To wander through her sole boutique is not an eye-to-eye object encounter. The revelation is unblemished progeny of her own fantasies. Eschewing what's hot and new,' espousing the 'tried and true', her personally revered bijouterie belongs to bygone eras, each piece locked into the past.

Be it a genuine aretefact set graciously in a mounting of 22 carat gold or a new retrospectively conjured design imbued with the spirit of past cultures, the Woodhull inscription represents a modern day legacy that marries the pristine with the present to create a nostalgic nuance in fine jewellery.

Helen's persona is the epitome of her inner self. She is tenderly voracious; marvellously surreal, and ardently dedicated to the preservation of the life and history of all things rare, natural and beautiful. If one has to pinpoint a drawcard, it would be her desire to place something of value and beauty into the world. History and heritage are part of her identity.

Contemptuous of a modern society which she regards as becoming "such a philistine environment" she shuns unnatural materials, and mawkish costume gimmicks. Helen's packages are not parcels for profit but expressions of art that reflect her own philosophies. Her work and her business are not mere extensions, they are her life. To talk of her jewellery, is to talk of herself. "I would rather go to Maine and grow tomatoes than bastardise what my life is," she says with her characteristic, of times brutal honesty. But a vegetable grower she is not nor was she destined to be. "I started with one thousand dollars and built my own atelier... and that should be a story."

Born in Morristown, New Jersey, the second of four female siblings, Helen inherited a heteroclite combination of traits. From a paternal, puritanical, aristocrat, the "last nineteenth century gentleman" and a bohemian maternal gene with a sense of delightful lunacy that encouraged a harmless freedom, there developed a unique progeny. Helen describes her father, the late James Clifford Woodhull, whose family settled in the U.S. from England in 1650, as "a great man" from whom she derived her sense of dignity and pride. He honoured his generation with pervasive ethics and honesty. In the late Twenties, he was Associate Publisher of Town & Country then part of the William Randolph Hearts empire. Following his World War 11 service, he entertained his talents and love of automobiles with a car dealership but eventually returned to publishing, magazines and his foremost love, advertising.

"He only passed away about 18 months ago and he was really a legend in the industry," says his admiring daughter. "He was the one who pioneered the co-op advertisement concept: He took General Motors and put it together with Ralph Lauren. that was his idea. He was ready to retire but no because of his age. He felt that people didn't matter any more in the new style of business.

Katherine Woodhull nee Ward, Helen's mother was the daughter of Charles Bonnel Ward, a US Congressman from New York.

Alias, "the crazy Wards - I found out later that is what they were called" - Helen claims that her mother's side of the family were "very wonderful people but, a little looney." Probably in comparison with the starched shirt ethic of her Father's English heritage. Her Grandmother Ward, a seminal influence on the young girl, and a diversified hobbyist, was far from being any youngster's mainstream mentor.

"My grandmother was probably the first of the really liberated ladies, long before 'liberation' became fashionable." And with admirable discourse, her granddaughter was instilled with a like and balanced libertine faculty. "I love men and I think that Women's Liberation denies the feminity," says Helen. "The feminity is what's important and the masculinity is what's important. And there is no reason you cannot do something just because you're a woman... it never entered my mind that there was nothing that I couldn't do. I was liberated before I knew it. In fact, I am so liberated, I'm not 'liberated', if you know what I mean."

With a husband cum congressman, her mother's mother was in Washington during the later teens and early twenties. Grandmother Ward indelibly left her mark. "She used to play golf with Harding and beat him at the game until finally someone had to pull her aside and say, 'Now look, first of all, it's bad enough that a lady plays golf at all, but secondly, a lady does not beat the President of the United Stated at the game.

