Soho art dealer Reese Palley has passed away, aged 93

Mr. Palley was born in Atlantic City and graduated from Atlantic City High School. He opened his gallery on the Boardwalk outside Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, trading in porcelain figures of animals and birds made by Marshall Boehm. “I’m a peddler. Of ideas. I love to sell things,” Reese Palley told the Philadelphia Magazine in 2011. “I opened what became a very famous [art] shop on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, labeled myself “merchant to the rich,” and took off from there.” On his return from a 15-year around-the-world sailing trip in 1994, Reese Palley told The Inquirer “it's not that I’m so exciting...it's just that everybody else is so dull.” The art entrepreneur, at the time, had sold his business interests in Atlantic City. He was “very complicated, very excitable, very distractible,” Mr. Palley’s son Gilbert said from New Mexico following the art dealer’s death.