twisted his arm.

Another Winterthur fellow, David B. Warren, who Mrs Ring cites among those most helpful to her, became Bayou Bend's first curator. Mr Warren, who retired as Bayou Bend's director late last year, was joined by another Winterthur graduate, Dean Failey, Bayou Bend's associate curator from 1971 to 1974. The collection's parent institution, the Museum of Fine Arts, was headed by an ambitious young director named Philippe de Montebello, who returned to New York to head The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Bayou Bend opened one of the biggest doors in Betty's life," says Mr Failey, now Christie's senior director of American decorative art. "Being exposed to a top-rate collection and being asked as part of her training to engage in research had to have been stimulating."

"She is one of the greats in the field of American decorative art," says Mr Fairbanks, curator emeritus at the MFA, Boston and a contributor to artfact.com. "The intensity of her desire to learn initially surprised me. Years later, I'd go to the Massachusetts Archives and there Betty would be. She knew it was the only way to have original research."

The 1970s were heady times in Houston, a prosperous city discovering its cultural potential. The Rings gave and attended many dinners and parties, and it was through such social exchange as well as her work as a docent that Betty Ring became friendly with other Houston collectors and museum professionals. James Nonemaker, director of the Heritage Society, introduced her to a world of American decorative arts that lay beyond Houston; David Warren showed Betty her first auction catalog; and Sue Jameson, a fellow Bayou Bend docent, and her husband, Bob, collectors of American furniture and Audubon prints, became two of the Rings' closest friends. With Sue Jameson, Betty began traveling to the Winter Antiques Show in New York and the Antiques Forum at Colonial Williamsburg.

In 1967, with Miss Ima's encouragement, Betty organized "An Exhibition of Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century American Needlework" at Bayou Bend. A six-page booklet accompanied the display of 34 embroideries, most of them from Mrs Ring's growing collection. The talks Mrs Ring gave in conjunction with the display marked the beginning of her lengthy career as a lecturer. Everyone who has heard Mrs Ring describes her as a preternaturally able speaker.

"She could talk for an hour and a half with hundreds of slides and no notes. She quoted lengthy passages from memory. She made sure that the color values were equivalent in the slides and that the images were the same size. Every detail was thoroughly considered," says Nancy Druckman, Sotheby's senior vice president in charge of American folk art. Ms Druckman met Mrs Ring not long after joining the auction house in 1972, when she and department head Ronald de Silva were orchestrating sales of property from the collection of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch.

"I brought down a collection of samplers from my friend Barbara Taylor, an old-time dealer. Betty bought three of them," said Ron Bourgeault, who began exhibiting at Houston's Theta Charity Antiques Show from the late 1960s. Mrs Ring chose these "accessories" for their "appealing naïveté and comforting authenticity." In 1965, she paid Joe Kindig Jr $450 for a map sampler and $425 for an alphabet sampler. Her friends thought the prices exorbitant at the time.

In search of historical blue Staffordshire, one of her early collecting interests, Mrs Ring visited specialist dealers Richard and Virginia Woods in Baltimore, Md. Overwhelmed by the selection, she left instead with her first silk embroidery. Her appetite whetted, she bought a Washington memorial from the Garbisch collection for $2,250 at Sotheby's, New York, in January 1974. Ms Druckman suspects the price was a record.

"It was mourning embroideries that really aroused my curiosity and led to an intense interest in schoolgirl needlework," wrote Mrs Ring. Although the Garbisches, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Eleanor and Mabel Van Alstyne, Edith Gregor Halpert and Channing Hare had owned silk memorials, little had been written on the subject, a circumstance Mrs Ring found intolerable.

An epiphany occurred during a 1965 visit to the Chapel Hill, N.C., home of part-time dealer Elizabeth Daniel, a college professor and collector of silk memorials. Seeing the sophisticated federal-era embroideries displayed together, it was clear to Mrs Ring that the needlework formed stylistic groups, evidence that girls had not worked independently but had been tutored by accomplished instructors. Ms Daniel refused to break her collection and Mrs Ring left North Carolina empty handed. Through Mrs Ring's initiative, Ms Daniel later agreed to sell three memorials to Miss Ima for Bayou Bend. Ms Daniel over time relented and sold Mrs Ring a memorial, as well.

