Gallery owner Tom Veilleux ’74 pursues artistic excellence

Story by Joshua Bodwell; photo by Marc Glass (PDF of magazine layout)

Those most likely to question gallery owner Tom Veilleux’s risk-taking subscribe to the standard business model for art dealers: assess the market, note contemporary trends and buy only art that they have calculated will sell. “We don’t do that,” Veilleux says in a tone that is neither condescending nor boastful. “We try to sell people the work they should own.”

Veilleux is known to purchase the exceptional work of unknown artists and to buy the lesser-known, or “difficult,” work of famous artists. The only Jamie Wyeth in his Portland gallery, for example, was painted by the renowned Maine artist when he was just 15 years old. The only criterion that means anything to Veilleux is Excellence. Period. “Every painting in this gallery is here for a reason beyond simply who painted it,” he says.



Veilleux traces his interest in art to his teen years and a part-time job at Berry’s Stationers in his hometown of Waterville. The store offered framing services, and the late Ellerton Jette, an amateur art dealer and former president of the C.F. Hathaway Co., was a regular. “He’d pull his Bentley to the back door,” Veilleux recalls, “and the backseat and trunk would be stuffed with hundreds of paintings.” Handling the art had a profound impact on the high school student. Years later, while an English major at UMF, he got his first taste of art dealing.

“I recognized the name,” Veilleux remembers of the Benjamin Champney painting he stumbled upon in a Skowhegan antique shop. “It was a landscape of Mt. Washington Valley, and it seemed particularly good to me.” He purchased the painting for $20, and immediately brought it to an antique dealer he knew might be interested. “I asked him to make me an offer,” Veilleux says. “He told me it was worth eight hundred to nine hundred dollars and he’d give me four hundred for it.” The year was 1971, and with that sale—which netted a profit of $380 dollars—the young Veilleux was hooked.

Veilleux supported himself through college selling art and antiques on the side. By his senior year he was postponing exams to attend auctions. “It didn’t take me long to realize that even just selling sporadically between my studies,” he says, “I’d earned the equivalent of a first-year high-school English teacher’s salary.”

After graduating, he opened a shop in Farmington. He acquired and re-sold several important paintings, and as his reputation grew so did his ability to buy more expensive pieces. “But I also learned fast that the rewards of this business are not about the money. You get jaded about the money pretty quickly,” he says. “The money is only about what it allows you to buy next.”

To this day, Veilleux has kept his gallery focused primarily on the work of deceased artists, particularly American painters from the first half of the 20th century. He estimates that nearly 90 percent of the art he shows has some connection to Maine. “Luckily for me,” he says, “almost every important painter of that era ended up in Maine at some point in their lifetime.” A few of his favorites include Rockwell Kent, William and Marguerite Zorach, James Fitzgerald and George Bellows.

Like the artists whose work he buys and sells, Veilleux seems a man from a different era. For one thing, he owns the majority of the work in his gallery, a practice that is becoming increasingly rare in today’s art scene, according to Veilleux. “If they say they like something, dealers should put their money where their mouth is,” he says. He also subscribes to the optimistic belief that all paintings are destined to be purchased by ideal owners, and that it’s only a matter of time before he can facilitate that perfect union. “There are paintings in my gallery that I’ve had for sale for five or ten years,” he says, “and I think they’re just as amazing today as the day I bought them. They just haven’t found the right home—not yet, at least.”

If there is one thing that is immediately evident about Veilleux, it is that he truly loves art—he not only cherishes it, but art seems to somehow nourish him. You can see it in the way he strokes a bronze sculpture by William Zorach, and you can hear it when he’s bemoaning the fact that one of his Rockwell Kent paintings has yet to find a home because many consider its subject matter—Eskimos observing a burial in Greenland—too “difficult.” But he doesn’t have a single regret about purchasing the Kent, for Veilleux is a rogue archeologist, an Indiana Jones of the Maine art scene who’s forever ravenous to discover the next great piece of “lost” art. His appetite for such discoveries is insatiable.

Since relocating his gallery from Farmington to the heart of Portland’s Old Port in 2007, Veilleux says more art than ever—pulled from dank basements and musty attics—is coming through the doors for his inspection. It’s a process he savors.

“I’m happy to look at thousands of paintings,” he says, “just to find that magnificent one that I can’t live without.”

Chasing the Spark first appeared in Maine Home+Design magazine. This edited version is reprinted by permission of the author.

Joshua Bodwell is a journalist and fiction writer from Maine. His artist profiles have included John Bisbee, David Driskell and John Whalley, whose recent exhibition catalog at Boston’s Vose Galleries included Bodwell’s essay “New Eyes.” His Web site is www.joshuabodwell.com.