Living with antiques: a Kentucky couple collects.

Although "My Old Kentucky Home" is the state's official song, the original contents of old Kentucky houses have not been widely published, with The Magazine ANTIQUES being the notable exception. As early as 1947 the lack of attention paid to Kentucky's artistic heritage confounded the magazine's editors. "The surprising thing," they wrote, "is that Kentucky has not attracted more attention from antiquarians outside its own borders, for it is the oldest state west of the Great Divide." (1) And even though the magazine featured Kentucky again in 1974, the state's early fine and decorative arts still remain on the margins of the Americana mainstream. Moreover, when they do appear, Kentucky is often described as "the backcountry," a rather general term that might well have been disputed by wealthy antebellum Lexingtonians and Louisvillians as they perused French wallpapers, English cut glass, and imported Indian textiles in local shops and advertisements. (2) Knowledge of Kentucky's artistic heritage has instead come from within. The state's collectors and dealers, typically natives driven by pride and passion, have produced a largely unwritten body of knowledge based on observation, experience, and memory.

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For the past twenty-five years, this cadre has included the husband and wife who assembled the collection featured here. Inspired by the same passion that drove their predecessors, they have gradually built one of the state's finest private collections of furniture, textiles, pottery, paintings, and silhouettes. Like many astute collectors, they are more rightly described as curators: each potential purchase is considered in relation to the larger whole, each is subject to meticulous comparative and genealogical research, and each is seen as a preservation effort on behalf of Kentucky's heritage. The pair's still-growing collection fills their 1935 colonial revival house, appropriately located in one of the state's early county seats.

Ironically, the couple never intended to become specialized collectors of Kentucky art. Decades spent in Alexandria, Virginia, initially led them to purchase East Coast materials. Philadelphia rococo chairs, an elegant Rhode Island breakfast table, and other survivors from their first collection are interspersed among their Kentucky pieces. Their conversion came when they returned to Kentucky in 1980. Suddenly four hundred miles inland, adding to an East Coast Americana collection became much more difficult. Kentucky objects offered an underappreciated and undervalued alternative.