Sylvia Phillips Regelson: The Elegance Of Simplicity                                                                         

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Regelson family, in memory of their beloved mother who recently passed away, plan to continue operating OUROBOROS at the Antique Village in Hanover County. The following story was originally published in NORTH of the JAMES magazine 16 years ago. Our deepest condolences for the Regelson family loss. Sylvia was a unique presence in the Richmond community and she will be greatly missed by many. 

by Charles G. McGuigan

There’s nothing else like it in the Richmond area, and I suspect few establishments similar to it anywhere in America. Entering Ouroboros out at Hanover’s Antique Village is like visiting a museum in your best friend’s home. There’s an air of informality and ordered clutter, but the contents are rare, one-of-a-kind pieces of art, and the proprietor, the curator, Sylvia Regelson, is a woman who has a personal attachment to every single item within her shops. And she knows the histories of these objets d’art, and has an acute understanding of the art. For Sylvia Regelson the antique business is as much about the appreciation of the piece as it is about the sale. And her education about art is always growing.

“An antique dealer who spends more time selling than studying is an underachiever,” says Sylvia Regelson. “It’s an eighty hour a week job, and much of that time is spent learning about what you have.”

We stand in one of several rooms that Sylvia leases. I’m positioned next to an Arts & Crafts style bookcase that I’d willingly give my one remaining wisdom tooth for. On shelves and table tops surrounding us there are hundreds of pieces of Art pottery, all museum quality, the sorts of things you’d find at the Chrysler Museum or the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Within minutes, Sylvia is educating me about Art pottery. These are those exquisite pieces that rose out of the Arts & Crafts movement around the turn of the last century in this country and in Great Britain. There’s something understated in them, even in the subtlety of their glazes, and they seem like vessels contrived in a dream world. They have a simplicity and elegance to them much like a gingko leaf or a dragonfly wing.

Reading The Mark

Sylvia invites me to turn the vase over so I can inspect the mark that was stamped into the clay almost a century ago. If you understand what the mark means, it is a far more reliable method of discerning the past than by reading tea leaves. 

This particular mark bears an RP surrounded by feather-like flames. “That’s the Rookwood Pottery logo,” says Sylvia. Beneath the logo are the Roman numerals XV. “The flames stand for the number of years after the founding of the pottery,” she explains. “It started out with just the RP, then they would put one flame and keep adding them. They started doing the flames in 1886. After 1900 they went to Roman numerals. So we know this was made in 1915.”

Just under the Roman numerals there are the initials CST for Charles S. Todd, a longtime potter for Rookwood and one of Sylvia’s favorites. Beneath that there is a three-digit number. “That’s the shape number,” Sylvia tells me. “Every piece was assigned a shape number.” And just under that is the letter B. “That tells you the size of the piece,” she says. “There’s so much information on the pottery,” she says. “And people ignore these things. They say, ‘Well I have a piece of pottery, but I don’t know what it is.’ And they come into me and they say, ‘Can you tell me what this is?’ The information’s right there.”

Reaction To Victorian Excess

Sylvia meticulously examines each piece of pottery and the other items that inhabit her shop so she knows exactly what she has. “It really behooves us to look at the marks, to examine the piece, to learn something about it before we sell it,” she says. She considers some of the pieces she has kept just because she has not yet learned enough about them. “I have some pieces here I’ve had for a couple of years,” says Sylvia. “I won’t sell them, not that I want top dollar: I don’t want top dollar, but I have to know what they are.”

She picks up another piece of Art pottery, gently turning it in her hands. She tells me it was made at Newcombe College, part of Tulane in New Orleans. “The Art pottery of my interest is a reaction against Victorian excess,” Sylvia says.  “It’s a return to nature and there is an emphasis on glazes and form.”

I point to a vase that features deep red flowers under an obscuring taupe glaze. Although it’s a production piece, it is still one of a kind. “That’s also Rookwood,” she says. “Most of the pottery was thrown away even after the firing. There was always something wrong, even with the production pieces.”

First Love Is Rookwood

Rookwood pottery flourished in Cincinnati, Ohio from 1880 until 1955. “Cincinnati had great clay,” Sylvia explains. The business later moved to Starkville, Mississippi. 

This particular kind of Art pottery is what initially inspired Sylvia Regelson. She purchased her first piece of Rookwood Pottery at an antique show in her native New York City when was just 16 years old.

