Walters Art Museum

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, exists because of a clause in a will. When Henry Walters died in 1931, he left the city a collection of then more than 22,000 works. He also left the original Charles Street Gallery building and his adjacent townhouse. The gift came with a purpose, that the art be held "for the benefit of the public". How did one father and son gather so much? Why did a nominal Confederate loyalist's wartime stay in Paris shape the galleries of a Baltimore museum? And how did a palazzo, a Brutalist annex and a Greek Revival mansion become a single institution?

  11

• 2. Father and Son

  ›

  In 1861, as the American Civil War broke out, William Thompson Walters moved to Paris. He was a nominal Confederate loyalist, and he stayed there with his family through the war because of his notorious Southern leanings. In Paris he began collecting and developed a keen interest in contemporary European painting.

  William Walters either commissioned works directly from the artists or bought them at auction. His purchases included Barbizon masters such as Jean-François Millet and Henri Rousseau. He also acquired academic masters, among them Jean-Léon Gérôme and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Even the modernists Monet, Manet and Sisley appear among his acquisitions.

  Ingres, Géricault and Delacroix supply major paintings from the first half of the 19th century. Ingres' Odalisque with Slave, a second version of the composition, is a highlight. So are Claude Monet's Springtime and Alfred Sisley's panoramic view of the Seine Valley. Édouard Manet's The Café Concert is a realist masterpiece.

  Henry Walters, William's son, turned his own attention to the courtly arts of 18th-century France. The Sèvres porcelain in the collection includes pieces made for members of the Royal Bourbon Court at Versailles Palace outside Paris. One is a pot-pourri vase shaped like a ship, made in the 1750s and 1760s. Only ten examples of it survive.

  The Treasury displays portrait miniatures and goldsmiths' work, especially snuffboxes and watches. It also holds Art Nouveau jewelry by René Lalique, jeweled objects by the House of Fabergé and precious jewels by Tiffany and Co. of New York City. Two of the Fabergé pieces are Russian Imperial Easter eggs.

  9

• 3. Ancient Worlds

  ›

  Two monumental statues of Sekhmet, the lion-headed fire goddess of Egypt, each weigh 3,000 pounds. The British Museum has lent them to the Walters on a long-term basis.

  The ancient galleries span Egypt, Nubia, Greece, Rome, Etruria and the Near East. The Walters Mummy represents Egypt. Alabaster reliefs from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II represent the Near East.

  Greek gold jewelry includes the bracelets from Olbia, on the shores of the Black Sea. The Praxitelean Satyr is another Greek highlight.

  The Roman holdings include a large assemblage of portrait heads and a bronze banquet couch. Marble sarcophagi come from the tombs of the prominent Licinian and Calpurnian families.

  In 1911, Henry Walters bought almost 100 gold artifacts from the Chiriqui region of western Panama in Central America. That purchase created the core of the museum's ancient American collection. Gifts and loans later added works, mostly in pottery and stone, from Mexico, Central America and South America. Olmec, Aztec and Maya pieces are among them. Works by the Moche and Inca peoples of South America also arrived through later gifts and loans.

  914

• 4. Medieval Treasures

  ›

  The medieval collection is the part of the Walters best known internationally. Henry Walters assembled art in all the major media of the Middle Ages, and it ranks among the best medieval collections in the United States. Its holdings span metalwork, sculpture, stained glass, textiles, icons and other paintings.

  Ivories, enamels and reliquaries are especially renowned. So are early Byzantine silver, post-Byzantine art and illuminated manuscripts, including a Georgian illuminated Gospel manuscript. The museum also holds the largest and finest collection of Ethiopian Orthodox Church art outside Ethiopia.

  The Rubens Vase, a Byzantine agate vessel, once belonged to the painter Rubens. It carries accession number 42.562. An ivory carving made in Egypt in the 6th or 7th century, accession number 71.297, is the earliest surviving image of the Virgin of Tenderness.

  Two sculpted heads from the royal Abbey of St. Denis, accession numbers 27.21 and 27.22, connect directly to the origins of Gothic art in 12th-century France. Portal sculptures like these rarely survive. An ivory casket covered with scenes of jousting knights is one of about a dozen like it in the world.

  Late medieval devotional paintings from Italy include work by Tommaso da Modena, Pietro Lorenzetti and Orcagna. Niccolo di Segna's Saint Lucy and Bartolomeo di Tommaso's Death of Saint Francis are also in the collection, as is Andrea di Bartolo's Resurrection.

  The Amandus Shrine, accession number 53.9, was featured in a small exhibition called The Special Dead in 2008-09. Curators and conservators had carried out in-depth technical research on it. Visiting researchers also make frequent use of the medieval holdings.

  In 2010-11, Treasures of Heaven, an exhibition about relics and reliquaries, was on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, at the Walters, and at the British Museum in London.

  912

• 5. Asia and Islam

  ›

  A Cambodian bronze of the eight-armed Avalokiteshvara, made in the late 12th or early 13th century, is among the outstanding works of Asian art. A Tang dynasty earthenware camel and an intricately painted Ming dynasty wine jar are also counted among them.

  The oldest surviving Chinese wood-and-lacquer image of the Buddha dates to the late 6th century AD. It has a gallery dedicated solely to it.

  William T. and Henry Walters, the Baltimore father and son, collected Japanese arms and armor, along with Chinese and Japanese porcelains, lacquers and metalwork. The museum also holds one of the largest and finest collections of Thai bronze, scrolls and banner paintings in the world.

