A diamond anniversary.(Current and coming)(New Jersey Remembered)

Seventy-five years ago, in September 1930, Frank S. Schwarz moved his newly established antiques business from a farmhouse in southern New Jersey to, of all places, Atlantic City. Business was good--so good in fact that, following two more moves along the boardwalk of this beach-front town, he set up shop in the Ritz Hotel, only to move several more times.

Atlantic City changed during World War II, and Schwarz made an auspicious move to a building on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, where the stop was on the ground floor, and Schwarz and his growing family lived above it. The shop was mainly a source for other dealers scattered across the United States who knew that Schwarz had established a rapport with those who had lived in and around Philadelphia for generations and who therefore sought him out when they decided to dispose of some or all of their inherited antiques. Over the years many important pieces passed through his hands, ending up in noteworthy private collections and in institutions such as the Winterthur Museum in Delaware and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Frank Schwarz died in 1985, decades after his wife Marie and their son Robert D. had joined the company and changed the emphasis from selling wholesale to other dealers to retailing to the public. Robert had a consuming interest in American art, particularly in the works of Philadelphia artists, and soon the inventory was heavily weighted toward paintings, watercolors, and drawings, eventually to the exclusion of all other mediums. A natural progression was the organization of special exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues. Today, following Robert Schwarz's untimely death in 2004, the gallery is directed by his son Robert D. Schwarz Jr., with the able assistance of his grandmother Marie.

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