Seth Morton Vose II, at 98; art historian owned galleries

S. Morton Vose II with his son, Seth, in New Hampshire in the early 1950s.

Breeding and training readied Seth Morton Vose II for a lifetime in his family's fine art business, and that preparation went beyond acquiring an appreciation for paintings that would hang in Boston's most affluent homes.

"His living depended on his being very polite," said Mr. Vose's son, Seth III of Brookline. "He took great pains to be very polite to everybody."

When Mr. Vose died at 98 in the Brookhaven at Lexington retirement community on Dec. 5, not long after a serious bout of pneumonia, he had spent much of the past 30 years writing "The Dictionary of American Painters Born Before 1900," a reference book that never found a publisher.

Instead, his family said, he donated his papers and research to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.

Mr. Vose's idea for the project dated to 1931. During his first days at his family's gallery in the Back Bay, he noticed that some paintings bore signatures of artists who had not been recorded in standard reference books. In the course of his career, Mr. Vose became an authority on American artists who worked in the 18th and 19th centuries.

"First, of course, I kept notes for my own convenience," he told the Smithsonian Institution in the mid-1980s for an oral history that is posted on the Internet, "but as I went on, it began to seem that there was material there for something really organized and something that would be a real benefit."

His entry into the family business was predestined, insofar as his father could map Mr. Vose's life course. In the oral history, conducted in 1986 and 1987 for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, the interviewer asked Mr. Vose whether he had considered pursuing a scholarly career.

"Well, it never occurred to me, because I knew perfectly well I wasn't going to," he replied.

Born in Boston, a few steps from Brookline, Mr. Vose moved with his family to Brookline and lived in the town for nearly 90 years, spending summers at Cajacet, the family's farm in Jamestown, R.I., on Narragansett Bay.

Mr. Vose attended First Parish Church in Brookline and belonged to Boy Scout Troop 4. He rose to Eagle, the highest rank, and helped run the troop while attending Harvard, from which he graduated in 1931. In college, he studied French, German, and Spanish, developing a lasting love of languages.

"He had many different foreign language dictionaries on his shelf, not just French and German," said his daughter, Ginny of Seattle. "He had Russian and Danish."

Mr. Vose, she said, liked to know at least a few words in the languages of the far-flung art dealers with whom he dealt.

Solicitude toward clients was particularly important when he began working in the business his great-grandfather Joseph Vose started in 1841 when he purchased a gallery in Providence, later expanding to Boston.

In the oral history interview, Mr. Vose said he was in the Back Bay gallery one day while still in college. He recalled looking out the windows and "hearing newsboys shouting, 'Bank holiday!' . . . I remember that very well. Sort of a panic had set in as a result. From then on, sales were very, very tenuous."

Said Mr. Vose's son: "He entered the business just as the country was in the process of falling into the Great Depression. He had no time to learn the business, he simply had to step in and practice. There were a couple of times - I don't know how many, but I know there were some - where he would be with a client knowing full well that if he didn't get the client's business that day, he wouldn't eat that night."

A few years after beginning his career, Mr. Vose's sisters introduced him to their friend Ruth S. Denny. She, too, was from Brookline. They married in 1940 and moved into the second house on her parents' property.

"He said I could marry her, but he said I couldn't take her away, so he asked if we would like to live right here," Mr. Vose said of his father-in-law in 1997 during an interview with the Globe when he and his wife were selling their Brookline property.

When World War II started, for health reasons Mr. Vose was classified unfit for military service, "which I still think was ridiculous," he said in the Smithsonian interview. Instead, he served in the Massachusetts State Guard and rose to the rank of captain.

The eldest son in his family, he became president of Vose Galleries of Boston when his father died in 1964. When Mr. Vose retired in 1976, he launched his own fine arts consulting firm.

Because he shared his name with his grandfather and his son, Mr. Vose distinguished himself from the other two by using S. Morton Vose II as his signature, though he was always called Mort.

Retirement provided time for research on the reference book Mr. Vose was writing and allowed him to lavish attention on his gardening. The family had a summer home in New London, N.H., where he tended a large vegetable garden. In Brookline, he and his wife each had a greenhouse to accommodate their individual passions.

"He would grow coffee trees and papyrus and odd seeds that he had collected off the ground in the Everglades to see what he could germinate," his daughter said.

His taste for the unusual carried over into dining out.

"If you went out to a restaurant, you always knew what he would order because it would be the oddest thing on the menu," his daughter said. "It would be the tripe or it would be the snails."

Long a member of the Thursday Club, a gentlemen's group in Brookline, he became an honorary member upon moving to Lexington in 1998.

And though there had never been any doubt that he would enter the family business, Mr. Vose had no quibbles with the path his life took.

"I very much enjoyed what I did with the family galleries," he told the Smithsonian. "As I think back, I don't think I would wish to change if I had a chance to change and do it differently."

In addition to his wife, daughter, and son, Mr. Vose leaves another daughter, Ruth of San Francisco; a granddaughter; and a great-granddaughter.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on April 19 in First Parish Church in Brookline.