Robert Ellsworth with various Ming dynasty pieces in the living room of his Fifth Avenue apartment in 1980.CreditGene Maggio/The New York Times

Robert H. Ellsworth, a prominent dealer of modern Chinese painting, Ming dynasty furniture, archaic jade and other examples of Asian art who helped amplify many of the major Asian collections in the United States, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 85.

He died as a result of a fall, said a friend, Margarett Loke.

Mr. Ellsworth, who never graduated from high school, was interested in China and in antiques from the time he was a boy. As a teenager, he worked in a Manhattan antiques gallery, where he met Alice Boney, then the leading dealer in Asian art in the city. She took him under her wing, and what he learned from her about Chinese porcelain, painting and furniture was the fundament of a career that placed him among the boldest, most prolific and most prescient dealers of Asian art in the country.

“The Chinese have a phrase, ‘The indigo emerges from the blue,’ meaning the student surpasses the teacher,” said Marc F. Wilson, a former curator of Asian art at, and later the director of, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., which acquired a dozen or so important pieces from Mr. Ellsworth. “He became the No. 1 purveyor of things Asian, especially objects, in the Western world. When it came to objects, he was unbeatable.”...Continue Reading

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