It was during the Second World War, and Sylvia and her sister once a month would give blood, hit the antique show and then go to the theater. “We’d make a day of it,” she recalls with fondness. “After we gave blood for the soldiers, we’d go to the antique show, if it was in town, then in the evening we’d go to the theater and we’d sit in the upper, upper, upper balcony in the last row for just 50 cents. I saw Helen Hayes and Vincent Price. I saw everyone.”

One of the women at the antique show had more contemporary pieces than other vendors. As Sylvia and her sister browsed through the booth one Saturday afternoon, Sylvia’s eyes hovered over a small dish. She kept going back to the piece of pottery, moved in her core by the glaze. She’d never seen anything quite like it before and almost instantly fell in love with it. 

“It was a little Rookwood dish,” she says. “It was a 1907 piece and it was 45 cents and I couldn’t afford it, but I bought it. And I looked at the mark and I was trying to figure out what it was and it wasn’t until a few years later that I saw some of the same pottery in a department store in New York.”

Library As Educator

Sylvia Regelson was born in Harlem on 112th Street, but the family moved around quite a bit. It was, after all, in the throes of the Great Depression, and money was tight. Her father, Sam Phillips, had been a famous klezmer cornetist who performed with some of the leading orchestras of the day. But when the Depression slammed the economy, Sam had to go to work as a grocery store clerk. He never regained his lip. 

Sam and his wife, Gussie, ran a candy store near NYU’s uptown campus. Along with confections, they also sold tobacco, ice cream, milkshakes, newspapers and magazines.

“I was a constant reader even at an early age,” Sylvia remembers. Although neither of her parents read English, they pushed their children toward education. 

“My mother saw to it that we joined the library,” says Sylvia. “We’d have to cross a park and it was about a mile and a half, two miles away and we’d go to the library every week and I’d come home with armloads of books.”

Sylvia started kindergarten when she was just four years old. “My older sister and I were inseparable,” she explains. “My sister started kindergarten at five, and when we went to school and my sister was being enrolled I started to cry and the teacher said, ‘You can come, too.’ And I did. I learned to read early on and I don’t know what I would have done without a library. That was my education. They don’t call Jews people of the book for nothing. We revere the printed word.”

Altering Newspaper Images

As young girl, Sylvia had a penchant for drawing. “We didn’t have much paper,” she says. “You didn’t just go out and buy paper in the middle of the Depression when you were five people living in a three-room apartment and your father was only getting twenty dollars a week as a grocery clerk.” So Sylvia improvised. She would take old newspapers and alter the images in them. “I could draw anything,” she says. “And while I could draw anything, I couldn’t do anything original. I didn’t have that compelling talent.” 

Regardless, at age 16, Sylvia studied art at Hunter College at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue. The cost was eight dollars a year for book and library fees. “My parents couldn’t have afforded to send me,” she says, then adds. “Education should be free.” She shakes her head thinking about the current administration of philistines, who have cut funding for education and the arts to the bone, as un-Jeffersonian a bunch ever to inhabit the White House. “Anybody who wants education, should have access to it,” Sylvia says. “Do you know they (current Bush administration) even cut back library hours. I’m still grieving over that election. It was a tragedy.”

The Ohrbach Philosophy

When she graduated from college in 1947, Sylvia worked briefly at an art gallery on 57th Street and then worked at City College, but she soon married William Regelson and in order to help put him through medical school she needed to find a job that paid better.

That’s when she had her first real introduction to retail. “I got a job at Ohrbach’s which was a specialty store,” says Sylvia. “It was famous for its advertising. Nathan Ohrbach was one of the most brilliant retailers I have ever known. He taught me everything I know.”

 Ohrbach understood the value of image advertising well before anyone else did. “They used to have full page ads in the New York Times,” Sylvia remembers. “They wouldn’t advertise any particular thing, they would advertise the store. It was on 14th Street. They carried the same kind of merchandise as Saks Fifth Avenue but at a lower price. You would see a purse that was a hundred dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue, and that same bag would be fourteen dollars at Ohrbach’s. They had a reputation for quality and value.”

Nathan Ohrbach didn’t believe in having sales. “If Mr. Ohrbach was having a sale he would never advertise it as a sale,” Sylvia says. “He’d write a new ticket. Instead of reducing the price, he’d write a whole new ticket for the new price. He said, ‘This is what it’s worth to the customer, this is the price.’”

