Bill Guthman, Frontiersman

From 1960 until 2005, when Guthman ceased actively buying, his many branched collection grew organically. He owned guns, swords and accoutrements of the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars; related Eastern Woodlands Indian material; and early pictorial depictions of Native Americans in prints, peace medals and powder horns. Painted, punched, pierced or engraved, hand-decorated artifacts supplied further insight into the sensibilities of owners and makers. With few references to consult, Guthman collected primary documents. These first-hand accounts of historic events conjured the past with an immediacy and nuance that few other antiques could match.

As Guthman himself explained, "It boils down to the fact that I really collect early American history in objects and written words, in an attempt to acquire a complete picture of the period or periods...."

"What Bill has accomplished is so complex," reflects Philip Zea, president of Historic Deerfield, which recently acquired 75 decorated American power horns created between 1747 and 1781. Guthman and Stillinger's partial gift is Historic Deerfield's single largest acquisition in more than 50 years, says Zea. Given Guthman's long study of the French and Indian Wars, the English settlement of Deerfield, Mass., site of a bloody raid in 1704, was a logical home for the material.

Guthman's powder horn collection is regarded as the foremost of its kind. Originally slated for auction, it will be on view from April 1 at Historic Deerfield's Flynt Center of Early New England Life. A symposium is planned there for November 10-11, 2006.

Along with examples from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg and other major holdings, the trove is substantially documented in Drums A'Beating, Trumpets Sounding: Artistically Carved Powder Horns in The Provincial Manner, 1746-1781, Guthman's catalog to the 1993-1994 exhibition that traveled from Heritage Plantation of Sandwich to The Connecticut Historical Society and The Concord Museum.

"Drums A'Beating" was the first exhibition to present these sculptures as art, an essentially indigenous one at that. Brought to public attention by Guthman, they remain an endlessly fascinating aesthetic contradiction, their languorously curved shape, soft touch and warm color at odds with their disjointed, almost dreamlike decoration. With their randomly juxtaposed portraits of men, weapons, forts, mythical beasts, sirens and shrews, these cryptic vessels suggest the psychological rigor of war in all its tedium and terror.

"Bill likes pieces that are redolent of Colonial and frontier history," says Ted Trotta, a New York dealer in Native American art who first met Guthman in 1979 when he underbid him on a ball-headed club. Hardly an omnivore, Guthman bought widely but selectively. Because it was often mass-produced, Civil War material, a mainstay of the market, was of little interest to him.

Bill Guthman began collecting as child in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. There were pennies, matchbook covers and butterflies, plus 31 frogs from summer camp. After studying at Northwestern University, he briefly worked with his father, a society portrait photographer, before being stationed in China with a US Army Air Force photographic unit during World War II. There he gathered Buddhas and, on his way home via India, ivory elephants.

Guthman and his first wife, the late Patricia Rosenau Guthman, later a dealer in hearth antiques, married in 1948 and honeymooned in Colonial Williamsburg. Their daughter, Pamela Guthman Kissock, was born in Elkins Park, Ill., in 1953. Soon thereafter the couple moved to Scarsdale, N.Y., where their son, Scott, was born in 1955. In 1956, the family settled into the Westport home that Guthman has occupied for nearly half a century.

"My gosh, you've got nothing on your walls," Mary Allis, the plain spoken dealer in American folk art complained the first time she visited the house. The gracious residence has a settled maturity, its interiors replete with country Queen Anne and Chippendale furniture, Liverpool jugs depicting American subjects, tomahawks, powder horns and large painted drums that, fitted with glass tops, serve as tables. Taken together, the antiques - among them an eagle-inlaid slant-front desk that descended from Pennsylvania dealer Joe Kindig, Jr, to arms collector General Charles West to Guthman - suggest the web of kinship relationships that binds the tight-knit collecting community of which Guthman has long been a mainstay.

Guests are often invited to tour what Bill calls "the gun room," the fire and burglar-proof wing he added in 1960 to house the hoard that is densely stacked on tables, tucked away in metal file cabinets and mounted on peg boards.

"Squirreled away were amazing books and pamphlets," says Selby Kiffer, the specialist in charge of Sotheby's December 1, 2005, sale of manuscript, printed and graphic Americana from the William Guthman collection. "We had a wonderful time going through it all. For Bill, it was almost like collecting it all a second time. He simply had so much." Though too ill to attend the $1.9 million auction, Guthman listened to bidding via a remote hook-up.

