The International Fine Print Dealers Association lost a longtime colleague on Saturday, June 4, with the death of Sylvan Cole. He was 87.

Mr Cole was an expert fine print dealer and a founding member and former president of the IFPDA. He spent the better part of his life working with printmakers and he was committed and passionate about his artists, his gallery and to the field of collecting.

Sylvan Cole was born January 10, 1918. A native New Yorker, he attended Horace Mann School and went on to Cornell University and later Rutgers University where he took graduate classes in history of art.

After serving in World War II, Mr Cole returned to New York and in 1946 started working for the Associated American Artists Gallery. The gallery’s mission was to “make contemporary art known and available to the American public; to bring it into the cultural pattern of the greatest number of American homes.” Mr Cole came to serve the association as director and president in 1958, commenting in an interview with Jacqueline Brody, the gallery “rose to the top by selling good prints to a lot of people.”

The Sylvan Cole Gallery on 57th Street was established in 1984, and specialized in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American prints and drawings. Among others he represented and exhibited the following artists: Ivan Albright, John Taylor Arms, Milton Avery, Will Barnet, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Stuart Davis, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Karl Schrag, John Sloan, Raphael Soyer, Benton Spruance, James McNeill Whistler and Grant Wood.

He knew many of these artists personally and was renowned for being close to the artists with whose work he dealt. Since he concentrated on printmakers whose work he knew well, he was able to represent them meticulously. He knew the importance of seizing the opportunity to collect and record information from the primary source – the artists or their estates.

Alongside Marty Gordon, Mary Ryan, Paul McCarron and Dorothy Schneiderman, Sylvan Cole founded the International Fine Print Dealers Association in 1987 and was a great force behind the establishment of an annual IFPDA print fair in the Armory building on Park Avenue. Serving the board since the beginning, Sylvan Cole assumed the presidency of the board of directors from November 1994 through November 1997.

He is survived by his wife, Mary Myers Cole of New York City and Fire Island; a daughter, Nancy Cole Kelly of Rochester, N.Y.; two sons, Robert Cole of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., and James Cole of Fleury-en-Biére, France; a brother, Charles Cole of Fort Worth, Texas; two grandchildren and one great-grandchild.