For years Manhattan art and antiques dealer R. Louis Bofferding avoided the Internet. So much about the online experience disturbed the soft-spoken, soigné Midwesterner—the disquieting immediacy, the farrago of information, and, most of all, the beautiful imagery. “On a glowing screen,” he says, “an ersatz antique looks as good as the real thing.”

That was then, however, and bofferdingnewyork.com is now. The dealer’s newly launched website—“I was probably the last dealer left standing without one”—takes those misgivings and uses them to create a virtual shopping experience that combines hard-nosed commerce and impeccable scholarship. The objects aren’t just fine furnishings that can be yours for a price, whether a John Edwards Jones portrait of Queen Victoria’s whippet, a set of 1930s glass candlesticks owned by tastemaker Frances Elkins, or a pair of ’20s cast-iron urns by Sweden’s brilliant Olof Hult. (See some of his latest acquisitions here.) Each online listing, Bofferding avers, is a three-dimensional invitation to the history of the decorative arts, and a chance to spend time with the individuals whose passions have fueled its ebb and flow.

Bofferding complements many of his offerings with brief essays that, the AD contributing editor says, “put the objects into context—what they are, and how they fit into their owners’ lives.” A Belle Epoque screen that once belonged to Huntington Library and Museum cofounder Arabella Huntington imagines the formidable pince-nezed millionairess “stepping behind it to slip into something more comfortable.” Two 1930s Caldwell & Co. sconces spark a reverie about how historical revivalism persisted well into the 20th century, thanks to designers who put a modern spin on old-fashioned styles. A set of lacquer tables made around 1970 triggers an informed lament about how China’s finest artisans were hounded out of business by Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Even Bofferding’s brick-and-mortar shop window (at 970 Lexington Avenue) is designed as a lesson; a recent example gathered 20th-century objects that could have been made in the 18th century and vice versa and asked passersby to offer their best guesses as to which was made when.

Like the objects they are built around, those essays and displays embody Bofferding’s strong point of view as well as his desire to establish his little corner of the antiques field as a crash course. “I’ve always thought of myself as less of a marketer than an educator,” says the dealer, who got his start in the early ’80s as an assistant curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (he hails from the Twin Cities) and established his reputation as a gimlet-eyed contemporary art dealer in New York City before launching R. Louis Bofferding Decorative & Fine Art in 1994. And part of his syllabus is getting clients to recognize their place in the slipstream of design history.

“The very act of being a collector, whatever your focus, connects you with the past and with the future,” Bofferding explains. “You are not going to be the last person who will own the treasure you just purchased.” And if you ever decide to put it back on the market, he’ll make sure your moment in its provenance is properly cited.