"She was also a lover of animals and when my grandfather retired, they came to buy a farm near where I grew up.: In the late Forties and Fifties, she had a menagerie that Noah himself would have admired. Dogs, cats, monkeys, elephants and from the Antipodes - a kangaroo. All lived harmoniously in the storybook setting entitled 'Scotsward Farm', in the midst of which was a 'fantasy' Olympic sized swimming pool which Grandmother Ward built in the middle of a cow field and an apple orchard for her son who was at Yale at the time and part of the varsity swimming team.

"She was an unusual woman; a great lady, with no constraints except moral ones," says her granddaughter today. "If you want to have wild animals, who says you can't have wild animals? Likewise, if you are a young girl and you want to be an artist, be an artist! As long as you don't hurt anyone, do it. I had an idyllic childhood in that respect."

Not so idyllic however, was Helen's time spent at school with dyslexia. "When I was a child, no-one knew what that was. So they just thought that I was slow and not very bright," she says. The feelings of inadequacy were very low but I never really thought that I was inadequate. I hated my school years. I never woke up in the morning with a sense of security. I woke up with panic. It was a total terror from first grade to when I graduated from college. I mean, I hated school. I was different."

Surrounding this impairment was a lot of weight, and three hundred pounds (of which she has since shed half), worsened the blows she received in the playground where she was ridiculed by the others for her differences both obvious and perceived.

"I look back on it now as a blessing because it gave me a great sense of humanity, empathy and understanding for people, and it also let me develop the thing that is uniquely my own, that led me away from the cheerleaders, away from all the things that sidetrack you from your real individuality.... but which society says are important for young people.

"Everybody is unique and everybody has a mission in life, but so many people get sidetracked from it. So, I look back on that whole period now as my blessing but it wasn't a pleasant thing to go through at the time. I grew up with he stigma of everybody telling me I was slow and stupid when I knew I was not."

What the teachers couldn't see was that Helen saw everything not with an eye for the ABC and arithmetic, but with a visionary eye. She could see what the rest of the class were blind to - the "real life" in paintings. Her worlds were the scenes she painted in the school's history room, of medieval knights in armour and Gothic women clad in period costume. She lived in and through her paintings and was her own lead role in the stage sets she created for her school's Shakespearian productions.

"What I loved to do was to paint. So instead of learning about history, I painted history. And then for English, the School would do Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Tempest, for instance, and I would paint the stage sets... which was all very fine for my creative endeavours but I didn't get much of an academic grounding. My parents realised when I as about 10 or 11 that I couldn't read very well or do the multiplication tables so then, I was tutored from two years very extensively.

I was blessed with wonderful parents, and a marvellous grandmother too because all the nurturing I didn't get at school, I got at home which reinforced all those positive elements. My unhappiness at a very early age channelled me to do what was uniquely right for me. Hence because of my superficial surroundings I was forced into my spiritual identity.

"I wanted to be an artist and my parents encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be. That would have been very hard for them, especially my father. Being so straightlaced, he would probably have been much happier if I had just been the normal girl and the debutante. But with four girls, all mavericks, he did not get her either of those!

Her fascination with civilisations past and the utilisation of their creative milieus in her own work led Helen to art school and the adoption of the styles of those times long past in her mode of dress and her day-to-day lifestyle.

"When I was painting the Parthenon, I was Greek, and when I was painting the Egyptian pharoahs, I was an Egyptian lady... so when I went to art school in New York, and living there, I wanted to be these people. I went to thrift shops and bought seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century clothing. I wore it because it was a way of getting me as close as I could to being a Gothic lady or a renaissance lady... and that was the area I was really involved with at that point - mentally and spiritually.

"I remember I found some wonderful old corset covers, the ones they used to wear with wonderful inlaid lace. I bought several of them and dyed then different colours. Off I went to visit my Grandma wearing one of them and we sat down to lunch. She was sitting at the head of the table and as always I was sitting to her left. She looked at me. she looked again and remarked sternly; 'Do you know what you are wearing? Do you realise what you are wearing to lunch?! And I replied, 'Yes, this very pretty blouse.' 'This,' she replied, 'is not a blouse, this is a corset cover. You can't do this.'