Encouraged by Ms Daniel and Ms Hogg, Mrs Ring began researching silk memorials. American Samplers by Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eve Johnston Coe, published in Boston in 1921 by the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America, was the field's only serious reference at the time. Although silk embroideries had received far less attention than samplers, Mrs Ring soon found that the makers of memorials on silk were easier to identify than samplers because the works often incorporate birth and death dates.

"If you look at old auction catalogs, they never say where a silk embroidery is from or what the subject matter is. Thanks to Betty, so much more is known: who the teachers were and what girls were reading, which was often famous essayists or religious literature. There was far more to women's education than we supposed," say Old Saybrook, Conn., needlework specialists Carol and Stephen Huber, who met Mrs Ring many years ago and have remained among her closest friends.

"It was David Warren who mentioned my collection to Edith Gaines at The Magazine Antiques, and I am especially indebted to Alice Winchester for her faith in a novice," Mrs Ring wrote in American Needlework Treasures. Ms Winchester, the magazine's editor for 34 years, published Mrs Ring's first article, "Memorial Embroideries by American Schoolgirls," in October 1971. By 1993, it had been followed by 14 more articles, plus another article co-written with Davida Deutsch and a half-dozen "Collectors Notes."

When Ms Winchester retired from The Magazine Antiques, she chose for her final cover in June 1972 a 1766 sampler by Susannah Saunders from Betty Ring's collection. The magnificent Salem, Mass., needlework is richly embroidered over its entire surface with a pastoral scene.

"Ginsburg & Levy was always my first stop in New York. One trip, my friend and I got there and just lost it," says Mrs Ring, remembering the day she splurged on the Saunders sampler, her favorite.

It was about this time that Mrs Ring met Ms Winchester's successor, Wendell Garrett. Editor ofThe Magazine Antiquesfrom 1972 to 1990, when he joined Sotheby's, Mr Garrett came to Houston to lecture.

"Young man, if you don't speak up, I shall never be able to hear you," Mrs Ring recalls Miss Ima calling to Mr Garrett from the audience. Mrs Ring became further acquainted with Mr Garrett that evening, over a dinner at the Jamesons. Mr Garrett was subsequently a frequent visitor to Mrs Ring's home.

"Betty's home was a wonderful, comfortable place to be. Warm colors and early American furniture added to the atmosphere. Every surface had a magnificent embroidery or a family picture," says Betsy Garrett, vice president for collections and interpretation at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, N.H.

Mrs Ring received supportive encouragement in her endeavors from her husband and children, who "grew up without posters or pennants in their bedrooms: they had mourning embroideries. They withstood the comments of their friends with an admirable nonchalance," she says.

Wendell Garrett published a dozen articles by Mrs Ring. "Collecting American Samplers Today" appeared in June 1972, followed by the "Salem Female Academy" in September 1974 and "Mrs Saunders and Miss Beach's Academy, Dorchester" in August 1976.

"The more difficult it became to unravel the history, the more intrigued I became," says Mrs Ring, who eventually found an advertisement for the opening of the Saunders and Beach Academy in the Columbian Centinelof February 5, 1803.

Mrs Ring continued to break ground with "Saint Joseph's Academy in Needlework Pictures" in Antiques, March 1978; "Homage to Washington in Needlework and Prints," co-authored with Davida Deutsch, in February 1981; "Peter Grinnell and Son: Merchant-Craftsmen of Providence, Rhode Island," in January 1980; and "Looking Glass and Frame Makers Known by Their Labels," published in May 1981.

"One thing Betty is less well-known for is her checklist of looking glass and frame makers. It is one of her great contributions, a labor of meticulous research," says Allison Ledes, who succeeded Garrett as Antiques' editor.

"Needlework Pictures at Bassett Hall" appeared in 1982; "Samplers and Pictorial Needlework at the Chester County Historical Society" in 1984; and "Needlework Pictures from Abby Wright's School in South Hadley, Massachusetts" in 1986. Under Ms Ledes' direction, Mrs Ring published articles on heraldic silk embroideries from Boston in 1992 and 1993.

