PHILADELPHIA, PENN. -- In the Kabuki world of New York's salesrooms, competition for the most coveted objects is a highly stylized drama. Allies gather in the back of the room; opponents swagger, strut and brandish cellular phones. The drollest of referees oversee civilized jousts whose choreographed moves barely hint at the behind-the-scenes cajolery needed to close major deals.

The actors themselves are a varied lot. They are brash adventurers, secretive plotters and inspired lovers of beautiful things. The agents of many passions, they are dealers, collectors, brokers, advisers, representatives, consultants and conservators. Rarely are they the art world's men of the cloth, curators.

Even before he joined the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Jack Lindsey attended New York's important Americana sales. Trim and well dressed, with a thatch of sun-streaked hair and pale blue eyes, he was so often confused with American furniture experts Leigh and Leslie Keno that some called him "the third twin."

Lindsey's conspicuous presence and easy charm in time drew attention to an important fact. Through its 37-year-old curator, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is aggressively building its already outstanding collection of American decorative arts. Since Lindsey's promotion to full curator in 1990, the four-person department has added 1,200 objects through gift, purchase or a combination of both. In 1990, it acquired (through a reduced-price purchase agreement with the donor) what at the time was the most expensive antique ever purchased by a museum, a Philadelphia secretary bookcase worth $9 million. That distinction now belongs to the Getty Museum, which not long afterwards bought the Badminton cabinet for $15 million.

Far removed from New York's blunt commerce, Lindsey the public servant pursues his calling in a severely classical temple of art high above the Schuylkill River and Fairmount Park. Not as old as it looks - its architects would have been pleased by the aura of antiquity that has collected on the 70-year-old acropolis - the Philadelphia Museum of Art nevertheless reveals its age in its heroic preoccupation, assembling a vast and varied collection of world art. Over time the museum has grown broader and more diffuse, the musty smell of forgotten treasure now drifting pleasantly through its trailing corridors and cavernous reception rooms.

Lindsey's daily route to his office is through the West Entrance, up the Grand Staircase, through the Special Exhibition Gallery and into the American Wing, a suite of nearly 20 galleries containing a rich assortment of Philadelphia furniture and silver, Pennsylvania German art, Shaker furniture and artifacts, Nineteenth Century glass, Twentieth Century design and paintings by Thomas Eakins.

"This is our main American furniture gallery. The whole wing was last gone through in 1987, just as Bea was finishing the Federal exhibition," says the curator, mentioning his predecessor. Married to the late Anthony N.B. Garvan, a prominent academic and the son of Mabel Brady and Frances Garvan, collectors who lavishly endowed Yale University Art Gallery, Beatrice Garvan served the Philadelphia Museum of Art for nearly 30 years. The curator emeritus organized the Park House Guides, the museum's largest volunteer group; surveyed portions of the PMA's American decorative arts holdings; initiated negotiations with potential donors that, even now, are bearing fruit; and, in 1987, mounted the excellent "Federal Philadelphia: Athens of The Western World."

For the latter she recruited help from one of her husband's University of Pennsylvania graduate students. "Happily, right as my internship for class credit was ending, they had funding to hire someone and she asked me to stay on," Lindsey recalls. As her 1990 retirement approached, Garvan made plans for her young assistant to succeed her. "The transition had none of the horror stories that you hear of. Bea was unbelievably generous," confides Lindsey, noting how his mentor assured his progress.

In an increasingly bureaucratic, bottom-line driven profession, Lindsey is a curator of the old school, a gentleman for whom personal profit seems a remote concern. A dedicated employee, he nevertheless manages to get away for long summer weekends on his sailboat, travels widely and reveals himself through an exuberant, highly idiosyncratic private collection that ranges from quirky Twentieth Century folk art to Afghan tent hangings and Brazilian santos. He is abundantly knowledgeable - it is his range of expertise that friends and colleagues most frequently remark on - but not overly immersed in research. Acquisitions are his grand passion, and in that he is backed by several of the country's most ambitious collectors of American decorative arts, H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., chairman of the department's collections committee for the past 15 years, and Robert L. McNeil, Jr., to name two from an active group of about a dozen.

Once he entered the marketplace, the Philadelphia Museum's reputation as a institution actively collecting Americana "sort of steam rollered," admits Lindsey. "One thing built on another. People started calling us when they were dissolving their households. There is a perception in the market that we have money for things, so we hear of more. Because of the activity in the department here over the last four or five years people think, oh, it's an American department that is doing something."

