BURIED TREASURE
A priceless collection of artifacts finally sees the light of day.
Tucked away among the wind-worn cottages of Nantucket’s western shore resides a collection of Chinese artifacts millennia older than anything ever found on the island. Spanning more than six thousand years, these priceless relics make up one of the most varied and desirable private collections of Asian artifacts in the world. As unlikely as it would seem, the collection is housed along the banks of Hither Creek inside a cottage that looks like any number of other Madaket homes, on an island not known for Chinese treasures.
Owned by longtime Nantucket resident David Billings and his wife, noted island photographer Beverly Hall, the four-thousand piece collection has lived in the couple’s Madaket home for the past decade, filling every nook and cranny, covering every wall, with some pieces even sprinkled among the property’s eclectic gardens. Protected by high-tech, discreet security systems, this space is unlike most museums; there are no hermetically sealed rooms, no attendant asking you to keep a respectful distance from the artifacts—just the owners and a collection that they live with and love. Now, beginning at the end of May, hundreds of the Billings’ finest pieces will be on public display thanks to the Nantucket Historical Association.
Entirely self-taught, Billings amassed the collection by purchasing these artifacts over the course of more than fifty years at hundreds of auctions, private sales and from dealers, dedicating large sums from his personal fortune to the pursuit. From ancient figurines and Ming dynasty vases to burial suits and statues, the Billings Collection is a fascinating window into one of the world’s richest and oldest cultures.
After moving to the island full time in 2008, Billings began a years-long process of transferring his collection from around the world to Nantucket. “At that point, the collection was all over the place,” said Billings. “Moving to Nantucket allowed me to bring everything to one place. That process took about three years and completely filled my small Milk Street house, so much so that I would throw furniture out the back door to make room for pieces as they arrived!”
When Billings and Hall met in 2012, they discovered a unique connection. Raised in New York City before moving to the island in 1964, Hall is the daughter of the late Gerry P. Mack, a world-famous collector of antique Chinese snuff bottles. After this initial connection, Billings took Hall on a first date to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel at The Dreamland, and exactly one year later, they wed. Over the past decade, they’ve consolidated residences to Hall’s longtime Madaket home that began as a small cottage in the mid-1960s and has been added to a handful of times over the years, creating a 7,000-square-foot labyrinth of halls and unique rooms, several of which have been repurposed and converted into sections of the “museum.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, Billings and Hall took stock of their collection and decided to share it with others in the form of a book. “The world forced me to stop everything I was doing,” Billings said. “I was always so busy with the various projects I had been dedicating myself to, that I never thought there would be a window to create a book, no matter how many friends had been telling me to write one. COVID changed all of that.” Meticulously detailed, the couple’s new book, Passion and Pursuit: The David Billings Collection, is a four-hundred-page tome offering incredible detail as well as hundreds of high-resolution photographs taken by photographer and Nantucket resident Rob Benchley.
Part of producing the book required some serious restorations of specific pieces, which was made more difficult by the fact that virtually every museum and art restorer had been shut down due to COVID-19. “I ended up consulting with several of the large London museums,” Billings said, “since no one was picking up here in the States.” However, one American museum that did reach out during the pandemic was the Nantucket Historical Association, offering an opportunity to show his unified collection to the wider public for the first time. Over many months of negotiations, which included finding a curator that Billings felt he could work with to produce a show that would meet his high standards, it was agreed that of the thousands of pieces in the collection, just three hundred of the finest, oldest and rarest would appear in the Broad Street exhibition.
Exhibit curator Alice “Tita” Hyland said the book and the collection offer “an extraordinary opportunity to expand our knowledge of these creations made over thousands of years throughout Asia.” She added, “We are the beneficiaries of their commitment to collecting so many noteworthy treasures.” One of the more notable pieces in the exhibition will be a five-foot long burial suit from the Han dynasty (approximately 200 BCE) made up of almost three thousand small jade plates tied together by strands of gold that took five months to restore. This afterlife garment made for a woman of high rank has a beautiful chest plate emblazoned with twin rising phoenixes and is believed to have taken at least ten years to make.
Other highlights include the Peking Opera, a diorama of thirty- nine figurines detailing an elaborate and colorful staging of a Chinese opera. Also featured are an eggshell-thin black earthenware cup from the Longshan Neolithic culture, which dates back as far as four thousand years before Christ, and a white glazed vase from the Song dynasty formerly owned by the Mellon family. This vase is an important piece as it is one of the first examples of white glaze being used in China. In fact, the Billings Collection mainly consists of ceramics, but it also includes a variety of objects in bronze, wood and jade, as well as many textiles and several large Buddhas, including one weighing more than 1,200 pounds. And not all of the collection is from China, with masterpieces from India, Burma, Cambodia, Tibet, Korea and Japan included as well.
“I think I love the historical context with more than eight thousand years of recorded history,” Billings explained of his motivation. “I’ve loved studying the different dynasties and why they did the things they did. A lot of these objects are from tombs, which preserved them from the power transitions over the centuries when the invading or rebelling force would destroy everything significant to the previous rulers. I love that when you stitch all the history back together, you end up with an extraordinary story that continues on today.”
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