"Coats-of-arms are the most glorious needlework made by school girls ever. They were the lavish embellishments of the richest families," says Mrs Ring, for whom American heraldic embroidery is a personal favorite.

"She spent enormous time collecting images and information from institutions that barely knew what they had. She published from a huge variety of sources," says Amy Finkel, a Philadelphia specialist in antique needlework.

In 1972, Mrs Ring bid on a 1785 sampler by Nabby Dexter at Sotheby's. It was the collector's first piece from the Mary Balch School in Providence and it stirred in Mrs Ring a deep interest in Rhode Island needlework. Within three years, she published her first article on the subject, "The Balch School in Providence, Rhode Island" in Antiques. She followed with "Mary Balch's Newport Sampler" in Antiques in 1983.

In the course of her research, Mrs Ring discovered in the home of a descendant a sampler by Mary Balch's mother, Sarah Rogers. It was later given to the Rhode Island Historical Society. Ms Balch's own girlhood sampler, worked in Newport, surfaced in California about the same time. The mother and daughter embroideries were possibly the "most important samplers to appear during the Twentieth Century, for they provide a keystone for understanding the extraordinary sampler embroidery of Rhode Island," Mrs Ring wrote. In 1973, she approached the Rhode Island Historical Society about organizing an exhibition but was rebuffed.

"Let's do it," historical society president Joseph K. Ott replied after Mrs Ring approached the museum again in 1979. She spent the next three and a half years commuting to Providence to work on "Let Virtue Be A Guide To Thee: Needlework in The Education of Young Women, 1730-1820." In late 1983, the traveling exhibition of 122 samplers, silk embroideries and related artifacts debuted at the Rhode Island Historical Society, accompanied by a 276-page catalog of the same name. The catalog, which originally cost $22.50, today sells for about $800.

"The night 'Let Virtue Be A Guide To Thee' opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was the most glamorous moment of my life. When the show opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in February 1984, Sotheby's came down and planned an elegant dinner to follow the evening opening and invited me to choose the guests. It was a wonderfully generous gesture and a truly fabulous evening, a major milestone for me," Betty recalls. The landmark display emphasized a regional body of needlework and the teachers who influenced it.

"Betty had already proven herself in her articles. She moved into the major leagues with a big exhibition, a big catalog and openings in three cities," Wendell Garrett observes.

"Let Virtue Be A Guide To Thee" followed by five years "A Gallery of American Samplers," an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York showcasing the collection of Theodore H. Kapnek. Accompanying the show was a catalog written by Glee F. Krueger and edited by Cyril Nelson of E.P. Dutton.

Mr Kapnek, a Philadelphia businessman, died two years later. In 1981, Sotheby's auctioned his collection for $641,300, a staggering three times estimate. The sale marked the beginning of the modern market for American needlework, a market already shaped by Mrs Ring's scholarship. Mrs Ring acquired the top lot, a charming pictorial sampler made in 1830 by a Berks County, Penn., girl, Matilda Filbert, for a record $41,800, including premium. Mr Kapnek, who once told Mrs Ring that he never paid more than $2,000 for a sampler, purchased Miss Filbert's "accomplishment" for about $2,200 in 1975 from West Chester, Penn., dealer Elizabeth Matlack.

Encouraged by the success of the Kapnek collection, Robert Bishop, director of the American Folk Art Museum, invited Mrs Ring to exhibit her personal collection. The accompanying catalog, American Needlework Treasures: Samplers and Silk Embroideries From The Collection of Betty Ringby Betty Ring, was published by E.P. Dutton in 1987. The exhibition of 165 samplers and silk embroideries opened at the museum in 1990. (The museum had to postpone the show, which had been planned for 1987, after its arrangements for a temporary gallery space fell through.)

Organized by state and school, the 112-page American Needlework Treasureswas in some ways a prototype for Mrs Ring's next book, her monumental, two-volume Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850, published by Knopf in 1993. It took Mrs Ring the better part of a decade to write it.

"The main idea was to get everything on the page where you could see and compare. The second intention was to direct attention to the long-forgotten educators of one half of the population of early America," she told Antiques and The Arts Weekly.

