When I was in NYC for the Scalamandré Lenox launch party at Bloomingdales, I had a conversation with a lovely woman, but I didn’t get her name. A day or two later, I received an e-mail from a PR gal with whom I’ve communicated for several years, and she said that one of her clients had met a blogger from Baltimore at the Scalamandré party. Putting two and two together, they realized that it was me!
The woman I met was Robyn Pocker, third-generation owner of J. Pocker Framing in NYC. Pocker has been in business since 1926, and both Robyn’s father and grandfather ran the store. She’s got all of the old ledgers showing who their customers were and what they paid – and whether the piece was going to their townhouse or their country house. 
Generally, I don’t give a lot of consideration to framing. Either the pieces I have are inherited and have already been framed, or they’re just pictures I’ve taken, and I put them into simple frames.
But spending time at Pocker made me realize that there’s an art to framing. As an exercise in this art, Robyn invited me to bring along a piece I wanted to have framed. After some consideration, I realized that the piece I wanted to frame was one of the chromolithographs I blogged about a few weeks ago, which was part of my late father’s collection. 
I packed the piece carefully and took it to New York with me, being super cautious not to bend the package. At Pocker, we unwrapped the print, and I was so pleased when Pascal, the framer, put on his conservators’ gloves to handle the piece. 
Pascal started the process by selecting some mats to show off the print, and because of the Oriental nature of the print, he selected some mats in a raw silk. After a process of elimination, we chose an olive green silk mat, which emphasized the vase and made it the focal point. 
The cream mat was lovely, but we all agreed that the green one was the ideal.
Then Pascal brought over a selection of frames. 
He took into consideration things that wouldn’t have occurred to me, like the highlights and lowlights in the print, the background, the Asian nature of the vase and more. 
We tried various frames with the various mats until we arrived at a combination that was pleasing to the eye and complimentary to the work on paper. Here are some of the final options. 
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Thanks so much to Robyn Pocker and her staff at J. Pocker Framing for spending time with me and showing me the process of having a work of art custom framed, and to Liza Morten from Blitzer & Co. for helping get this together. For more information on J. Pocker Framing, check out their website, here, and their blog, which is full of great information.
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