"We're getting killed on this one," the collector, always an astute businessman, would groan. The sale's many successes included a 1777 ink and watercolor drawing by Captain J. Leach of the Pennsylvania militia that sold for $102,000; a hand colored engraving of the Battle of Lake George, $66,000; and the Yorktown Campaign journals of Blackall William Ball, $90,000. A friendship certificate, $20,829, signed by John Quincy Adams to accompany the presentation of an Indian Peace Medal to a Winnebago chief was the first such item Kiffer has seen in 21 years.

Commuting to Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s to work as a purchasing agent in the New York offices of Rosenau Brothers' Cinderella Frocks, a manufacturer of children's clothing, Guthman spent lunch hours poking through antiques shops on Second and Third Avenues. On weekends he trawled the back roads of Bucks County, Penn., and fertile Route 7 from New York to the Canadian border, where he scoured lawn sales and country auctions.

This prelapsarian age of collecting, Guthman later wrote, was "before turnpikes and superhighways had been built and auction houses had become merchants to the masses." He noted, "The 'look' and 'smell' of things, as well as the 'feel,' had great appeal for those of us who hunted antiques in those days. It was the object that was important and, although condition was a factor, it never got in the way of a decision to buy something because of what it was and where it had been. When, as often happened, parts and paint were missing, we concentrated not so much on what wasn't there as what was and that determined our decision."

"We were weekend warriors," says Antiques and The Arts Weekly editor and publisher R. Scudder Smith, who shared his friend's love of the chase. With an eye both toward buying and selling to upgrade, the collectors set up at flea markets in Connecticut and New York where dealers unloaded their wares from the backs of Ford station wagons.

Guthman never missed the Brimfield markets, which he often shopped with Stamford, Conn., dealer Rockwell Gardiner, a voracious buyer with an infectious love of all things old. Another friend and frequent source was Middletown, Conn., dealer Paul Weld, from whom Guthman once bought a gun collection.

"I stood the guns straight up in the rumble seat of my Morris Minor and Pat and I drove to Silvermine Tavern for lunch. No one thought anything of it in those days," Guthman remembers.

Guthman also bought from Norm Flayderman, whose Guide to Antique American Firearms and Their Values has sold more than 600,000 copies. Between 1954 and 2000, Flayderman, now a private dealer in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., published 118 catalogs of military and nautical antiques. Going through them, says Guthman, was like "picking toys out of the Sears Wish Book."

"Only a handful of people sold antique American firearms before World War II and very few people were buying more than a militia piece here or there," notes Flayderman. "Bill was a very astute collector with a deep love for his subject. His refined taste was reflected in his collection."

Looking at paintings and furniture taught Guthman, who initially collected a spectrum of early American antiques, about the subtleties of surface and age. His transformation into a specialist with an evolved, highly personal vision began in the early 1960s when he bought a pipe tomahawk with a curly maple haft decorated with silver inlays and two inscriptions from Robert Abels, then the premier dealer in antique American arms. Guthman was hooked.

In 1966, Guthman quit his manufacturing job to devote himself full-time to antiques. One Sunday morning, as was his habit, he had risen early and driven to New Haven, Conn., where pickers like Sam Shelnitz set up stands of scavenged treasure in empty shops along State Street. There Guthman acquired a tole-painted box containing a sheaf of post-Revolutionary War letters written from the Northwest Territory by Jonathan Hart, a member of the First American Regiment, to a fellow officer back home in Farmington, Conn.

Guthman spent six months at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan studying the papers of General Josiah Harmar, the commander of the First American Regiment.

His inquiry resulted in March to Massacre: A History of The First Seven Years of The American Army. Suggested by Thompson R. Harlow, director of the Connecticut Historical Society, the book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Based on documents and relics collected by Guthman, the book told in dramatic detail the anguished story of the slaughter of the infant Federal force sent to guard the Northwest Territory. Barely out of high school when he met Guthman in 1966 at an antique gun show, prominent military artist Don Troiani provided some of the illustrations.

"One of Bill's greatest accomplishments has been to engage and inspire others," says Ted Trotta, one of several younger dealers whose careers Guthman encouraged.