"She pretended to be absolutely aghast but when no-one else at the table was looking she took an ice cube out of her water glass and flopped it over at me to let me know it was O.K. She understood that I had to put on this show!"

Such rarities in habille were not the fetish carried over from childhood imaginings, for collecting antique dolls and toys whilst growing up consolidated her youth, as did an assortment of exquisite objets d'art which would cement her later career. An adjunct to a fine arts major, she graduated with a private museum of precious antiquities, including ancient Greek and Roman amulets, medieval artefacts, mythical talismen, renaissance furniture, seventeenth and eighteenth century ecclesiastical embroideries. Egyptian scarabs and pieces from the Chinese Ming Dynasty, nineteenth century France and Japan. She had procured a wealth of historical belongs, but not things that earned an income for a woman in the Sixties. "I could not type or spell so I rented a studio" she says. "I also worked as an usher in the evening which allowed me to work in the studio all day.

"The one thing that I did have though is my husband. I've known him for years, so much so that I don't even know when it was than we got married. It was almost an afterthought." Helen's dearest asset was also the instigator of her first store where she could earn a living from selling her collectables. Together in 1965, they opened the 'Leogryph' a little shopfront on Maidson Avenue at 82nd street and a block away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here, she literally lived out her fantasies and enriched her rapport with the Renaissance.

Animate with nonpareil objets d'art, the Leogryph was aptly titled. The reincarnated soul of this mythical creature bearing the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion would rest content as Helen Woodhull. "It seemed to me that the bird half signifies the lyricism of creative pursuit while the lion half represents the strength of the classical, the balance needed in music, literature and art," says the artist, explaining her choice of symbol which has now become the distinguished trademark of Helen Woodhull.

"Very soon after I opened, I met a wonderful man by the name of Peter Sharrer who was at the time a conservator with the Metropolitan Museum. He has now become one of the premier antiquity dealers in the world - not with a store but by selling directly to museums. He is very low key - not a 'razzle dazzle', and he might sell three things a year. But they are premier things. He has a very unusual eye."

Both Sharrer and some of Helen's customers suggested that she mount some of the collectables in her stock. Initially, she was reluctant to do such a thing, to risk compromising the antiquity or destroying the harmony of each piece. "My first reaction was that this was absolutely the most sacrilegious thing that anybody could suggest to me because if something has survived 3,000 years. I shouldn't tamper with it, I should leave it alone. It should be in a case, it should be revered.

"But then I thought, Well, most of the pieces that I am selling are amulets, they were meant to be worn on the body anyway... if there was some way to mount them with reverence, and to mount them in a way that didn't lower the antiquity value - that they weren't glued or drilled, that they were somehow 'kissed' into this environment and could be removed from their mounting and returned later without being destroyed, then..."

The next step was to question what exactly the environment should be. "It should be something that works as a bridge between the culture of the object but that is still relevant to our lives today... and that is how the whole thing started."

Woodhull's very first attempt at her new milieu began with a piece she acquired from Sharrer; a heart scarab that was originally sold as part of the Spencer Churchill Collection - "the first collection of antiquities to come onto the market after the days of the big digs," Reviving the ancient ways of working gold, she carefully created appropriate settings for each piece in turn, never sacrificing individual cultures, yet rendering them relevant to today.

"It was the perfect thing for my individuality: the most natural thing for me to do," she says. "I had collected antique jewellery. I was a sculptor. I also wanted more Renaissance Jewellery but could not afford it. So then I started to make my own.

"It was the perfect thing for my individuality: the most natural thing for me to do," she says. "I had collected antique jewellery. I was a sculptor. I also wanted more Renaissance jewellery but could not afford it. So then I started to make my own. Being able to make jewellery was to enhance my fantasies. It was another way of making the inner life real. That is what it all meant for me."

