Gallery owner recalls Scaife's excitement for art, knowledge

Bill Vareika had never heard the name Richard M. Scaife when the billionaire showed up one day in the late 1980s at his Newport, R.I., gallery.

“He came in and he kind of licked his lips, and he said, ‘I feel like a child in a candy store,' ” recalled Vareika of William Vareika Fine Arts. “He had a very good eye, and obviously, he had been raised around art.”

The owner of the newly opened gallery still didn't know of Scaife's status when, trusting his instincts, Vareika let Scaife walk out the door without paying for about a dozen paintings by the likes of John La Farge and 17 pencil drawings by James Edward Buttersworth.

Scaife explained he hadn't brought his checkbook but wanted to fly the pieces to Pittsburgh for a party he was throwing that evening.

The encounter marked the start of Vareika's longtime business relationship and friendship with Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking fortune and the Tribune-Review publisher and owner until his death July 4.

Those La Farges and Buttersworths are among Scaife's collection of more than 500 artworks, the best of which soon will be available for public viewing at two of the philanthropist's favorite museums, Westmoreland Museum of American Art and Brandywine River Museum of Art.

While museum officials began dividing the collection evenly on Wednesday, Scaife's artworks sat neatly filed and stacked in a dim basement, grouped by the Scaife residence they came from — Pebble Beach, Calif.; Nantucket, Mass.; Shadyside; and Ligonier. In sum, Scaife's collection is overwhelmingly uplifting and cheerful, reflecting his love of surrounding himself with natural environments such as landscapes and seascapes, beautiful objects and flowers. He preferred American art but owned a few European and modern pieces.

“He liked sunny scenes, he liked beautiful women and he liked scenes and places where he lived or visited,” Westmoreland Museum director Judith O'Toole said.

Yet Scaife's greatest motivation for collecting was quite simple: He collected because it made him happy.

“Of all the money I've donated or spent,” Scaife wrote in a Tribune-Review column published June 22, 12 days before he died, “the most enduring pleasure and reward came from buying art.”

Natasha Lindstrom is a staff writer for Trib Total Media.