Qualla: Baltimore Museum of Art

Baltimore Museum of Art: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit «Marylandstater» «reply» at English Wikipedia., Public domain. When the Baltimore Museum of Art was incorporated on November 16, 1914, it consisted of a single painting - William Sergeant Kendall's Mischief - donated by the man who had just declared, on behalf of a post-fire city congress, that Baltimore desperately needed an art museum. The Great Baltimore Fire of February 1904 had destroyed most of the downtown business district. The recovery plan that emerged from the city's response identified the absence of a major art museum as a cultural failing. Ten years later the museum had a charter and a single painting. By 1949, when the Cone sisters donated their collection of approximately 3,000 modern artworks - including more than 600 by Henri Matisse, the largest single concentration of Matisse's work anywhere in the world - the BMA had become one of the most significant art museums in the country. Today its collection holds 95,000 objects.

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Image: «Marylandstater» «reply» at English Wikipedia. | Public domain

Baltimore Museum of Art: Claribel and Etta

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christopher Busta-Peck, CC BY 2.0. Claribel Cone, born 1864, became a physician at a time when very few women practiced medicine. Etta, born 1870, kept the household and managed the family finances. The Cones were unmarried sisters from a wealthy German-Jewish Baltimore family whose brothers owned textile mills. I...

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Image: Christopher Busta-Peck | CC BY 2.0

Baltimore Museum of Art: John Russell Pope's Building

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:Steelplug, Public domain. After more than a decade of using temporary quarters - a downtown house, then the Garrett Mansion at Mount Vernon Place - the museum hired John Russell Pope to design a permanent home in Wyman Park. Pope was the master of American classical-revival architecture, the architect who...

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Image: en:User:Steelplug | Public domain

Baltimore Museum of Art: Morris Louis's Letter

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jennyferretti, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the late 1930s, the museum was succeeding by its own measure but failing by another. A 1937 Carnegie Corporation report found that Baltimore's cultural institutions, the BMA among them, had appealed mostly to a small, privileged, white minority. Local artists felt overlooked. ...

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Image: Jennyferretti | CC BY-SA 4.0

Baltimore Museum of Art: The Antioch Mosaics

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Artbma-anne, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1932, with the support of BMA trustee Robert Garrett, the museum joined Princeton University, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Musees Nationaux de France in an excavation of the ancient city of Antioch, near present-day Antakya in southeastern Turkey. The seven-year dig uncov...

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Image: Artbma-anne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Baltimore Museum of Art: Renoir, Recovered

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jennyferretti, CC BY-SA 4.0. In November 2012, a small Renoir landscape called Paysage Bords de Seine surfaced at a Virginia auction house. The painting had been stolen from the BMA in 1951 and had been missing for 63 years. A woman claimed she had bought it at a West Virginia flea market for seven dollars. ...

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Image: Jennyferretti | CC BY-SA 4.0