Frank Hogan, a Provincetown native who was an accomplished collector of art and antiques and had an art gallery in Orleans until about a decade ago, died early in the week of July 19, 2020, in his adopted city of Santa Fe, N.M. He had been coping with Parkinson’s disease for a few years.
Hogan was just shy of his 83rd birthday, according to a eulogy by Roy Menne published in the July 24 issue of Antiques and the Arts Weekly. No formal death announcement has been found to confirm the date of his death, and, according to Menne, Hogan did not want an obituary.
Born in Quincy to Frank H. and Viola Hogan, Frank moved with his mother to Provincetown when her second marriage, this time to George Fillmore Miller, led her there. Hogan’s new family was well known in Provincetown, where Fillmore (as he was known locally) ran the B.H. Dyer hardware store. The Millers, through ancestors in the Dyer, Matheson, and Hopkins families, traced their arrival in Massachusetts to the Mayflower.
Frank married artist Ruth Ann De Witt in Boston in 1967 and the couple made their home in Orleans, where, according to Menne, he was a commodore of the Orleans Yacht Club, but “remained always of Provincetown.” Hogan, he wrote, also served as president of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum.
For some 30 years, Menne said, Hogan was “a dealer’s dealer of Cape Cod and Provincetown art and antiques.” Hogan, Menne said, “helped establish the market for local material and was a go-to guy for information” other dealers relied on.
Historian and former Provincetown antiques dealer Irma Ruckstuhl, who now lives in Truro, remembers Hogan and De Witt as superb hosts. “Frank had an enviable wine collection, which matched Ruth’s culinary skills, often featuring lobster from a couple of traps Frank maintained, eels caught virtually at their doorstep, lamb raised on Cape Cod, and other goodies from the Orleans farmers market,” Ruckstuhl said. “They were locavores long before the term became popular.”
In his eulogy, Roy Menne wrote that dinner parties at the Hogans’ always featured “spirited discussion of everything and everybody on the Cape, in Provincetown, and the art world.”
Ruth De Witt, who is known for her white-line block prints in the tradition of the Provincetown Printers, survives her husband. She lives in Santa Fe, where the couple moved about a decade ago and where they also had a gallery.
