A collection in Providence Rhode Island; a visit to Marguerite Riordan's shop in Stonington, Connecticut, was the beginning of a thirty year journey collecting American furniture and folk portraits.(Living with antiques)

A favorite Saturday Evening Post cover of 1947 illustrates two spellbound window-shoppers, noses pressed against the glass of an antiques shop in the tony coastal Connecticut town of Southport. The shop belonged to Mary Allis (1899-1987), the fierce, flame-haired authority on American folk art who advised the collectors Stephen C. Clark, Stewart Gregory, and Jean and Howard Lipman.

Flash forward forty years. The year is 1987; the town is Stonington, an unspoiled Connecticut fishing village on the Rhode Island border. (1) A couple, a young physician and his wife stalking antiques on a Saturday afternoon, peer through the window of another shop. It belongs to Marguerite Riordan, Allis's successor as a leading woman dealer and top specialist in American folk art and New England country furniture.

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Riordan eventually got her own cover, on the New Yorker in 1979, where she is sketched minding her booth at a popular antiques show. (2) A former jewelry designer and New York sophisticate who was restless as a young mother in the Connecticut suburbs, Riordan began selling antiques in the 1960s after filling her eighteenth-century Glastonbury house with quilts, weather vanes, baskets, samplers, and stoneware. Her children watched with amusement, and pride, as schoolmates puzzled over the tags that adorned the family's ever changing furnishings.

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