Helen closed the Leogryph in the late sixties, welcoming the opportunity to design jewellery exclusively for George Jensen and working under her own name. In 1974, she left and then travelled the country for the Minneapolis based David Hudson Group of stores. In the ensuing years, she was affiliated with the holding companies - Peacock's in Chicago, Caldwells in Philadelphia and Shreve and Grumps in San Fransico.

But big business selling strategies and mass marketing did not appeal to the iconoclast in Woodhull. The dissatisfaction took its toll and she bid adieu to the jewellery giant. "I realised that a conglomerate could not sell the jewellery the way I could sell, "she says in reflection. "It was too impersonal. I wanted one-on-one with my customers. I wanted to sell my jewellery in a persona way. I wanted it explained; I wanted it wrapped beautifully. I wanted all of those things that I was used to the way that I had them in 1965. I like people to understand and believe in what I am doing." Today, as then, personal contact is more important to her than P.R.

"I wanted my 1965 store back," she says simply of that period. "So, I opened my second store and I've had one of my own ever since. The first Helen Woodhull Inc. was also located on Madison Crowd' was the madding crowd, mood she wanted for her beautiful things. Seeking a more fitting location, she found her premises on the eighth level of 743 Fifth Avenue, where she is happy today. She gutted the entire floor of what was formerly a turn of the century bachelors residence and created a bicameral abode; a kinder, gentler haven for her garniture, and gallery for her virtu.

This sequestered atelier is an integral part of Helen's world. Creations are thoughtfully displayed in burnished mahogany furnishings and pellucid cabinets. Flowers bloom in delicate crystal; the air is perfumed with fragrant potpourri and graced with classical music whilst muted colours reflecting from linen covered walls create a sense of serenity. The seclusion is perfect, permitting the solitude needed for intense appreciation. "If you are alone, you have heightened experiences. I remember when I went to Europe in 1961 for the first time, to a millennia of history and tradition, I went to the British Museum and came upon Caravaggio's painting of Christ and The Disciples. It was in a little cubicle all by itself. There was a little bench in front of it and I sat myself down. Two hours had passed when I realised that I had really been transported... the shell in the fishermen's nets... I could breathe it, "she recalls.

"I realised what a masterpiece does and what the artist who creates a masterpiece does. With one foot on earth and one foot in heaven, the artist realises that there's something more to this material life that we experience on earth. It goes beyond that. It's an intuitive thing and if you're permitted solitude, you can have this exchange.

Resplendent rays through the floor to ceiling windows illucidate a splendid array of eclectic artwork from intriguing artefacts, to a sample of Helen's private collection of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscript leaves and cuttings, to fine needlework from past centuries.

Offered for sale in the gallery throughout the year are exquisite secular and ecclesiastical embroideries from the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and vibrant European.

"The purpose of our gallery is to bring textiles of amazing virtuosity back into our everyday world. We want these treasures to survive to future generations in people's homes, not in the storage rooms of museums.

Also displayed amidst the warm, sentient atmosphere are selections of the works of Polish photographer Andre Barnaowski; New York commercial photographer Bob Brody and contemporary painter Edna Gluck whose work has struck a particular chord in Helen and fostered an artistic symbiosis. "it I was natural that Edna's paintings became a part of my life," says Woodhull. "In each of Edna's works there exist an enchanting mysterious and lyrical world in which to discover your own personal meaning... I have lived daily with her paintings.

A real life motif is a constant with Woodhull's jewellery. "To create my jewellery allows me to live my fantasies. It is rebirthed, not designed and that is its quality." Her own creative impulses come from the storehouse of memorabilia in her mind's eye and as such, she does not exalt a prospective influence into her work, rather she moulds an afterthought.

