By Victor Greto
CHEVY CHASE, Md. — When Bruce Coleman Perkins turned 21, his parents gave him $500 to spend as he pleased.
He bought a pair of dishes.
Exquisitely decorated 18th-century Chinese export armorial soup plates, sure.
But dishes nonetheless.
“Dad thought I was crazy,” says Perkins, a tall, burly man, who would look as natural wearing a football uniform as he does standing in his home showing his collection of Chinese Export Porcelain.
To Perkins, 55, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Winterthur Museum since 2001, art objects are not things.
They are windows.
Like relics, they are charged with meaning, a link to a past that still breathes through the minute pores of a 1705 14-inch dinner plate with the coat of arms made for and once owned by a British aristocrat named William Pitt.
“In Bruce’s case, something happens when he looks at a piece of Chinese export porcelain,” says Tom Savage, director of museum affairs at Winterthur. “It starts with the nameless people in 18th-century China who produced it. The ship captains who built worldwide networks to trade for it. The families who passed it down. It’s an amazing romance.”
It’s a romance that has threaded his life.
Even the home in which he and second wife Pam live was chosen, at least in part, because of his extensive collection.
“He saw the built-in shelves,” Pam says, “and cried, ‘Dish-a-rama!’”
Those built-in shelves line the far end of their museum-like living room, and are filled with 200 pieces of 18th-century Chinese export porcelain dishes, teapots, cups, saucers and bowls.
The collection is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The home is six miles from his Washington, D.C. office, Flather & Perkins, an insurance company specializing in fine art, such as collections of Chinese export porcelain.
Two short blocks from the White House, his insurance company’s suite of offices also is filled with antiques, including 18th-century prints and engravings of Revolutionary War generals, mostly of George Washington, and a series of old du Pont gunpowder flasks.
“The girls call my collection my ‘Dead Generals,’” Perkins says of the 14 women who staff his office.
Even the Perkinses’ dog is touched by history, although of a more personal kind.
About a year ago, Pam came home with a small, fuzzy white “coton de tulear” and named it Henry.
“I’m a big-dog guy,” Perkins says. “But she fell in love with him. So after she named him, I said I would name the rest — Henry Francis du Pont Perkins.”
H.F. du Pont was not Perkins’ father.
But some of the blood of the Winterthur estate’s founder courses through him, and when Perkins became chairman of the board there, he suddenly had privileged access to hundreds of rooms of objects in which to melt into the past.
“He is a very sophisticated collector,” Savage says. “But he’s also a regular guy. There’s nothing effete or snobbish or off-putting about him.”
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His mother and father met at the National Archives shortly after World War II.
John Howard Perkins, a former photographic specialist with the O.S.S. — the war-time precursor to the C.I.A. — was running the microfilm department there when he met Ellen du Pont Meeds, the niece of Delaware senator and former governor C. Douglas Buck, who had gotten her a job there.
The second of four children, Bruce Perkins, born in 1951, started collecting things early. First, it was stuffed animals made in Germany.
Then, inspired by his father, weaponry.
“Every year for my birthday and for Christmas, I’d get a sword,” Perkins says. Or a cap-and-ball pistol.
These were mostly pre-Civil War swords, which could be gotten back then by the barrelful from a surplus army store in Alexandria, Va.
“We used to have sword fights with those things,” Perkins says of he and his two brothers. He’s put them away now in deference to his own 18-year-old son, Thomas Coleman. He also has a 13-year-old daughter, Sarah Trencher. Both are from a previous marriage.
Perhaps the most infuriating collection he began as an adolescent — from his parents’ point of view — was begun when Perkins was 15.
Working on a farm in Middleburg, Va., during the summer, he found a dump and discovered dozens of empty beer cans. “They weren’t very popular at home,” he says.
No matter how smelly, though, the common denominator of a collector’s obsession is objects.
“The first impact is visual, it’s what appeals to you,” Savage explains. “It speaks to you.”
It seems inevitable, in hindsight, that Perkins’ tastes would become more traditional.
He attended the all-male and private Landon School for Boys. He wore a coat and tie.
“I loved tradition,” he says, and while attending the indelibly traditional Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., he visited his maternal grandmother’s (Ellen du Pont Wheelwright) house in Wilmington — Goodstay, now a conference center owned by the University of Delaware.
“Grandma’s house was full of art and porcelain,” Perkins remembers. He now owns an 18th-century one-drawer nightstand and pair of card tables that originally set in the living room at Goodstay.
When Perkins’ grandfather died in 1962, his mother inherited a lot of early American furniture. He grew up in a house filled with antiques.
He soon discovered that Washington and Lee held the third greatest collection of Chinese export porcelain in the United States — Winterthur had the second — and he began cataloging the university’s collection. The Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., has the best.
“I fell in love with it quickly,” he says.
So, when he turned 21 and his parents gave him $500, he bought those two dishes.
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The Perkins home today reflects a compromise.
Pam is a lover of English and French antiques; Bruce can’t get enough of early American Federal style (late 18th century), including some of the furniture he got from his mother and that had been in the du Pont family for generations.
Although it’s the early American style that dominates the lower floors of the house — including Chippendale card tables, neo-classical art, his dishes, framed prints and engravings — the walls of several rooms are painted in pastels.
The rooms have both a feminine and museum-like quality.
But upstairs in Perkins’ “dressing” room are set all his manly, brown-toned paraphernalia, including those leaden cap-and-ball pistols, and slender-necked, century-old whiskey bottles. On the walls hang earthy 200-year-old prints of Washington, Lafayette and Nathaniel Greene.
