“Pack rat” is such an inelegant word for someone like the late Ruth K. Flower, who indisputably had elegant taste. Her collecting habits over more than half a century, however, did begin to resemble something more like hoarding on a grand scale.
Flower, born in 1902, heiress to her father’s Keith Lumber Co. fortune, began collecting as a young woman and continued until her death March 5, 1991. Her interest in quality never ebbed, and ultimately she crammed her 20-room Georgian-style house on a Winnetka bluff overlooking Lake Michigan-from basement to attic rafters-with a collection encompassing every type of decorative object imaginable.
Initially, Flower was most interested in Currier and Ives prints and antique firearms. Influenced by her father’s business-he was Herman Neuman Kreutzer, whose firm was one of the largest hardwood distributors in the Midwest-Flower later began collecting wooden furniture and folk art.
Throughout her life she was a voracious reader and educated herself about antiques, especially silver. She had a roster of favorite antiques shops in and around Chicago and visited them frequently. She was president of the Midwest Antique Association in the late 1930s, though she never was a dealer. In the 1940s she began collecting Staffordshire pottery and ceramics, as well as more of her first love, primitive American and folk art.
In 1952, after she came into her inheritance and she and her husband, Wallace Flower, who died four years ago, bought the Winnetka house, she accelerated her collecting of 18th Century American antiques.
Flower had a fabulous eye for English and American furniture and acquired lovely early American dropleaf tables in exquisite grains such as tiger’s eye maple, Chippendale side chairs, secretary bookcases, highboys, slant-front desks, Queen Anne, George I and II and Federal pieces of the quality one normally sees in books or restored museum houses on the East Coast.
Flower also amassed, just to skim the inventory, 10 tall case clocks from the 18th and 19th Centuries, nearly 50 American patchwork quilts and jacquard coverlets, hundreds of Staffordshire figurines, two complete Wedgwood Creamware dinner services, 20 or so primitive portraits, more than 75 silhouettes, 75 brass candlesticks, 200 cast-iron and ceramic banks, 15 American silver tea and coffee services, more than 50 tole boxes and trays, hundreds of pieces of glassware, boxes of pocket watches, a multitude of papier mache trays, American salt-glazed pottery crocks, Majolica, Bennington and Redware pottery and more.
There was so much more that it took seven auction-house staffers the whole month of January and half of February, working full-time, just to catalog the contents of the house, which is being billed as the “largest single-owner collection to go on the block in Chicago in decades.” The auction is scheduled April 18 to 21 at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers.
The auction house isn’t even sure how many items are in the sale, but a spokesman estimates it’s “over 10,000.”
Harvey Pranian, proprietor of Harvey Antiques in Evanston, called it “probably one of the best to come out of the Chicagoland area in many years. I cannot think of one that matches it in terms of early furniture, pottery, painting,” adds Pranian. “The variety and quality is pretty impressive.”
Unfortunately, Flower, the consummate collector, is not around to explain her reasons for rounding up what amounts to what grandson Clint Roenisch of San Francisco calls “a museum of early American history.”
Though she was known to many here and on the East Coast for her taste and acquisitions, the reasons for these passions remain an enigma.
All that is known from family members is that for decades, Flower hit practically every estate sale along the North Shore. Sometimes she roamed as far afield as Lake Geneva, Wis. In the attic are printed lists and catalogs of some of these estate sales.
“Mother just collected and collected and collected,” says her daughter, Elizabeth Crowe, of Winnetka. “My mother started collecting when we were babies.” Perhaps the collecting began as a escape from daily cares, Crowe said.
“I think she was a little bit overwhelmed by having two babies and another child who was 3,” says Crowe, who has a twin brother and an older brother. “She would put the babies in the back seat of her car with their bottles and she would head off antiquing. It was a lifetime occupation.
“Her house, well, you just couldn’t believe it,” Crowe says. “What I noticed as I got older was that her house just got fuller and fuller and fuller, and the tabletops got fuller and fuller and fuller. It was a little overwhelming. I doubt she wanted to part with anything she found. She never sold.”
Speculating on his grandmother’s reasons for her collecting passion, Roenisch says, “She was interested in history, but more interested in the evolution of technology. She enjoyed the evolution of how things have changed. One of the sad things about the sale is you are breaking up a museum of early American history. I’ve gone through and taken things I`m interested in,” as have other family members, he says.
“Given my druthers, I would turn the house into a museum, but from a personal standpoint, I’m not a curator and I’m living in San Francisco,” Roenisch says. “And there are so many things, you couldn’t keep everything-it’s impossible.”
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Auction-goers can view the Flower collection from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 13, 14 and 16; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. April 15; 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. April 17.
Catalogs will be available by April 1. For information and auction schedule, call Maron Matz at Hindman, 312-670-0010. –
