Eli Wilner's job: putting the frame in the picture.(ART)

YOU know that dour Victorian portrait your Aunt Tellie left you? Get it down from the attic. Even if the painting's not worth anything, the frame might fetch up to $200,000.

And if it does, Eli Wilner will be the man to thank. In 1982, when he was 26 and working as a painting restorer and framer, he began collecting antique frames that art dealers put out on the street as trash. It was cheaper for them to buy reproductions than to restore the old ones. Very old frames were valued, but those from the 19th and early 20th centuries, he recalls, "were considered junk."

In part, they were suffering the same fate as the late-19th-century paintings they once held; the fact that so many modernist painters had chosen to dispense with frames entirely didn't help matters either. "So curators, dealers and collectors dismissed an entire area of decorative arts," Mr. Wilner says. With the look of genuine horror he relates how some people even made a living burning old gilt frames for the gold.

In the early 1980's, however, the value of American paintings from the late 1800's began to soar, and works by artists like Winslow Homer, Frederic Church and Sanford Gifford started going for millions. Seeing a market in the making, Mr. Wilner quit his job to become a dealer specializing in frames from the period.

He bought 300 frames "in antique stores all over the Catskills," he recalls, often for as little as $20. He was also given many frames by galleries glad to have them hauled away. He carted them all back to his rent-stabilized walk-up on the Upper East Side and hung out his shingle in 1983.

Everyone thought I was insane," he says, smiling. "From my parents to my art dealer friends to my present-day wife, everyone told me, 'This is the stupidest thing you'll ever do.'"

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