Those dead generals, however, are softened by quaint prints scattered throughout the house, including a charming 1724 print by English botanist Mark Catesby of “the earliest known picture of a quadruped in North America,” Perkins says — a bison, drawn from life in North Carolina.
At the entrance to their home hang a set of four early 19th-century paintings of American merchant ships, which carried Perkins’ precious porcelain from China. There are early maps of Baltimore and New York City hanging elsewhere.
But the home is not finished, Pam says.
“When we married a couple of years ago,” she says, “we hired a decorator. This is a compromise.”
A working one — not unlike Perkins’ career.
When he graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1973 with a degree in art history, Perkins interviewed at the University of Delaware and at Winterthur for the Masters program.
After attending UD for a year, it didn’t feel right.
“Everyone wanted to be a curator,” he says. “I wanted to buy stuff, collect, not do it for someone else. I knew I didn’t want to be a curator.”
He returned to Washington, and decided he wanted to be an antique dealer. But there was a recession during the early 1970s, and he worked for a while in an insurance company, and then got a job as an assistant buyer at Garfinkle’s, a retail store.
There, he met his first wife, Tracy Trencher, to whom he was married for 24 years.
He got restless by 1978, and opened his own antique store in Middleburg, Va. The couple also bought a home in town built in 1800, which took years to restore. Perkins even took six months off to do it, and in two years they had restored 11 of 14 rooms.
Perkins began joining collecting and decorative arts organizations, including the Decorative Arts Trust and the American Ceramics Circle.
At his store, he met Jim Flather, partner in a downtown Washington D.C. insurance firm called Glover and Flather, founded in 1917. Flather wanted Perkins to work for him.
In 1983, Perkins closed his antique store, and went to work for Flather. He bought into the business five years later, and assumed full ownership in 2002, the year of his divorce, and soon after Flathers had died.
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As objects center Perkins’ life and imagination, so do they at Winterthur.
A non-profit, its nearly 1,000 acres was the estate of Henry Francis du Pont, who died in 1969.
Winterthur’s $24 million annual budget and 400 full- and part-time employees help maintain 85,000 objects, ranging from furniture, paintings and prints to ceramics, needlework and brass. Its library contains more than 75,000 books and half a million manuscripts.
The country estate’s 175 preserved rooms filled with antiques and art are delicate studies on how to lose oneself in the past.
As newer museums and centers open — including Philadelphia’s Constitution Center and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. — the trend has been less toward centerpiecing objects as it has been toward featuring audio-visual aids and participatory storytelling.
It’s a cycle, not a trend, says Winterthur board of trustees member John A. Sargent, who runs a real estate investment company in Washington, D.C.
“I do think people are going to want to understand the story of our history, and it doesn’t have to be glitz and glamour, because that was not the period of history,” he says. “Winterthur is an anchor in the American experience.”
Savage says that traditional museums are only smart in taking advantage of the latest technology to bring more people in.
“The museum field has reacted to the technological field, and there are technologies that help us understand objects,” he says.
Winterthur itself has added an iPod tour, as well as a recent lighter-weight but successful exhibition on “Fashion and Film.”
But Savage agrees with Sargent that it’s all part of a cycle.
“These things are cyclical, and we’re in a media-crazy world,” Savage says. “Technologies are robbing us of more of our leisure time. But thinking people will never give up the experience of reading a great book from a tactile volume.”
At some point soon, Sargent says, “Someone will say enough, and sit down and have a meal without wanting to eat it on their lap — and want their history in a thoughtful, realistic way.”
Perkins, as chairman of the board, has the most influence in setting the museum’s agenda, says Winterthur director Leslie Greene Bowman.
That new direction includes seeing Winterthur as a country estate.
“He is a du Pont and knows the history of the place,” she says. “We’re learning how a country estate actually operated,” which includes adding sheep, and opening up the garden tour from a clockwise perspective that H.F. du Pont had designed his gardens to be seen.
Perkins was instrumental in purchasing one of the most expenses pieces Winterthur has ever gotten, the $1.5 million 8’-11” mahogany tall-case “Stretch Clock” built about 1740 in Philadelphia.
In their letter of interest, Perkins and Bowman said that the clock was “Perhaps the most important object ever to be considered for purchase since Mr. du Pont’s time….”
“He’s passionate,” Bowman says of Perkins. “It’s infectious.”
And it doesn’t matter to whom he is speaking.
In June 2002, Perkins, Bowman and Savage took a 10-day tour of country estates in England.
At the estate of Lady and Lord Arran, Perkins noticed Lady Arran’s Chinese export porcelain collection that once belonged to the Pitts, Bowman remembers.
“You have a lot — a lot — of the Pitt Service,” Perkins said to her. “Yes,” Lady Arran replied, “It was my great-aunt’s. Would you like to hold a piece?”
Perkins breathlessly took hold of a “charger” — a large plate — and took it out to the porch to see it in the natural light, Bowman says.
“Because he’s so knowledgeable, he was telling dukes and duchesses about their possessions,” says Savage, who also was there.
Perkins ended up acting as a middleman six months later when he learned that Lady Arran wanted to sell much of the collection.
He bought two pieces, including a pair of 14-inch chargers, proudly displayed in his dish-a-rama space.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he says, his eyes looking from an avid collector’s heart into the exquisite detail of both the plate and its past.