Equally enchanting is the range of nature-inspired ornaments with their florid reflections, subtle floral fashionings or amusing animals motifs. "I love animals so there is are a lot of them. It's a peaceable kingdom - there is no carnage," she says of the bejewelled pets she creates. Superimposed with romantic feeling, each pastiched, each delicate stone is complemented by a meticulously handcrafted and overwhelming setting that defies the ordinary but defines the sublime: Whether a quaint Roman gold amulet illustrating two little birds pulling a chariot being driven by a butterfly, or the elaborate major necklace incorporating an Egyptian scarab with platinum and 22-carat gold that was sold for around US$12,000 at Sotheby's fine jewel sale in Christmas 1989.

Enhanced with classical overtones, superlative stones and the purest of silver and gold, she has devoted her style to resembling her own philosophy of great works of art. "If whatever is unique to a piece seems to transcend the object itself and the period in which it was made, then it is truly great art. Great art reached for something timeless and universal". Woodhull feels an intimate connection both the origin and the destiny of her pieces and she strives to keep in contact with everybody who has every been a client although it has been a difficult task: "In the early years I lost some contacts. People would die, things would be willed and then I'd lose the trail." The 300-plus signed and numbered one-of-a kind creations have become part of private family collections throughout the world. Apart from visiting rights and the retrospective she launched in November 1990 to celebrate her 25th year in business, which highlighted 50 of her original pieces on secondment from their proud custodians, Helen rarely works with antique pieces today.

"I stopped doing this about a decade ago when antiquities suddenly became fashionable." And when familiar but inferior articles emerged with the trend, outrageously overpriced." Some things that I didn't buy for $50 because they were mediocre are now priced at $5,000 and if I didn't buy them at $50, then I am certainly not going to buy them at $5,000, so I stopped doing it."

Today her clientele spans more than 3000 devotees and three generations. As a personal service, she retains individual records for future reference. This personal touch is indicative of Woodhull the jeweller, Woodhull the jewellery.

"When Kathleen Turner opened in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' she asked me to design a cat sitting on a roof just for her to give out on opening night out. I made 30 of them. The design was hers alone so I told her that I would only do it that way for her but that I would take the kitty off the roof and put it in the garden for another design, one for the shop. And she was quite happy with that arrangement."

Her own personal favourites are decidedly unbiased. "Anything and everything!" She happily exclaims. "The styling is a little of everything, the challenge is in the art. It is a challenge to take something that is overdone and to use diamonds, for example, in a way that is heartfelt and not garnish, or take an eccentric stone and mount it in such a way as to minimise the flaws. Each blue print is remodelled and remodelled to perfect the ultimate design.

"One lady who had been married for a long time wanted her engagement ring remodelled," recalls Helen by way of example. "She had always hated it because she is not an ostentatious type of person. it was an enormous heart-shaped yellow diamond.

Now, hearts are not really the things that I want to do and I really felt that this was to be my Waterloo! I told her I couldn't do it and she said: 'Helen you can do it.' You've got to try...' and on went the exchange. So I did it. She had estimated its worth at about US$100,000 and wanted to send it from Idaho through the mail! It turned out to be worth over half a million dollars! A recent commission has been from one of America's leading families to design a baby cup for the first born grandchild - completely handmade and spun from a solid piece of sterling.

And selecting the best has brought her the best. "Most of my customers are really quality, wonderful people and generous," a compliment which pointed refers more to their collective spirit than state of finances. "I receive letters from them all the time saying how much joy I have brought to them and their families."

"Kathleen Turner took 20 minutes from her busy rehearsal to celebrate with me when I opened here; and when Jamie Lee Curtis was in town to publicise her new movie, she took her only free time to take the rickety old elevator at the back, as the front lift was not working, just to see me. It is really gratifying and I actually get goosebumps when I think about it!

A complaisant clientele has sustained a heartfelt virtuosity. The spoils of easy packaging have all but perished. Infused with renewed authenticity, the flamboyance of a frivolous nouveau rich has mellowed and the counterfeit has collapsed. The residual tarnish of has been polished by the polite society of tomorrow. The exodus to retrospect heralds the testimonial that is Helen Woodhull; the future is for her now.