After 33 years on Worth Avenue, Select Fine Art is closing its doors with a retirement sale.
Cara Broderick opened the gallery specializing in 19th- and 20th-century European and American fine art and antiques in 1990 at 339 Worth Ave. in Via Mizner. It has been in the same location under her ownership all these years.
“Everything has to be sold. I am retiring. There are some wonderful things, some below cost,” Broderick said.
Prices are reduced by 50 to 75% on paintings, porcelain and furniture, and by 25 to 35% on antique sterling silver picture frames. She expects the shop to close by early August.
Broderick is already back in England, where she has traveled each summer and where she lived for years. She has traveled throughout Europe selecting treasures for her gallery, and says the most difficult part of the business has been finding enough beautiful items at estate sales and other places.
Elizabeth Del Santo, gallery manager for 13 years, is operating the shop. The hours in June and July are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., five days a week. The shop is closed Thursdays.
It all began when Broderick, already an established art dealer in London, visited Palm Beach.
“I fell in love with Palm Beach on my first walk down the street. I thought it was so delightful. It is almost like a part of England. I decided I could bring beautiful paintings and antique silver here and have a lovely shop,” Broderick said. “The shop at the corner of Via Mizner was absolutely perfect.
“It is hard work and very time-consuming. I keep my standards very, very high. Mainly the paintings we sell are museum quality to discerning buyers,” Broderick said.
The gallery is known for carrying paintings from American and English impressionists, especially marine and sporting paintings depicting hunting and yacht racing scenes. Its antique silver picture frames are also prized by collectors.
An especially important work at the gallery is “Hounds and Huntsman, North Cornish Hunt,” painted circa 1914, by Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959). Munnings is considered one of the finest British impressionist painters of the 20th century. His works were focused on rural scenes, racing and hunting, and his favorite subject, the horse.
Broderick, who was born in Ireland, closed her business in England when she opened her Palm Beach gallery, but now has returned to live fulltime in England. Broderick lived in Hertfordshire, England, for years. After selling her house on Clarke Avenue in 2014, she purchased a 10-acre horse farm outside London.
“The art world has changed tremendously. I am lucky that I have always dealt in fine art. There is a lot of decorative art being sold on the Avenue as opposed to fine art that is authentic fine art,” Broderick said.
“One reason Select Fine Art did so well is that it stayed the course and always sold fine quality authenticated paintings. We stood by everything we sold,” said Broderick, whose customers have included museums and leaders from the financial, real estate, tech, hotel, transportation, building, sports and entertainment industries.
People invest in art when times are good, and when times are bad. Buying art is a way for people to enjoy their wealth, she said.
“When they get concerned, they turn to fine art and decide they would like to put their money on the wall and enjoy it. People have a great sense of pride in their art collections. Look at the American collectors such as the Rockefellers and the Fords. They loved collecting fine art, and they would show it off. People are like that today, too,” Broderick said.
In the early years, Select Fine Art closed in the summer, but Broderick found that as time went on, more people were redecorating their homes in the summer.
“Decorators would contact us, then we would find ourselves busy in the summer, too,” Broderick said.
An accomplished equestrian, Broderick has competed in dressage events in Wellington and in England. Her horses have gone back and forth with her. The eight dressage horses she owns are in England now. They travel from Wellington to Miami by road, then are flown to Amsterdam. Next, they take a ferry from Amsterdam to England.
Her lifelong love of horses goes back to her childhood when at age 5, she was given her first pony, Tufty.
Along with her horses, Broderick’s West Highland white terriers, Bertie and Monty, also have left Palm Beach for England. They were well known in Palm Beach, where they greeted the shop’s visitors.
Bertie became famous in 2016 when his encounter with a poisonous cane toad, also known as a bufo, giant or marine toad, made the front page of the Palm Beach Daily News. The dog was poking around in the bushes when the toad sprayed him.
A Palm Beach police officer who was driving by heard Broderick’s screams for help and drove Broderick and Bertie to Island Animal Hospital in the police car. Bertie came through what could have been a fatal ordeal.
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“Everybody up and down the Avenue knew my Westies. They are now loving their life in England,” Broderick said.
Del Santo said she will miss working at the gallery and will miss Via Mizner. Prior to working for Broderick, she worked for the property’s landlord.
“It is heart-wrenching for me. I have a long association with the property,” Del Santo said. “I learned everything about art through Cara. She is a very generous teacher.”
Broderick has moved on to her new equestrian-centered life in England.
She feels privileged to have spent so many years in Palm Beach, which “has been a lovely part of my life,” Broderick said.
“I shall miss it all terribly, but I do love my life in England.”