Conviction - the mark of an activist - allows him to be persuasive, persistent and direct without appearing brash. He explains, "This is our modus operandi when we go after something at auction: I get a commitment of the institution or the private person who is going to buy it for us, and then I call people who might potentially be interested. First, I do it institutionally. Then I speak to a few dealers who are intimately involved in the process of acquiring objects. It's a legal, easy way to get the word out. If the funders who are going to acquire an object for the museum have no qualms about paying a consultant, or a representative, it is one of the best ways to disenfranchise other clientele that might normally use that dealer."

When institutions bid publicly, it is often a bid for sympathy. "I would like to think that people back off when they see the museum is interested in certain objects. It boosts my faith in human nature," says Lindsey. His collections committee has recently given him permission to bid directly in several minor auctions. "We have gotten the object at a very advantageous price," he confides.

The strategy doesn't always succeed. Dispatched to Sotheby's recently, Museum of Fine Arts Boston curator Jonathan Fairbanks bid $1.15 million to recover the historic Hannah Otis chimneypiece for the museum. And last June, the PMA was disappointed when it lost the earliest documented Philadelphia easy chair to Leigh Keno on behalf of a private client for $552,500. The New York dealer has represented the museum on other occasions.

"One of the things that I've heard that people say about me is that we are able to acquire so effectively in the market in part because I know how to treat dealers," says Lindsey, indirectly suggesting what many must privately wonder. Does the curator secretly wish to be a dealer?

No, he says, those days are behind him. "My hands on experience came very early on. I started out as a teenager going to flea markets, buying and selling. I did shows until my sophomore year of college. My parents said, `If you are going to mess with this stuff, do it professionally.' I didn't seriously think of being a dealer because by that time the things I was interested in academically I would never been able to afford to deal in."

More than most, Lindsey is the product of his upbringing. Among a handful of Quakers in Asheville, N.C., the curator and his brother were raised in the family's apple orchards near Great Smoky National Park and went to a "kind of free-form, wild, late '60s hippie school." Lindsey attended a Quaker college, Guilford, where generations of his extended family had preceded him. Eventually, lured by a Friends' School teaching appointment, he migrated north to Philadelphia. From his Quaker experience, he says, came his "manic avoidance of dishonesty," a desire to serve and a sensitivity to ethical issues. After their parents' deaths in 1986, the Lindsey brothers, whom remain close, renovated an 1856 row house six blocks from the museum. They see each other often, although Charles Lindsey, who works in the music industry, now owns his own home on the other side of town.

Philadelphia's American decorative arts collections are among the oldest in the country, older even than those in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing. "We've been collecting since 1876," Lindsey says in a soft drawl. Founded as a school of industrial arts, the PMA regarded design as a teaching tool, only adding important fine art after the institution moved to its Fairmount Park home.

More than a century later, the PMA's early policies are reflected in current activities. "A lot of the Chippendale furniture came in when it was only 100 years old, and there was no need to conserve and restore it. That makes a difference. None of our big casepieces has replaced pediment decorations. Because of that, it became prerequisite to acquire objects with high levels of authenticity and originality."

"This is the way we sum up our collecting," says the curator, surveying the treasures around him. "We do everything that Winterthur does on a smaller scale. We are interested in the documents, historical library material, parts that show certain fascinating aspects. It's the same mind set."

Pennsylvania objects take precedence. "Our wealth of Eighteenth Century Philadelphia things is an emphasis that we will maintain," he notes, adding that, "when Pennsylvania objects aren't surfacing, or when we have comparable examples, we will broaden our sphere if there is money."

"This is all Philadelphia furniture with some exceptions. We have a Newport desk here, a couple of New England chairs, a case over here of New England objects, but we do our regional thing. The collections are very heavily weighted toward Pennsylvania," Lindsey explains.

A small gallery houses the museum's "heavy hitters," including the only known matched, labeled highboy and lowboy by Thomas Tufft, a cabinetmaker who worked in Philadelphia between 1768-88. The PMA has owned the lowboy for decades; the highboy was a 1991 purchase. Benefactors paid $396,000 for Christie's cover lot, knocked down to Leigh Keno on behalf of the museum.

Another Tufft's piece, a pitched pediment chest-on-chest given to the museum in 1995, descended from Abel James, whose family built Chalkley Hall. Two prominent Philadelphia families, the Jameses and the Morrises, intermarried. The complexity of their multiple unions is reflected in PMA collections, which house a tea table, desk and interior architecture from the country house on the Delaware River.

Robert L McNeil, Jr.'s late 1995 partial gift (the balance is promised) of a Chippendale tea table surviving with a bill of sale from its maker, Thomas Tufft, was quietly signalled during Israel Sack's January loan show, when the New York dealers removed a label reading "Private Collection" and replaced it with another acknowledging the PMA. Distinguished by a top whose scalloped perimeter is interspersed with carved rosettes, the table is one of two known - the other is at Winterthur - and the only example with original surface. Another McNeil gift is an ultra-stylish Philadelphia Rococo side chair made for General John Cadwalader by Thomas Affleck. It was presented to the PMA in 1991.