  Islamic art in all media is represented at the Walters. A 7th-century carved and hammered silver bowl from Iran, once ancient Persia, is among the highlights. A 13th-century candlestick of copper, silver and gold comes from the Mamluk era in Egypt. Mausoleum doors from the 16th century are decorated with wood carvings in a radiating star pattern.

  A 17th-century silk sash from the Mughal Empire in India sits alongside a 17th-century Turkish tile. The tile shows the Masjid al-Haram, the Great Mosque of Mecca, which is the center of Islam in modern Saudi Arabia.

  A 15th-century Koran from northern India was written at the height of the Timurid Empire. A 16th-century copy of the Khamsa of Nizami was illustrated by a number of famous artists for the Emperor Akbar. A Turkish calligraphy album is by Sheikh Hamadullah Al-Amasi, one of the greatest calligraphers of all time.

  Manuscript W.613 contains five Mughal miniatures from an important Khamsa of Nizami made for the Emperor Akbar. The rest of those miniatures are in London.

  912

• 6. Three Buildings

  ›

  Architect William Adams Delano designed Henry Walters' original gallery, which was finished in 1909. Its exterior drew on the Renaissance-revival Hôtel Pourtalès in Paris. The interior was modeled on the 17th-century Collegio dei Gesuiti in Genoa. The Balbi family built that college for the Jesuits, and it is now the Palazzo dell'Università.

  An overhead passageway crosses the back alley to link the gallery with Walters' townhouse to the north. Renaissance and Baroque art, French decorative arts of the 18th and 19th centuries, and manuscripts and rare books are exhibited in this palazzo.

  Hugo van der Goes' Donor with Saint John the Baptist and El Greco's Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata are among the highlights. Veronese painted the Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto Thiene and her Daughter Porzia. The Madonna of the Candelabra comes from the studio of Raphael.

  Bernini's bozzetto of the Risen Christ is a small preparatory model for a larger work. Tiepolo's Scipio Africanus Freeing Massiva and Giambattista Pittoni's Sacrifice of Polyxena hang nearby in the collection. The Ideal City is attributed to Fra Carnevale. Heemskerck's Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the Ancient World is another highlight.

  The Centre Street Annex opened in 1974. The Boston firm of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott designed it in the Brutalist poured-concrete style of the 1960s. Several of its horizontal lines parallel features of the 1909 structure.

  Kallmann McKinnell and Wood, Architects, substantially altered the annex in 1998-2001. They added a four-story glass atrium with a suspended staircase where the older and newer buildings meet. A new lobby on Centre Street brought easier ground-level access, better security, a café, an enlarged museum and gift store, and a reference library.

  The ancient, Byzantine, medieval, Ethiopian and 19th-century European collections are housed in the annex. The museum's famed art conservation laboratory is here too. It is one of the oldest in the country.

  John Rudolph Niernsee (1814-1885), a noted local architect, designed a Greek Revival townhouse built between 1848 and 1850 for John Hanson Thomas. It sits on the southwest corner of the circle around the Washington Monument. It was long regarded as the most elegant house along Mount Vernon Place.

  The Thomas family's distinguished guests in the mid-19th century included the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. Another guest was General Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian freedom fighter known as the "Father of modern Hungary".

  The city briefly acquired the house in the late 1950s. A poorly planned northern expansion of the gallery put it at risk of demolition, and local preservationists protested. The house was resold to the Gladding family, who ran a well-known Chevrolet dealership and promised to restore it. Under the name Thomas-Jencks-Gladding House, it was designated a Baltimore City Landmark in 1975.

  In the mid-1980s, Mayor William Donald Schaefer led the city in reacquiring the house from the Gladding family. Schaefer served as mayor from 1971 to 1987 and as governor of Maryland from 1987 to 1995. A donation from his friend, the local businessman Willard Hackerman, helped make the transfer to the Walters possible.

  A connecting gallery with a domed skylight was built through the top of the old rear carriage house. It runs across the alley to the north side of the 1909 building. The house reopened in 1991 as Hackerman House, devoted to the Walters' expanded holdings of Asian art.

  101311

• 7. Free and Open

  ›

  The Walters was founded and opened in 1934. Dorothy Miner became its first Keeper of Manuscripts that year and held the post until her death in 1973.

  In 2000, the institution changed its long-time name from The Walters Art Gallery to The Walters Art Museum. The new name reflected its image as a large public institution. It also removed confusion among a growing number of out-of-state visitors. Locals still often call it The Walters.

  The following year, the museum reopened its original main building after a dramatic three-year renovation. The work also replaced the building's internal utilities and infrastructure. A private collector lent the Archimedes Palimpsest to the Walters for conservation and spectral imaging studies.

  On the 1st of October 2006, admission became free to all, year-round. Substantial grants from Baltimore City and the surrounding Baltimore County arts agencies and authorities made this possible.

  In 2012, the museum released nearly 20,000 images of its collections under a Creative Commons license. It collaborated on uploading them to Wikimedia Commons and the wider internet. It was one of the largest and most comprehensive releases of this kind by any museum.

  1211

• 8. Labor Trouble

  ›

  In 2021, several Walters employees fell ill from toxic vapors tied to construction work on the museum site.

  Throughout 2021, director Julia Marciari-Alexander refused to meet with employees. She was advised by the law firm Shaw Rosenthal LLP, and her refusal stalled a wall-to-wall unionization effort.

  In October 2021, the Baltimore City Council and Comptroller Bill Henry directed her to meet with employees and allow a vote on unionization. She refused again, claiming that meeting with her employees would constitute interference.

  If the unionization effort succeeded, workers would be represented by AFSCME Council 67. That union would also represent workers at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

  34678