Martha Gandy Fales

Martha Lou Gandy Fales (October 31, 1930 – February 24, 2006) was an American art historian, museum curator, and author specializing in historic American silversmithing and jewelry. She worked as a curator and keeper of the silver at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library during the late 1950s and worked mostly as an independent historian and consultant after that. Her seminal book Jewelry in America received the Charles F. Montgomery Prize from the Decorative Arts Society.

Biography Fales, who went by M'Lou, was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, on October 31, 1930. Her father, Preston Boehner Gandy, was a physician. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wilson College in 1952 and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Delaware in 1954, as one of the first graduating class of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. An expert on silver, she wrote her master's thesis on the Joseph Richardson family of silversmiths based in Philadelphia.

Immediately upon graduation from the Winterthur Program, on August 1, 1954, Gandy became a curatorial assistant at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library alongside fellow program alumnus John A. H. Sweeney. She received a promotion to assistant curator a year later. Gandy met Dean Abner Fales Jr., a Harvard University alumnus who worked as registrar at Winterthur Museum and married him on March 4, 1956. Sweeney and museum director Charles F. Montgomery acted as ushers at the wedding. She received an honorary doctorate in literature from Wilson College in 1987.

In retirement, Fales lived in Kennebunkport, Maine. She died on February 24, 2006, at 75.

Published books