Dorothy Goldman. © GITTY DARUGAR - Paris, 2017.

Collector, professor, connoisseur, philanthropist, world traveler… Dorothy Tapper Goldman was all of those and more. Best known to the public as the collector of American foundational documents who in November 2021 sold her print copy of the U.S. Constitution—one of only fourteen known copies from the original printing—Mrs. Goldman was also an esteemed collector of Chinese ceramics, particularly monochrome-glazed porcelains from the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911).

Born in Jacksonville, FL, Dorothy Elizabeth Tapper grew up in Shaker Heights, OH, where visits in her youth to the nearby Cleveland Museum of Art with her parents, Irving and Jeanne Tapper, sparked an enduring interest in the arts. Residence in Boston, where she completed degrees in education—a B.S. at Tufts University and an M.S. at the Massachusetts College of Art (now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design)—and where, as a tenured professor, she subsequently taught courses in the departments of Architecture and of Interior Design at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, afforded ample opportunities to visit the neighboring Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, whose superb holdings of Asian art nurtured a deep and abiding love of Chinese art.

Living in New Canaan, CT, Mrs. Goldman made the acquaintance of Peter L. Rosenberg (1933–2013), owner of Vallin Gallery in nearby Wilton, CT, and of legendary Asian art dealer Robert H. Ellsworth (1929–2014), who owned a home in New Fairfield, CT, in addition to his well-known Fifth Avenue residence in New York, both of whom encouraged her not just to admire Chinese porcelains but to collect them. And over the years she did, to the very last year of her life. Diligently perusing all Chinese ceramics on offer in New York during every March and September Asia Week and buying from New York dealers and auction houses alike, she assembled a collection of more than 100 Qing monochromes, acquiring the pieces one-by-one and displaying them in her Park Avenue penthouse apartment. Chosen with a discerning eye, Mrs. Goldman’s porcelains are the crème de la crème of Qing monochromes, evincing the potters’ consummate skill in creating glazes in a rich, varied palette from subtle to bold. Mrs. Goldman grouped her porcelains by color, with those exhibited in the living room ranging, among others, from snow white and lemon yellow to emerald green and the palest of blues, known as clair-de-lune; by contrast, she showcased her stunning array of Dehua porcelains, including both vessels and sculptures, in the dining room. The porcelains featured in the living room came mostly from the celebrated kilns at Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, while those in the dining room—i.e., the Dehua porcelains familiarly known in the West as Blanc de Chine—came from the kilns in Dehua county, Fujian province. Always delighting in the presence of Chinese monochromes, Mrs. Goldman embellished her Paris apartment, where she spent several months each year, with a few emerald-green, lead-glazed pieces from China’s Eastern Han period (AD 25–220).

Mrs. Goldman’s interest in American historical documents stemmed from that of her husband, New York real estate developer S. Howard Goldman (1929–1997) who amassed a formidable collection of important printed Americana from the Revolutionary era through the framing of the Constitution, all of which he sold in 1995 except for the rare copy of the U.S. Constitution, which he gave to his wife, and which became the foundation of the distinguished collection of American printed foundational documents that she herself assembled. Mrs. Goldman’s copy of the U.S. Constitution sold in a special evening sale at Sotheby’s, New York, on 18 November 2021 (as Lot 1787, the date of that copy).

Mrs. Goldman contributed the proceeds from sale to the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation, of which she was president. The foundation, which supports research and education, has made substantial contributions to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and, since 2007, has funded an annual Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies; in fact, her generosity made possible the appointment of seventeen Constitutional Studies Fellows between 2008 and 2023. The foundation has also made generous grants to The New York Historical Society, including a grant of $10 million to train teachers in educating students about democracy, the society noting that Mrs. Goldman’s interest in the Constitution had been rooted in her background in teaching and perpetuated by the Constitution’s inclusive “We the People”, the opening words of its preamble. Following her late husband’s lead, Mrs. Goldman joined the board of The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society, serving as its Vice President and becoming friends over the years with former Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

A staunch advocate for the arts, Mrs. Goldman was active with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), where she championed the inclusion of Native American art in both exhibitions and permanent-collection acquisitions. A bibliophile and a supporter of the Grolier Club (of New York) and of The Manuscript Society (of Overland Park, KS), Mrs. Goldman, as chair of the library advisory board of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), New York, took a deep interest in the seminary’s library and its extensive collection of manuscripts and other treasures. She gave the new JTS Library’s Dorothy Tapper Goldman Exhibition Gallery, funding both the creation of the gallery and the exhibitions mounted within. And, under her direction, the JTS board of trustees initiated a touring exhibition program that showcased the library’s treasures in facsimile, thereby allowing wider access to its resources without risk of loss or damage to the actual works of art. Through her leadership of the JTS and her long association with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she oversaw the establishment of a lending program in which treasures of Judaica from the seminary’s library are shared with the public through exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. The remarkably successful exhibitions in the library’s Goldman gallery and the institution of the lending program with the Metropolitan Museum of Art are the hallmarks of her board chairmanship at JTS.

She was also an important supporter of the Metropolitan’s Department of Asian Art, just as she was a significant donor to the Harvard Art Museums, where she served on the Asian Collections Committee. In a few instances her foundation made contributions inspired by her foreign travels, such as the grant she made to the Tongabezi Trust School, in Zambia, which serves underprivileged rural children.

An inveterate world traveler, Mrs. Goldman traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, and Asia, taking special delight in her visits to Central Asia, India, China, Korea, and Japan. She returned from every trip filled with joy and with the desire not only to pay a return visit to the countries just visited but to expand her knowledge and understanding of those areas. In like manner, every acquisition of Chinese art sparked a desire to learn more about the piece as well as about the artist and culture that created it. In short Dorothy Goldman was an exceptionally intelligent woman of great learning, taste, sophistication, and dedication who delighted in collecting but even more in using her resources to support research, to advance scholarship, and to promote education.

Robert D. Mowry
Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art Emeritus, Harvard Art Museums, andSenior Consultant, Christie’s.

Photograph courtesy of Dr. Vera Michaels