Doris Lockhart Saatchi seasonal resident of the Vineyard for more than 30 years, died on August 6. She was 88.

Doris was born in Memphis, Tenn. to Nina and Jack Herbert Lockhart.

She began her career during what she called the golden age of advertising when good writing and creativity were deeply valued.

“I am a writer,” she once said, “I try to make narratives with my words.”

The author of many published essays, her interests were broad but her writing focused mainly on artists and architects. An inveterate collector, one of her favorite activities on the Vineyard was the Chilmark Flea Market which she visited as often as possible. She lived most of her adult life in London, and Martha’s Vineyard was her only link to what she called her “home country” where she created an almost symbolic retreat.

She graduated Smith College in 1958, spent her junior year abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris and moved to New York City. By 1965, she was working at the London office of Benton and Bowles, an advertising firm, when a young man named Charles Saatchi joined the firm as a copywriter. Six years older than Charles, Doris was his boss. At the time, Charles collected Superman comics and jukeboxes and it was Doris who introduced him to contemporary art. Their first art purchase together was in 1970, a wall drawing by the American artist, Sol Lewitt.

That same year Charles and his brother decided to launch a new advertising agency called Saatchi and Saatchi. Charles and Doris lived together for six years before they married in 1973. By then, they were avid art collectors and in 1985, they purchased a 30,000 square foot warehouse on Boundary Road in London which they renovated into a contemporary art museum.

Boundary Road transformed the contemporary art world in London. From Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, artists flocked to the museum to see art not available elsewhere. The Saatchis believed that artists should be represented by a body of work rather than a single piece and each artist was given their own gallery. Doris worked closely with the architect Max Gordon on the Boundary Road galleries and this experience marked the beginning of her interest in architecture. She went on to collaborate with a number of architects on a long series of residences.

Doris was a striking woman with icy blue eyes, an aquiline nose and her signature English Sassoon bob haircut. She was photographed often including several portraits by the American photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. She was, however, exceedingly modest, something that allowed her to listen to others carefully, and she developed a wide array of diverse friendships.

In the late 1980s, she designed a three-story architectural gem of a residence in New York where she and Charles entertained the American artists they collected, such as Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan, Cy Twombly, Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Ellsworth Kelly and James Turrell.

After 23 years together, she divorced Charles Saatchi in 1990, eventually sold the New York apartment, and began donating some of the larger works in her private collection to museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London. She was among the first to recognize the Young British Artists generation, whom her former husband Charles did much to publicize.

Ironically, her great concern about the increasingly status-driven interests of art collectors was largely the result of the marketing and branding done by her former husband.

She is survived by her brothers, Richard Lockhart of South Carolina and Dr. Jeffrey Lockhart of North Carolina.