Lindsey has just negotiated the purchase of an early Philadelphia Spanish-foot high chest of drawers and dressing table of maple. "It's a style that was very prominent prior to 1730 and, for whatever reason, we just never acquired any of it," he explains. Paired with a labeled full-size serpentine chest by Jonathan Gostelowe is the only miniature example of the same by Gostelowe, an acknowledged master of Philadelphia Rococo style. The tiny casepiece - whose meticulously crafted details echo the full-sized chest down to the last corner block - came from the collection of Theodore and Ruth Kapneck, famed needlework collectors who pursued miniature furniture with similar vigor. The family gave the chest to the PMA in 1994.

Further along, several open-ended galleries house a smattering of Nineteenth Century design. (Much of the PMA's Federal and Victorian collections are displayed in 23 historic homes and sites attended to by assistant curator Martha C. Halpern.) "We just acquired Anthony Quervelle's sketchbook. That's a tour de force," the curator says delightedly of 51 rare drawings from the shop of the French-born cabinetmaker active in Philadelphia after 1817. The sketches complement a noteworthy collection of Classical furnishings, among them portions of a suite of magnificent painted and gilded furniture by Benjamin Henry Latrobe for Philadelphia's William Waln house, built in 1808.

During Lindsey's tenure, the PMA has accelerated its drive to add representative material from other areas. "We are trying to acquire maybe a dozen objects from each region that show the high points through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century." On his wish list is a New York Rococo table, a Dutch-influenced New York kas, a Newport compass-seat chair, a Boston japanned secretary, a Duncan Phyfe table, a fine piece of Lannuier furniture and, from the Victorian period, some Meeks.

A great piece of Belter and a Herter Brothers bedroom suite in the Aesthetic taste bring the collection up to the late Nineteenth Century. Made for Philadelphia coal investor William T. Carter, the Herter suite was accessioned in 1928, just 40 years after it was commissioned. Recently, he acquired a crib by Daniel Pabst, a Philadelphia exponent of Eastlake style. It was made for the Iverson family, early publishers of the newspaper that became the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lindsey's curatorial duties leave off at contemporary design, which is handled by another department. Recently, however, he was given a 1933 limestone sculpture by William Edmondson, a Tennessee carver who worked in the 1930s and 40s. "Because of the strength of our Pennsylvania German and Shaker collections, this traditionally has been where the museum stopped thinking about folk art. Late Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century African-American art is of great interest to me because of its strength and vitality," he explains.

Buying at auction represents a small part of the Philadelphia Museum's acquisition program, says the curator, who "much more enjoys the gift process," an important part of which is educating potential donors. "We let them know that with capital gains they can basically reduce the price a third to us and cover their liability, giving us a donation rather than giving the government that amount as taxes."

In 1990, the year he was promoted to full curator, Lindsey made his most daring acquisition, a mirrored and elaborately ornamented secretary bookcase created for Ann Shippen Willing in 1758. "It had been on loan to the museum for about eight or nine years by a member of an old Philadelphia family who was very anxious that it stay here but also wanted to provide for her heirs," recalls the curator. Based on the 1989 sale of the Nicholas Brown secretary bookcase for $12.1 million, Sotheby's had attached an estimate of $8/10 million to the casepiece, a masterpiece of Philadelphia Georgian design. "We negotiated a reduced-price purchase/gift," notes Lindsey. "She took off a sizable amount - three-quarters of the appraisal - and then we purchased it for the balance."

Four years later, and also by private treaty, the PMA purchased a rare rectangular tray-top table. It is probably from the same shop as the distinctive metal-top tray table from the William du Pont collection that Leigh Keno sold at the 1995 Winter Antiques Show. "It's a stellar thing," Lindsey says admiringly of the PMA acquisition. "In my opinion, these two are the best Philadelphia examples of a form that was more common in New England."

"If an important object comes up and if the only way for us to acquire it is through private funds, generally, knock on wood, we've been able to assemble an interested group," reports the curator, who attributes such phenomenal support to Philadelphia's "history of philanthropy," generally, and to the area's "wealth of decorative and historically-oriented art."

The illusion of a free-wheeling, big-spending museum is countered by reality: 90 percent of the institution's collections are acquired by gift. It's a serendipitous process, as illustrated by the day in 1986 when a stranger walked into the PMA with a portrait of George Washington by Adolph Ulrich Wertmuller. "I think it's the first version. Would you like it?," said the descendant of the Swedish-American artist. Three or four copies of the portrait, which in its day was favorably compared to the better known Thomas Sully work, are in institutions around the country.

