Qualla: Walters Art Museum

Walters Art Museum: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anonymous (Chancay)Unknown author, Public domain. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, William Thompson Walters left Baltimore for Paris. He was a Confederate sympathizer in a Union city, and Europe was the safer address. He spent the rest of the decade buying paintings. His son Henry kept buying after him - Renaissance bronzes, Egyptian mummies, Faberge eggs, the agate vase that once belonged to Rubens. When Henry died in 1931, he left the City of Baltimore more than 22,000 objects, the palazzo he had built to hold them, and the townhouse next door. The will specified that admission be free. Nearly a century later, it still is.

Read more: Walters Art Museum on Qualla

Image: Anonymous (Chancay)Unknown author | Public domain

Walters Art Museum: A Palazzo on Charles Street

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dylan k, CC BY-SA 3.0. Henry Walters did not want his collection scattered to auction houses. In 1905 he commissioned architect William Adams Delano to design a gallery on the northwest corner of North Charles and West Centre Streets, in the Mount Vernon neighborhood a block south of the family mansion...

Read more: Walters Art Museum on Qualla

Image: Dylan k | CC BY-SA 3.0

Walters Art Museum: Thirty Centuries Under One Roof

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Claude Monet, Public domain. The collection spans about five thousand years and most of the inhabited world. Two three-thousand-pound statues of the Egyptian lion-headed goddess Sekhmet stand on long-term loan from the British Museum. The medieval holdings are considered among the finest in the United States...

Read more: Walters Art Museum on Qualla

Image: Claude Monet | Public domain

Walters Art Museum: The Brutalist Behind the Palazzo

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neosexy1, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original gallery filled up. In 1974 the museum opened a Centre Street annex designed by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott of Boston, in the poured-concrete Brutalist style that dominated 1960s public architecture. The contrast with the 1909 palazzo could hardly be shar...

Read more: Walters Art Museum on Qualla

Image: Neosexy1 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Walters Art Museum: Free Admission, Open Pixels

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Master Jean de Mauléon, Public domain. Henry Walters wrote 'for the benefit of the public' into his bequest, and the museum has taken the phrase further than most. Admission is free, every day. In 2012 the Walters released nearly twenty thousand images of its collections under a Creative Commons license and uploaded t...

Read more: Walters Art Museum on Qualla

Image: Master Jean de Mauléon | Public domain

Walters Art Museum: Mount Vernon Around It

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gilbert Stuart, Public domain. The Walters anchors the south side of Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore's most refined nineteenth-century square. Just to the northeast rises the Washington Monument, the marble column begun in 1815 - the first major monument to George Washington in any American city, predating the o...

Read more: Walters Art Museum on Qualla

Image: Gilbert Stuart | Public domain