Jacqueline Quillen

"Jackie" Jacqueline Loomis Quillen died peacefully on October 1, 2020 at her East Hampton, NY home, just short of her 78th birthday. Quillen came from a family steeped in Ivy League schools and finance. After amassing a fortune on Wall Street, her grandfather, Alfred Lee Loomis, devoted himself to science, starting a laboratory that helped develop radar technology, an advance cited as a key to the Allied victory in World War II. She was born in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 21, 1942, to William Farnsworth Loomis and Betty Blackmond Barton and attended the prestigious Madeira School in McLean. At Radcliffe / Harvard where she completed her first three years of college before she married at age 20; about ten years later, she attended Newcomb / Tulane where she completed her undergraduate degree. In her 40s, she earned a master's degree in English Literature from Georgetown. A divorcée with three sons, she owned a wine and cheese business in New Orleans before Christie’s Auction House hired her to start a wine department in North America in 1979. In the 1980s, the National Trust for Historic Preservation retained her as a consultant on the restoration of James Madison’s Montpelier estate in Virginia. With Larry Gray, she attended dinner parties and classical music concerts, vacationed at her family’s East Hampton retreat and traveled extensively. In her last weeks, Jackie was surrounded by her three sons, Parker, Whitney and Barton Quillen, and daughters-in-law, Bronwyn, Tamar and Lisa Quillen.