An expansion in Baltimore.(exhibits to celebrate reopening of Walters Art Gallery)(Brief Article)

In the great era of collecting at the beginning of the twentieth century, titans such as John Pierpont Morgan amassed enormous and important art collections. More than a few achieved this by buying entire collections that had been assembled by others. Not so Henry Walters. Over the course of his life he judiciously added piece by piece to the collections his father; William, had begun, so that by his death in 1931 he had assembled some twenty-two thousand paintings and objects. while this total is considerably smaller than that in many of this country's major museums, the Walters Art Museum is nonetheless highly esteemed for the extraordinary quality of its holdings.

In 1904 Walters engaged the architect William Adams Delano to design a limestone Italian Renaissance revival palazzo in his hometown of Baltimore to house the collection. Completed in 1909, the building featured a central court that replicated one in the Palazzo Balbi, constructed in Genoa in the 1630s by Bartolomeo Bianco. Walters was a full-time resident of New York City and long a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Therefore, when his will named the city of Baltimore the beneficiary of his museum and art collection, it surprised many in the art world.

The museum has expanded since the 1930s principally through the addition of two structures-a brutalist style building, designed by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott of Boston and Meyers, Ayres and Saint of Baltimore in 1974, and the Hackerman House, an 1850 mansion in which the Asian art collections are installed and which opened to the public in 1991. In the 1990s ...