"It was a struggle getting it all together," says the author. As always, Mrs Ring persevered, traveling the country with photographer Arthur Vitols. Extraordinarily helpful to her during these years were Dorothy McCoach, a textile conservator in Bethlehem, Penn.; Elizabeth Cadbury, an English-born friend with a great knowledge of English and Quaker history, and her daughter, Alison Senter; and Mary Linda Zonana, who herself was immersed in early New York history. Joan Stephens, a fellow collector who lived in Potomac, Md., and was a docent at the Smithsonian, was a fast friend and frequent traveling companion. Mrs Ring and Ms Stephens met in 1981 at the American Institute of Textile Arts at Pine Manor College in Boston, a program organized by Mildred Davis.

Girlhood Embroidery illustrated 600 samplers and silk embroideries, dividing them into regions, states, counties, towns and schools. Appropriately, Alice Winchester wrote the foreword.

"To my knowledge, it's the only work on American decorative arts that has ever been reviewed by The Wall Street Journal," Wendell Garrett remarked at the time. (The Journal's lay critic thought Mrs Ring's effort "awesome" but was spooked by the mourning pictures, which he called "eerily premonitory of Edward Gorey.") Reviewed in Time and The New Yorker, as well, Girlhood Embroiderywas most enthusiastically endorsed in The Magazine Antiques.

There, New York University professor Colin Eisler wrote, "Seldom does one see what, inarguably, is the ultimate publication of its genre: comprehensive, encyclopedic, erudite, and presented with clarity and modesty. ...No student of earlier life in the United States - whether concerned with craft, pictorial, education, familial, or feminist issues - can afford to ignore Ring's stupendous achievement."

"Betty essentially made the field, and she did it in two ways: with her collecting and with her scholarship," says Wendell Garrett.

"If you look analytically at what categories of American folk art bring the highest prices, needlework is right up there. Betty did not set out to transform the market, but her scholarship and publications had that result," says Nancy Druckman. Agrees Amy Finkel, "Collectors turn to American samplers with great assurance because of what she has done."

Prices for American samplers and silk embroideries have advanced dramatically since the Garbisch and Kapnek sales. The Joan Stephens Collection, auctioned in 1997 after the collector's death, realized $1,771,397, nearly three times what Kapnek brought 16 years earlier. The record price for American needlework, unlikely to be surpassed soon, stands at $1,157,500, the price paid by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Sotheby's in 1996 for Hannah Otis's canvaswork chimney piece.

"Most appealing to me are not unique examples but pieces that represent the prevailing taste of the regions from which they came," says Mrs Ring, whose collection would propel the market once again should it ever be for sale. Experts regard it as a connoisseur's collection, as scholarly as it is beautiful.

"Ultimately, my collection probably will be sold. I want someone who will follow me to look up and say, 'Gosh, I just love this thing,'" Mrs Ring confesses.

"I had no plan, just the interest and the opportunity," Mrs Ring says with significant understatement of her extraordinary career. Though some early American schoolmistresses remain unidentified, it is unlikely that anyone will again approach the subject of girlhood embroidery with as much ambition as Mrs Ring did.

"It was quite by chance that my life turned toward collecting objects that reflect so much social history, still largely unexplored. Trying to reconstruct the lives of teacher-artists through the needlework of their students has been both a challenge and a somewhat lonely pursuit. Occasionally, though, I have met with some success, and the satisfaction has been like the solving of a mystery," writes Mrs Ring.

"I don't think anyone can follow in her footsteps, though there will be people who take on individual groups or schools or questions. The standard that Betty set for herself and lived up to has become the bar," says Amy Finkel. Agrees Nancy Druckman, "Betty put this together, stitch by stitch. It's a towering achievement under any circumstances."

In 1985, Mrs Ring provided additional insight into her motivation when she told theChristian Science Monitor, "The antiques world is a community of people who live in all places, everywhere, but who stay in touch with each other. I have lived in Houston all of my adult life, but my specialized interest has taken me out into the world and made me part of a much broader community. I have loved every aspect of this wider experience."