One century ago, as is the case today, the pleasures of art were the privilege of wealth. A handful of high-end picture dealers stayed near their rich clients, who for the most part lived in the industrialized Eastern cities. At the same time, purveyors of more affordable furniture and decorative objects sprang up to serve a growing urban middle class. Some of these galleries remain in business today, bearing histories that together form a chronicle of collecting in America. Art&Antiques looks at a baker’s dozen of these centenarians, in the order of their origination.

The business known today as French & Company traces its roots to an 1840 furniture business in lower Manhattan called Marley&Co., which makes it probably the oldest firm in America selling fine and decorative arts. (But only by a hair; see Vose, below.) Marley was sold to Sypher&Company which, in 1907, was acquired by a man named French who sold European furniture, tapestries and some art. "The firm’s first important clients were William Randolph Hearst, who didn’t like paintings, and Samuel Kress, who did," says Martin Zimet, who acquired French & Company in 1968, nearly a decade after noted critic Clement Greenberg had helped the gallery open a modern art department. French & Company was located on Madison Avenue, in what is still locally called the Parke-Bernet building, until around 1972, when Zimet moved the inventory to his townhouse on East 65th Street for what was to have been 90 days. It is still there, giving new meaning to the phrase "living over the shop." In 1998 Zimet left the furniture business, turning over management to his son, Henry, who sells art spanning Old Masters to contemporary, by appointment only.

Vose Galleries of Boston, almost as old, has been led by six generations of Voses, thus their description of themselves as the oldest family-owned gallery in America. In 1841, Joseph Vose bought an art supply store in Providence, Rhode Island, and by the 1850s, his son, Seth, had edged the firm into the business of selling paintings. By the 1860s Vose was handling art by many living American artists such as Martin Johnson Heade, Albert Bierstadt, Alfred Bricher and John Kensett. Upon moving the firm to Boston in the 1880s Vose introduced French Barbizon painters to an initially resistant market—and since then the firm largely has stayed with American art. Today Vose occupies a five-story historic brownstone, displaying American paintings and drawings from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as some contemporary realist art, and rare French Barbizon works, displayed amid age-appropriate antiques. The gallery has handled more than 34,000 American paintings.

Like French & Company, Knoedler & Company originated in lower Manhattan, opening in 1846 in what was then the commercial heart of the city and moving uptown as the city itself did, today occupying a landmarked townhouse on Manhattan’s gallery-lined Upper East Side. Michael Knoedler sold prints and artist’s materials in his role as American representative of the French art dealers and print publishers Goupil & Company, but soon was selling important paintings by European and contemporary American painters to a distinguished clientele. Michael was succeeded by his bon vivant son, Roland, an effective businessman; Roland’s scholarly nephew Charles Henschel helped Knoedler build an international reputation. Indeed, the firm maintained a gallery in Paris into the 1970s, and in London into the 1990s. Knoedler’s clients have included towering collectors such as the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers and Mellons. In 1971 the business was acquired by the late Armand Hammer, whose family foundation maintains ownership. The firm’s highly regarded reference library contains more than 60,000 volumes.
 
A La Vieille Russie, as the name suggests, sells Russian art and antiques as well as European and some American jewelry from a two-story location on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park and the Plaza Hotel. It was a bumpy road to Manhattan, buffeted by a century of wars. The business began in 1851 in Kiev and immediately achieved success selling objets de vertu to the Russian aristocracy. Dislocated, to put it mildly, by the Revolution, the firm moved to Paris around 1921 and in 1941 opened its flagship store in Rockefeller Center, moving to its present location in 1961. ALVR boasts goldsmith and jeweler Carl Fabergé as an early client and today is renowned for the Fabergé pieces in its inventory of Russian Imperial treasures. Always family-owned, ALVR has been led by generations of Schaffers.

When John Snedecor opened his shop in lower Manhattan in 1852, he dealt from day one in what was then contemporary American art, quite probably making Babcock Galleries the oldest dealer to specialize in it. (E.C. Babcock, a co-director at the time of Snedocor’s death in 1917, took over and changed the gallery’s name.) Marsden Hartley figures prominently among the artists Babcock has championed. One director had the prescience in 1959 to acquire a truckload—literally—of Hartley paintings left unsold at the artist’s death; the gallery subsequently came to represent the artist’s estate. Other artists associated with the firm include George Inness, Thomas Eakins (Babcock was agent for that estate as well) and John Kensett, whose catalogue raisonné the firm is publishing. Says John P. Driscoll, Babcock’s sixth owner and director, "The firm continues to actively buy for inventory, acquiring more than 20 works by Stuart Davis in the last year and a half, as well as works by Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Charles Sheeler." It also handles works by some living artists.

James Graham & Sons opened 150 years ago in lower Manhattan selling furniture and decorative arts. Since 1955 the gallery has been located on the Upper East Side, and has long specialized in 19th- and 20th-century American paintings: American Impressionism, the Hudson River School, the Ashcan School, The Eight and the Stieglitz Circle. Graham is also associated with the paintings and bronzes of the American West by Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell, and additionally offers European sculpture, British ceramics and some contemporary art. Led by five generations of Grahams, it is the oldest picture gallery in New York under the same ownership. In celebration of its recent 150th anniversary, a sesquicentennial loan exhibition featured artists exhibited by the gallery, including Oscar Bluemner, Andrew Wyeth, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Guy Pène du Bois and Alice Neel. The latter, who has been the subject of seven Graham exhibitions, was represented by a 1968 portrait of Robert Graham Sr., the father of the current gallery head. Graham has published (May 2007) an anniversary book tracing its history and the development of New York’s art world.