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

PHILADELPHIA, PENN.

:The first antique needlework Betty Ring ever bought hangs on the wall of her Flatonia, Texas, farmhouse, about 100 miles from her home in Houston. Mrs Ring acquired the Scottish verse sampler for $30 in 1960 because, she says, in her characteristically self-effacing way, the colors matched her kitchen. She would not dream of selling it.

"I never get rid of a sampler," Mrs Ring said recently, astonished at the thought. Fidelity to her calling coupled with a genuinely brilliant mind, exactingly high standards and a dogged determination to see her work in print has made the collector the foremost scholar of antique American needlework of her time, perhaps for all time.

Mrs Ring's accomplishments will be honored on Saturday, April 9, at a dinner hosted by the Antiques Dealers' Association of America (ADA) in conjunction with the Philadelphia Antiques Show. She is the fourth recipient of the ADA's Award of Merit, previously bestowed on Albert Sack, Elinor Gordon and Wendell Garrett.

"Betty is a pure and unselfish scholar who increased public appreciation for an American art form that had long been misunderstood. Her two-volume book, Girlhood Embroidery, is the culmination of decades of groundbreaking research," says ADA vice president Arthur Liverant.

Disciplined, refined, gracious and demure, Mrs Ring has often been seen to embody the qualities of the schoolgirl art she studies. Though antiques were not part of her upbringing, she has loved American history for as long as she can remember.