Today’s vibrant Vineyard art community owes a great debt to Brandon Mayhew Wight, who died last month in Florida at the age of 101. Although there were art galleries on the Island that preceded the Granary Gallery at the Red Barn in West Tisbury, its success encouraged the founding of the dozens of galleries the Island now boasts.

A descendant of the Vineyard’s founder, the Rev. Thomas Mayhew, Brandy was born and reared in Rhode Island but spent summers as a child in his maternal grandmother’s Music street house in West Tisbury. After graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design, service in the Pacific in World War II, and work in New York, he returned to the Island in 1954.

Brandy and the late George Bigelow opened an American equivalent of Paris’s Marche aux Puces in Edgartown, naming it the Flea Market.

The shop proved so successful that in 1960 they moved to larger quarters on Vineyard Haven’s Main street. They continued to sell antique furniture, and to complement the furniture they added paintings. Following George Bigelow’s death in 1964, Bruce Blackwell became Brandy’s partner. Their customers included Broadway actress Katharine Cornell and her companion Nancy Hamilton, playwright Lillian Hellman, novelist William Styron and his poet wife Rose, opera star Beverly Sills, radio journalist Mike Wallace and Lady Bird Johnson.

Open year-round, the Flea Market at Christmastime became a center for Island celebrations, with Brandy decorating the windows with Italian miniature white lights, a carousel horse to which he affixed horns, live firs and spruces. Soon Island artists Virginia Packard, Michael O’Shaughnessy and Harry Cummins began selling their work at the Flea Market.

In the 1970s, when summer traffic and parking in Vineyard Haven had become a problem, Brandy and Bruce bought the Red Barn, a tack shop in West Tisbury, and moved the store there, renaming it the Granary Gallery at the Red Barn.

The new destination brought new patrons. At Sunday afternoon openings, Brandy, dressed in summery seersucker, with a flamboyant tie and neatly folded handkerchief in his breast pocket, would greet patrons that included Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Broadway actress Mildred Dunnock, musical personalities James Taylor and Carly Simon, and during the Clinton presidency, the First Family. All the while, new artists and photographers were exhibiting their work.

Among them were Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, a longtime Menemsha seasonal resident, Gazette photographer Alison Shaw, African-American painter Lois Mailou Jones and others.

The nearest neighbor was the Field Gallery that had opened across from Alley’s General Store in 1971 and included its outdoor Tom Maley statue display. Soon new galleries opened all over the Island.

With his artistic perspicacity, business acumen and charm, Brandy helped elevate the Vineyard’s reputation among artists and art dealers, a legacy that continues to this day.