Walters Art Museum

Stand for a moment on the pavement of Mount Vernon Place and listen. Traffic hums softly around the squares. Pigeons shuffle across the stone. Ahead of you, pale walls and tall arched windows look more like a palace in northern Italy than a building in an American port city. That is no accident. This is the Walters Art Museum, and almost everything about it started with one family's appetite for beautiful things.

The family was the Walters. William Thompson Walters made his fortune in the nineteenth century, in the liquor trade and later in railroads. He spent much of that fortune on art. He bought paintings, bronzes, porcelain, and objects from across Asia. His son, Henry Walters, took the habit much further. Henry collected on a scale few private people have ever matched, from ancient Egypt to the early twentieth century.

Here is the first surprise. Henry did not leave this collection to his children or sell it at auction. When he died in 1931, he left the building and thousands of works to the city of Baltimore, for the benefit of the public. The museum opened its doors in 1934. In other words, this is not a gift to a university or an elite society. It was a gift to everyone who lives here — and, by extension, to you.

Now look again at the original building. It was completed in 1909, and its design looks to the Renaissance and Baroque palaces of Genoa, in Italy. Notice the rusticated stone at street level, cut so the blocks look heavy and deep. Above, the windows become lighter and more refined. Inside, the old building wraps around a central court with arcades and columns. It feels calm and enclosed, a world away from the street outside.

The museum grew over the decades. A modern wing on Centre Street added much more gallery space in the 1970s. Later, the museum took over Hackerman House, a grand nineteenth-century townhouse on the square, which has displayed art from Asia. So as you walk through, you move between three very different spaces — a palace, a modern block, and a family mansion. The shifts in ceilings, floors, and light tell you when you have crossed from one to another.

The ancient galleries are a good place to begin. The collection of ancient Egyptian art includes coffins, sculpture, and small objects of daily life. Nearby, look for the Roman marble sarcophagi — carved stone coffins. Several come from a single family tomb in Rome. Their sides are crowded with figures from myth, including scenes of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and celebration. Lean close. You can see where the carvers drilled deep into the marble to create shadow.

Here is a second surprise that many visitors miss. The Walters holds one of the most important collections of Ethiopian Christian art outside Ethiopia. There are painted icons, small processional crosses, and illuminated manuscripts. The colours are bold — strong reds, yellows, and greens — and the faces have large, steady eyes. These objects show a Christian tradition in Africa that is many centuries old, and they rarely appear in museum tours of medieval art.

That leads to another strength of the museum: books made by hand. The Walters has a large collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, from Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. The museum is also known for manuscript research and conservation. For years, scholars here worked on the Archimedes Palimpsest, a medieval prayer book written over a much older copy of texts by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Imaging work revealed writing that had been scraped away and hidden for centuries.

Not every room is about scholarship. One gallery recreates a Chamber of Wonders, the kind of room a wealthy European collector might have filled in the seventeenth century. Paintings hang close together on the walls. Shells, animal specimens, scientific instruments, and curiosities sit side by side. It feels crowded on purpose. Back then, a collector wanted to show the whole world in a single room, mixing nature and art without clear boundaries.

For something smaller and more delicate, look for the work of the Russian jeweller Fabergé. The museum holds two of the famous Imperial Easter eggs made for the Russian royal family. One of them, the Gatchina Palace Egg, opens to show a tiny model of a palace in gold. Bring your face close to the glass. The details are so fine that you will want to look twice to believe a human hand made them.

The nineteenth-century French galleries connect directly back to William Walters and his tastes. He admired the French sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, who was famous for animal sculptures in bronze. When you step outside later, look at the squares of Mount Vernon Place. Several bronze animals there are by Barye, and they were given to the city through William Walters. His collecting did not stay indoors. It spilled out into the street.

That street deserves your attention too. Mount Vernon Place is one of Baltimore's oldest elegant neighbourhoods, built around a tall column honouring George Washington. Townhouses of brick and brownstone line the squares, with iron railings and heavy front doors. The Walters family lived here, on the same square as their art. Standing here today, you can still picture a time when wealthy families walked from their homes to look at new purchases arriving from Paris.

As you leave, take one more look at the arched windows and pale stone of the old building. Think about the choice Henry Walters made. He could have kept all of this private. Instead, he handed the key to the city. Walk out slowly into the squares, past the bronze animals and the rows of old townhouses. The art is behind you now, but the neighbourhood it grew from is all around you.