Lindsey is accustomed to quizzical looks from visitors he leads into the large room filled with Canterbury, Watervliet and Sabbathday Lake Shaker furniture and artifacts. "In the Colonial Revival mind set, casepieces were stripped," says Lindsey apologetically of what is nevertheless a well-documented study collection put together by a PMA board member and his wife in the 1920s, when Shaker communities were disbanding.

In another gallery, back-lit cases show early American glass to perfection. Most of the glass was given to the museum in 1953 by George Lorimer, but the collection has been substantially embellished, most recently, in 1994, by the Strassburger family. "One of the big weaknesses that we are just now starting to address is later Victorian art glass," says Lindsey, who has used unrestricted funds to acquire Mount Washington examples.

The PMA's already strong position in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia silver has been enhanced since 1990. "This is the Hollingshead coffee pot that sold a few years ago at Butterfield's," says the curator. He read about the Rococo finery in a post-sale report in a trade newspaper and, on a hunch, called Putnam Valley, N.Y., silver dealer Jonathan Trace, who arranged the coffee pot's resale to the museum through the Dietrich American Foundation. After the Philip Syng, Jr, example of 1753, it is the best repousse coffee pot in the PMA's collection.

A Rococo sweetmeat basket by Charles Hall, a Philadelphia-trained silversmith who moved to Lancaster, came to the museum after the seller bought it at a Charleston yard sale for less than $200 and turned to Lindsey for help identifying the marks. "Happily, she agreed to sell it for a fair price, substantially more than she had paid for it and what I thought was warranted given its quality and rarity. This is the only locally-made example of the cake-basket form," notes the curator.

So far, nothing in the museum's silver holdings surpasses a pair of Charles Le Roux sauce boats given to the PMA in 1991 by Daniel Blain, Jr, in whose family the Logan easy chair (sold at Christie's in 1995 for a record $552,500) and some other important silver descended. "They are the only known American Baroque double-lipped sauce boats. It's a ceramic form that was translated into silver in Holland and Ireland, but it didn't really happen here," says Linsdey of the hollow ware made for Pennsylvania governor Patrick Gordon. Auction estimates in 1991 put the value of the vessels at up to $1 million.

Beyond the silver, a corridor gallery dances with slip-decorated redware. "There would be no way now to assemble a collection of this quality or range," says the curator, glancing around at the formidable cache of Pennsylvania German artifacts that the museum began assembling in the last century. A Chester County line-and-berry inlaid chest was purchased for the PMA at Ron Bourgeault's Northeast Auctions by H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., whose vast and varied collections may someday be ensconced here. More than any other institution, the PMA has benefited from the Dietrich American Foundation's generous long-term loan program.

When Robert Trent left Winterthur, it was rumored that Jack Lindsey was on the museum's short list to replace him as furniture curator. Lindsey prefers not to comment, instead noting, "It would be very hard for me philosophically to leave the Philadelphia Museum of Art because they gave me a vote of confidence much earlier in the course of a career than curators usually get." He adds, "I have great administrative leeway and tremendous support. As terrible as it may sound, I could be here for 30 years and be happy."

Happy, and busy. In the works is a comprehensive exhibition of objects made for the Cadwaladers, the prominent Eighteenth Century Philadelphia family whose name is associated with the prized suite of hairy paw-foot furniture. "This will be the first time that we have really scrutinized the chronology of the bills with the existing objects to determine when things entered the family. We hope to see from the earliest to the latest if there is any possible design derivation or influence," he says. Scheduled for 1997 is "Baroque Pennsylvania," an analysis of pre-1750 decorative arts that derives from the curator's doctoral dissertation on early regional styles among Welsh Quakers in the Delaware Valley.

"Bea was responsible for the museum realizing the depth of the collection here and how important it was to start doing systematic publications," says Lindsey, who is helping Mrs Garvan finish a three-volume catalogue on the PMA's silver collection. He has catalogued its Tucker porcelain holdings, and plans to tackle furniture next. Not of the "huge coffee-table book mentality," he will be satisfied if each object is succinctly described and illustrated, right down to the "last screwy construction technique." The multi-volume project may take a decade or two to complete.

And he will continue to haunt New York's salesrooms. All eyes were upon Jack Lindsey in January, waiting to see if the PMA would claim the only known Philadelphia hairy paw-foot tea table, sold for $695,500; put in a bid on the Joseph Wharton armchair from the Meyer collection, bid to $585,500; or buy a rare Phillip Syng, Jr., spoon tray, knocked down at $48,300. As it turned out, Lindsey passed on all three, coming away with only a pair of Samuel Williamson wirework baskets made in Philadelphia at the close of the Eighteenth Century. In art as in life, discretion is the better part of valor.