“There wasn’t a single painting hanging from a single wall in our entire sprawling family home.”
—Tom Fletcher
After 28 remarkable years of representing Woodstock’s best-loved artists, the Fletcher Gallery closed in December 2019. Last Friday, September 29, EMT workers sent to Upper Byrdcliffe discovered the gallery’s founder, Tom Fletcher, dead in his bed. Based on past emergency calls, the cause of death was deemed insulin shock. Thomas Fletcher was 66 years old.
Tom was born fourth in a brood of nine. Both his parents were staunch Catholics. His father was president of a Manhattan-based theological press. When Tom was 17, his “Irish twin,” Bob, was killed by a drunk driver, after which the men in the Fletcher family unabashedly drowned their sorrow in drink. Tom was hyperactive, dyslexic, dangerously handsome. Much to his parents’ chagrin, he would just barely graduate from UCSF with a degree in philosophy.
Eventually, his parents received a call from Tom in Nigeria, where he and his best friend, having established sufficient capital through an international TV smuggling scheme, began an African well-digging company to supply local tribes with drinking water. However, Tom ran afoul of a certain chieftain who’d have killed him on the spot but for the fierce intervention of Sharon Capra, daughter of an American missionary couple, whom Tom would eventually marry.
They returned to New England, where Sharon studied law while minoring in art history. Fascinated by her textbook, which he promptly stole, Tom committed its entirety to memory.
Five days a week he worked for his father selling bible-study books to nuns and priests. As son of the company’s president, Tom developed a style of salesmanship consisting of equal parts shock and highly respectful charm.
Then, smack-dab in the middle of his territory extending from Albany to just north of Manhattan, Tom discovered and fell instantly in love with Woodstock. Here was a once-famous art colony, the “big names” of which were all dead, with but a few of its artists barely hanging on. Until, that is, one introduced to the next this worshipful young man who bought more original work than he could afford, while promising to return — cash in hand — for more. When it got out of control, Tom resorted to arranging sales of paintings and accepting commissions from painters, so as to support his ravenous art-buying habit.
Then came the day Tom noticed a “For Rent” sign in the empty-store front window a mere hundred yards from the center of “the most famous small town in America.” He wrote a check, signed the lease, called his father to quit his job, and then called his wife.
Confidence, good looks, enthusiasm, instinct, charm, courage, wild humor, and the inimitable gift of a natural-born salesman — all crowned by tremendous luck — flowed into that little storefront. Inside it, I could feel the tingle of an unadulterated devotion to the art of men and women, both living and dead, all of which was created here in these mountains which would remain centuries from now, long after our American experiment — and yes, probably long after our human experiment — was over and done with.
Of course, no one knew how long or briefly the window represented by The Fletcher Gallery would remain open. Yet Tom never failed to fill that window with drop-dead-delicious work for what would prove to be his 28 years running the town gallery in the Town of Woodstock.
In its first five years, the Fletcher Gallery ousted its most powerful rival, The James Cox Gallery, the owner of which had taught the brash newcomer much. Nor was it long before Tom took over both floors of 40 Mill Hill Road.
Gala openings fed and intoxicated the riffraff in town as well as our intelligentsia. Red-headed pins denoting sold paintings grew in number. Tom began picking up the checks of friends he encountered in restaurants. Then after the dissolution of his marriage, he inaugurated a downright grotesque Woodstock tradition.
Tom possessed a dark side. And, as an outrageous storyteller and a profoundly investigative questioner of all manner of human being, he had a hilarious side. For the next twelve or so years, these two sides combined in an ever-more-elaborate celebration of All Hallow’s Eve. Crowds blocked both sides of the street as ghoulish revelers patiently waited to be scared half to death by what they encountered inside. One year a bloody hand protruded from a coffin’s lid to reveal Tom, himself, gesturing wildly within.
A few months earlier, the same man annually commandeered an art auction for 70 or more enthusiasts, with Kevin Sweeney, Peter Mayer, Jim and Jean Young, Steve Hirsch, and Arthur Anderson ever in attendance. Arthur has repeatedly credited Tom with tantalizing him into the purchase of a collection so large it today resides in the state museum at Albany, where portions of it are loaned out to smaller reliquaries in proof of Woodstock’s glory days. However, the masterpieces of Fletcher’s auctions — more and more often — went to unidentified on-line buyers crowding phone lines in grim anticipation of what would soon entirely replace Tom’s pride and joy.
Before that predestined end, however, he found religion in nature. Gardening overtook him half the year, and he became known around town as a poet with a distinctive voice. It was this same voice that held numberless dinner tables rapt as Tom told story upon story.
With the same voice, he’d explain to a salivating buyer exactly how Rolph Scarlett was ripped from his anointed throne as Peggy Guggenheim’s next King of Abstract Art by a drunken magician named “Pollock,” moments before Tom pulled “Scarlett’s forgotten masterpiece” from a closet stuffed full of them
Tom once told me there wasn’t a single painting hanging in the entirety of his sprawling family home.
There were those many hikes up the back side of Byrdcliffe with his son, or in the company of his long-time partner, Julie Last, who recently told me of Tom’s carrying her one summer’s eve into a meadow filled with flickering fireflies. Such moments should not be discounted while remembering Tom Fletcher.
What Tom Fletcher would far rather have you learn now: is that his once-unstoppable spirit is again on the loose in his only child. David Thomas Fletcher has returned to Woodstock, and at 27 is presently revving up his father’s uber-entrepenurialism, this time in celebration of the gastronomical arts. But that optimistic news won’t keep Tom’s family and friends from memorializing him on November 4, on what would have been his 67th birthday, at a TBD location. There, someone will surely read the entirety of his poem, “Time Be Good To Me,” Excerpted below:
Time I beg be good to me,
although I know you lend no choices,
you the fruitful road and the long grave
sprawled about an unpredictable end.
Towards there you point and send me
as gently as the passing day,
like a mother and a madman,
from the orchard to the gangplank,
through love’s embrace to cruel infidelity,
where fragile wings meet poisonous fangs.
Tom, who was predeceased by his brothers Bob and John, is survived by his son David, brothers Ralph, Jim and Joe, and sisters Elaine Vega, Kathy Fletcher and Carolyn Fletcher.
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