Hayden Goldberg obit

With profound sadness, the Transferware Collectors Club announces that on January 3, 2012, veteran transferware collector Hayden Goldberg died in the hospital in Brooklyn. He had been unwell after suffering a stroke last September. Hayden is survived by his partner of 56 years, Curtis F. Brown, a renowned author. Together, they lived in Brooklyn for the past 40 years. Hayden and Curtis began collecting “Old Blue” Staffordshire of American historical interest in 1963, and successfully amassed an encyclopedic collection of nearly all of the views in the field.

The TCC owes both Hayden and Curtis an incalculable debt for allowing the club access to their collection of almost 800 specimens for the purpose of photographing and documenting the items. The Goldberg/Brown Collection is the corpus of the printed designs that now illustrate the TCC’s current interactive on-line exhibit titled Patriotic America: Blue Printed Pottery Celebrating a New Nation. Patriotic America, produced in partnership with Historic New England and the Winterthur Museum, will serve as a definitive database of images of English printed pottery that illustrate important places and commemorate historical events of the early republic.

Hayden’s intellectual insights and scholarly contributions to the literature are well known among “Old Blue” collectors. In the July 1981 edition of The Magazine Antiques, he published “The Earliest Known Example of Historical Blue Staffordshire,” depicting an earthenware plate with a medallion portrait of George Washington and the arms of the United States. Hayden included in that article an illustration of a then-recent discovery, which remains unique to this day: a dark blue plate by Andrew Stevenson in the Large Roses Border Series, with the central view of "Halstead, Essex" and portrait medallions of Washington and Governor Clinton, excluding an Erie Canal vignette.
But perhaps most ambitious was his pair of articles, also in The Magazine Antiques, exploring “The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch on Historical Blue Staffordshire.” (“Part I: The Early Buildings” in July 1985 and “Part II: The Later Buildings” in February 1987).
Nonetheless, Hayden may go down in history for his and Curtis’s legendary lunch invitation to TCC members Ted Gallagher and Kurt O’Hare. As Ted described in the Spring-Summer 2010 issue of the TCC Bulletin, under the title “Generosity Unbound,” pre-cut sandwiches and soup were served in some of the rarest views in all of “Old Blue.” Food never tasted so good!