"I knew of Bill Guthman by the time I was 10," says Portsmouth, N.H., dealer Hollis Brodrick, whose passion for historical Americana matches his mentor's. At 12, Brodrick owned eight muskets. At 17, he bought a Revolutionary War footlocker inscribed with the name of Major Gibbs of the Second Massachusetts Regiment. It took Brodrick two years to muster the courage to offer it to the prominent dealer, a friend and colleague ever since.

For the past five seasons, Guthman traversed the country to appear on PBS's Antiques Road Show as a guest appraiser. He found powder horns by the Spencer-Hitchcock carver in Savannah and an 1848 Zachary Taylor drum in Oklahoma City.

Guthman's best finds, he always said, were the good friends he made on the show, among them Cincinnati auctioneer C. Wesley Cowan and Christopher Mitchell, a young Clearpoint, Ala., dealer in militaria.

"Bill, Chris and I worked at the militaria table and, not unexpectedly, became fast friends," says Cowan, who shared many a late night drink with Guthman. "What most impresses me is Bill's humor, warmth and absolute willingness to share his expertise. He has been enormously helpful to me."

"A month and a half ago Bill called me up and asked me to meet him and Penny at 3 pm in Westport," says Hollis Brodrick, one of many friends who recalled Guthman's great love of gathering his friends for dinner. "When we got there, a limousine was waiting to take a group of us to the River Café in Brooklyn, which has the best views ever of Manhattan. We all had a wonderful time."

Guthman enjoys the casual camaraderie and brisk trading of antique arms shows. Active in his field's professional groups, he is a past-president of the Kentucky Rifle Association and a longtime member of the American Society of Arms Collectors. For several years he also participated in Santa Fe's ethnographic art shows. But it was the Winter Antiques Show, which he joined in 1974, that Guthman anticipated most eagerly.

"Bill was always successful at East Side," says Fairfield, Conn., dealer James Bok, who helped him in his booth each year. "He had varied merchandise in a range of prices. Certainly his reputation preceded him, but his success also went, in part, to the foresight of having collected for 30 or 40 years. Prior to each show, he culled a few things from his private collection. What's interesting to me is that a dealer of his caliber was a collector first. It was Bill's greatest love," says Bok.

The Winter Antiques Show boasts specialists in arms, armor, books, autographs, manuscripts and Native American art, but no one more vividly set the historical scene with a cross-section of related artifacts. Guns, swords and powder horns were a given in Bill's booth, but the unusual, from snow shoes to beaded gloves, canons to fur hats, also turned up each year.

Ever the gentleman, Guthman did not discuss his clients. Sometimes, as when television journalist Barbara Walters made a purchase, he did not even recognize them.

The Winter Antiques Show's most momentous year was 2002, when the events of September 11, 2001, forced it to leave its home at the Seventh Regiment Armory. On opening night at the Hilton, Guthman sold New York's billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg an 1820 New York militia flag decorated with an eagle and the stirring words "Liberty! Our Watchword."

"No QVC shopping for Mayor Bloomberg," the New York Daily News quipped the next day.

No one will miss Bill Guthman's presence at the Winter Antiques Show more than Antiques and The Arts Weekly. Arriving midday before East Side's gala evening opening to photograph the show, Guthman's booth was always our first stop.

"How are you? May I take your coat?" Bill would ask with a tilt of his head, a sidelong glance and a slow, steady smile. "I hope you're coming to dinner this evening." Putting the finishing touches on his display, he stopped to explain each treasure. Explanations could be lengthy. Every artifact represented a poignant human life, every life was a part of the larger pageant that unfolded on the American frontier. Like military historian John Keegan, who walked Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme to create his masterful depiction of war, The Face of Battle, Guthman walked every field show, mapped every market, scouted every auction to bring to light a little known chapter in our nation's history. For this, and for his friendship, we are ever grateful.

A third and final sale of the William Guthman collection is contemplated for 2006. Though details have not been finalized, the auction is likely to represent the spectrum of his interests, from Kentucky rifles and French and Indian Wars artifacts to furniture and ceramics. As Guthman once explained, "My 'Yankee Doodle' collection lifted my spirits for nearly half a century. I'm passing it along to others in the hope that it will do the same for them."