The Snake Devouring Itself

She continued working at Ohrbach’s until she became pregnant with her first child. Her husband, William Regelson, eventually completed his studies in medicine. In fairly rapid succession, the Regelsons had six children and the family relocated to Buffalo, where Dr. William Regelson went to work at a cancer hospital. “Bill was always a pioneer,” says Sylvia of her deceased husband.

Twelve years later, the Regelsons moved to Richmond, where Bill headed up the first Cancer Department at the Medical College of Virginia. Not long after that, Sylvia opened Ouroboros—a name that she and her husband had always been fond of. The word means, in Greek, the snake that swallows its own tail. "My husband used it as an emblem of his own work, bringing people back to life,” Sylvia tells. “And I liked it as well because antique dealers recycle, it’s the nature of the business. People own things, they sell them, and they are resold, over and over again, the snake swallowing its own tail.”

Her focus at Ourboros was Art pottery. She then began selling vintage cards, and 23 years ago she began introducing African art, which has become one the largest components of her business.

Art As Theater

As we enter the area that contains the African art, I am overwhelmed. These are all museum-quality pieces. It’s a trove of art that resonates with a love of living, quivers and hums like a tuning fork with a living spirit. It’s unlike most Western art, which seems at times bogus and imitative. This is the real stuff—there is magic in it.

“So many people walk by my shop and they’re afraid to come in because this is not Colonial pretty,” she says. And thank God for that, I’m thinking. If I never see another piece of Queen Anne mahogany, I’ll die in peace when the time comes.

“When some adults come into the shop they say, ‘O-o-o-o, scary,” says Sylvia. “When children walk in they say, ‘WOW.’ And it is WOW.” She mentions how Picasso, Modigliani and other artists collected African art. And its influence on their respective works is more than somewhat apparent. “They all collected it,” she says. “African art is a form of theater.”

We move among the players in this theater. There’s a massive cast bronze boat carrying a king, his consorts and men wearing Western dress and carrying muskets. The piece is 150 years old and as imposing as anything I’ve ever seen. She shows me a giant slit gong, a wooden drum from Uganda that possesses an eerie, bass voice.

The Dengezi Beauty

Facing me is a marvelous sculpture of a woman, her breasts pendulous, her buttocks pronounced, and her face, wrapped in tight curls, angelic and real as flesh. Her entire body is scarified with elaborate decoration. “This is from the Dengezi culture,” says Sylvia. “They never decorate the female figures to that extent. One of the curators at Colonial Williamsburg, when he saw this one, said, ‘I’m in love.’” 

She shows me one member of a Kuba trinity, ceremonial pipes made of bronze, a headrest, a bed that looks like a dugout canoe, and scores of masks.

On the opposite wall there are some ancient terra cotta sculptures. One is about 2,000 years old, another almost 2,300 years old and the third nearly 2,400 years old. I touch each one tentatively, knowing each was made before the birth of Christ. Each one was carbon-dated, so Sylvia is certain of their age. 

A man comes in and purchases a giant mask that actually dwarfs him. When he leaves, Sylvia says, “I often talk people out of buying things.”

She tells me briefly about her philosophy on collecting. “I don’t believe in collecting,” she says. “Oscar Wilde said, ‘Own nothing which is neither useful, nor beautiful.’ And by beautiful we don’t mean pretty. You should only collect to inform or inspire. I tell people, ‘Don’t buy it unless it gives you a palpitation of the heart. If you have to think too much about it, you don’t need it. If you know it’s going to haunt you, you better get it.”

Haunting Beauty

We don’t even get a chance to visit the booth Sylvia runs with her daughter, Mimi, who also owns Exile down in the Fan. But as we stand in the doorway between the African Room and the Art Pottery Room, Sylvia points to a number of Asian pieces. “The older I get the more I love simplicity,” she says. “And it doesn’t have to be expensive to be wonderful.  I sold a three-dollar piece of unglazed pottery a couple of years ago that still haunts me. It was so perfect in its way.”

Although Asian pottery is not her specialty, Sylvia is learning more about it all the time. 

 “This is an area where I’m not strong,” she says. “I depend a lot on my sources for a lot of this information. Although I am constantly studying.” 

She tells me Korea was the birthplace of fine ceramics and that the Chinese copied it from them and then the Japanese further perfected the process. Sylvia Regelson cradles each piece of porcelain and cloisonné as if it were the frailest infant. She strokes an opalescent vase with a pale green background and snowy egrets in flight, then raises it toward her eyes and inspects its crackling glaze. 

“I’m looking forward to how much I have to learn,” she says as she lowers it to a table.