Reinstallation in Baltimore.(Current and coming)(Walters Art Museum)

William T. Walters and his son Henry were acquisitive men. Before his death in 1894, the elder Walters amassed a collection that included nineteenth-century European paintings and bronze sculptures, Asian ceramics, rare books, and manuscripts, while his son was fascinated by the Renaissance in Italy. Both were civic minded and opened their house and collections in Baltimore to the public.

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In 1902 Henry Walters purchased the collection of Don Marcello Massarenti en bloc. It was of very high quality and comprised more than seventeen hundred works of art dating from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century. The collection soon outgrew its allocated space, and Walters, having purchased three adjacent houses, engaged William Adams Delano to unify the site and create an appropriate setting for his art. Delano modeled his design on a seventeenth-century palazzo in Genoa, and the building was completed in 1909. At Walters's death the house and collection were bequeathed to the city of Baltimore, and the galleries were opened to the public in 1934.

The Walters Art Museum has recently reinstalled and reopened a series of galleries in which the emphasis is on combining fine and decorative arts. The core of the installation is a suite of three galleries off the skylit courtyard of the building. These are evocative of the interiors of a wealthy nobleman's house in the southern Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The first gallery is devoted to arms and armor. The next, called the Chamber of Wonders, ...