Eddy Nicholson; infused energy into staid world of art and furniture collecting

His blunt, hard-driving style unnerved some buyers steeped in Old World collector traditions of propriety, art scholarship, and, above all, privacy.

“For one thing, he would sit there with an auction paddle, which was unusual,’’ said John Hays, the deputy chairman of Christie’s America, who became a friend. Important buyers usually sent surrogates or bid by phone, he explained.

“And if he wanted something,’’ he added, “nothing could stop him.’’

Mr. Nicholson helped push prices to unprecedented heights. Bidding on an 18th-century Philadelphia Chippendale wing chair at Sotheby’s in 1986, he made the first bid at $400,000, and kept hoisting his paddle high while imperceptible signals from competitors around the room (an earlobe tug, a crossing of arms) drove the sale price to $1.1 million, then a record for American furniture, according to an account in The New York Times.

Mr. Nicholson got his wing chair.

In 1980 Mr. Nicholson was president of Congoleum, a publicly traded conglomerate involved in military contracting, auto supplies, and floor covering, when he and a fellow executive, Byron C. Radaker, took the company private in a $580 million buyout backed by investors. The deal was among the first of its kind, and the largest at the time, in a decade that would come to be defined by such leveraged buyouts, so named because buyers used a company’s own assets as collateral to finance, or leverage, the purchase of its stock.

In 1986, Mr. Nicholson and Radaker dismantled Congoleum and sold its various subsidiaries for a reported $850 million.

Mr. Nicholson’s interest in early American art and furniture began with his move to Portsmouth, N.H., where Congoleum moved its corporate headquarters from Milwaukee in 1980. He wanted to decorate the new headquarters with nautical paintings and sought expert help in finding works that reflected American military history.