Bill Guthman, Frontiersman

WESTPORT, CONN.

:When the Winter Antiques Show opens on Thursday evening, January 19, Bill Guthman will not be among the fair's 74 exhibitors. Nor will he have been replaced.

The leading dealer in historical and military Americana of the Colonial and Federal period has retired from the show 32 years after he joined it; nearly half a century after he first began buying the powder horns, tomahawks, uniforms, knapsacks, canteens, swords, rifles, drums, medals, commissions, engravings, maps and drawings that are his evocative stock in trade.

As a specialist in the manly artifacts of war, Guthman has always looked the part. Trimly built and handsome, his only concession to fashion is his starkly shaved head, an economical jot of a mustache and the turquoise-studded Navajo pawn-silver bracelet that perpetually adorns his right wrist. One would hardly suppose that Guthman is 81 years old.

Given Guthman's understated mien - "quiet and acute" is how historian Robert Trent once described him - one also might not guess that he brought order to a previously inchoate universe of objects, some barely recognized, let alone prized. Through relentless intellectual inquiry and an imagination for collecting that can only be described as genius, Guthman - equal parts collector, scholar and dealer - carved out a specialty where none existed.

For the past 25 years, Guthman's companion in life has been his wife, historian Elizabeth Stillinger. They met when she edited "Decorated Military Americana," his first article for The Magazine Antiques, published in July 1966. Married since 1980, theirs is a creative collaboration marked by a shared passion for antiques and distinct yet complementary ways of appreciating them.

A thoughtful scholar of collectors and collecting, Stillinger has studied the phenomenon at close range. For "To Arms!," Sotheby's January 2003 sale of the William H. Guthman collection of militia artifacts, she provided what is likely to remain the most incisive portrait of her husband, "a collector's collector."

Stillinger wrote, "He evolved from a sort of Johnny One Note, collecting objects in series, into a sophisticated student, collector and connoisseur of a wide range of objects both military and domestic. These are for him both 'tangible remnants of history' and outstanding examples of the arts and crafts of Federal America."

"Bill doesn't just collect things, he collects what goes around them. Context increases value and meaning for him," says Stillinger, who likens her husband to early Twentieth Century ethnographic collectors such as Henry C. Mercer and Edwin AtLee Barber, or pioneering Pennsylvania German collectors like the Landis brothers.