Among the American millionaires who began collecting Italian art in the late 1890s, Henry Walters was perhaps the most cultivated. He was raised in a sophisticated environment of wealth and privilege where art collecting was a way of life. His father, William T. Walters, initially earned his fortune as a dealer in domestic and imported wines and spirits but expanded his business interests into transportation, becoming a controlling director of the Northern Central Railway Company which, after various mergers, ultimately became the powerful Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. William Walters’s business interests also expanded into banking, and he became a founder and director of the Safe Deposit Company of Baltimore, the predecessor of the Mercantile Bank.
William Walters’s passion for collecting art began in 1841, at the very beginning of his business career, leading to the legendary claim that “the first five dollars he earned was spent on a picture.”1 His interest in art, however, was not just for art’s sake. The art he collected was also utilized by him to promote the interests of the public. According to William Walters, the source of his combined interests in art and public service was his mother, who cautioned him at a very young age not to concentrate all of his attention on business. Instead, she urged him to channel his intellectual energy toward the creation of a public art collection. This, she advised him, “will keep your mind flexible and your soul alive.”2
In the 1850s, William Walters began collecting contemporary American paintings by such artists of the Hudson River school as Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, and John Kensett, evidencing a discerning taste for the most prominent artists in the United States at that time, of whom Kensett was his favorite. William Walters’s praise of this artist as well as his own refined appreciation of his art is reflected in a sentimental letter to Kensett: “There is poetry of art, as well as letters—and there is no art without it—and that poetry of yours has gone most deeply in my heart where you have spoken in the plainest and most clearly defined words—for certainty—trees-mountains-Rocks-air . . . are the artists’ poetic words.”3
In 1861, with the advent of the Civil War, William Walters, who sympathized with the interests of the South, left the United States for France and, with his wife, Ellen, his thirteen-year-old son, Henry, and his daughter, Jennie, resided in Paris. Walters felt culturally at home in France, having developed a passionate taste for French art. Two years earlier, in 1859, he had purchased ten paintings from French and Belgian artists, including a version of Gérôme’s The Duel after the Masquerade, which became one of his favorite paintings and a gem in his collection. After arriving in Paris, William Walters, who was often accompanied by his son, Henry, became immersed in French art, frequenting the studios of artists and studying the masters at the Louvre. Following the sudden death of his wife in 1862, Walters delved further into the French art market, purchasing paintings by Theodore Rousseau, François Daubigny, and Jean-Baptiste Corot, as well as sculpture and watercolors from Antoine-Louis Barye.4
By the time Walters had returned to the United States after the Civil War, he had become a devoted patron of contemporary European paintings, especially Barbizon school and French academic paintings. The importance of his collection was reflected in Walters’s purchase of 1814, a classic depiction of Napoleon on horseback directing his troops in battle, by Ernest Meissonier, whose meticulously prepared paintings were then considered to be the best, most sought-after, and expensive in France.5 In the 1880s, Walters also added to his collection Delacroix’s The Collision of the Arab Horsemen and Christ on the Sea of Galilee, two important paintings belonging to the French romantic school. Although his collection was devoid of paintings by Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, and other old masters, the quality of his nineteenth-century contemporary paintings was extraordinary for an American collector, leading one critic to observe that Walters “has gathered impartially the finest works of the French, English, Belgian and German artists now living or recently deceased, and has with perhaps few exceptions the best representations of each school and individual.”6 In the 1870s, Walters also became an enthusiastic buyer of Asian art, especially Chinese and Japanese porcelains. His goal was not simply to expand the collection, which included more than three thousand objects, but to improve it by judiciously pruning work of questionable merit in favor of better examples.7
To display his burgeoning collection, Walters converted his home at 65 Mount Vernon Place in Baltimore into a private museum, with a picture gallery stacked with paintings in the style of a French salon of the Second Empire. Walters was not shy about publicizing the collection and showing it off. He invited artists and art critics to visit his collection and to write about it. He hosted extravagant parties for foreign dignitaries and members of America’s upper crust to see the collection and, through the catalogues he prepared, to be reminded of its overall quality. Beginning in 1878, William Walters also permitted the public to visit his private museum each spring. He charged an entry fee of fifty cents, which he collected for the benefit of the Baltimore Association for the Improvement of the Conditions of the Poor; over the years, these fees amounted to more than $125,000.8
As a result of Walters’s efforts to promote his collection and his generosity in making the collection accessible to the general public, it became widely known and highly praised. It was, at that time, considered one of the most important private art collections in the United States. In The Art Treasures of America, published in 1879, Walters’s collection was referred to as “an educator of taste not to be excelled in the New World.”9 In 1889, the Magazine of Western History described the Walters painting collection as “the finest collection of paintings—the most informing—in this country.”10 In 1892, the Magazine of American History described in the following superlative terms the importance of the Walters collection:
There is no art collection, public or private, accessible to the people of this country where so many real treasures may be enjoyed, and no private art collection in any quarter of the world of such munificent proportions and genuine value. It is veritably a connoisseur’s collection, or rather, as we have seen, it is a connoisseur’s collection of collections—a masterly triumph in the art of collecting.11
In 1894, Harper’s Weekly called Walters’s collection “one of the finest private art collections in the world.”12 Although the quality of William Walters’s collection has been obscured by time and superseded by the more ambitious and far more extensive collection of his son, Henry, William Walters’s collection, in its time, had an incomparable reputation in the United States and, in terms of quality, remained as a model for his son to emulate.
In evaluating the factors that ultimately led to Henry Walters’s acquisition of the Massarenti collection, it would be impossible to overestimate the lasting influence of his father. Henry Walters stepped into a life of considerable wealth, economic power, and cultural sophistication. Yet the path he chose to follow as a patron of the arts was not in the familiar footsteps of his father but instead in a different, more adventurous cultural direction where the stakes were higher and where he could establish an identity and reputation of his own while at the same time memorializing his father’s prior accomplishments.
Although his father’s cultural legacy was grounded in Baltimore, Henry Walters aspired to use his wealth and culture to enter the elite circle of the Medicean princes of New York, his adopted city, where he would spend the last forty years of his life and serve as an influential member of the Board of Trustees and vice president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Walters thus became an enigmatic man of two cities, living primarily in New York, where his home, family, social circle, and business office were centered, while becoming, in absentia, the cultural prince of Baltimore, where his growing art collection was shipped but rarely examined by him. Unlike a proverbial Renaissance prince, who in the privacy of a small studiolo would lovingly surround himself with precious books, sculpture, and paintings for his own study and contemplation, Henry Walters’s relationship with his cultural treasures was attenuated by time and space, and consequently, as one critic has observed, “One cannot judge how well Henry Walters—who resided in New York—knew his fine collection, or had the opportunity to enjoy it.”13
Born on September 26, 1848, Henry Walters was initially educated in Baltimore but at the age of thirteen moved with his family to Paris, where he completed his high school education and acquired a proficiency in French that was matched by his early appreciation of the visual arts. William Walters, it is reported, not only took his son hand-in-hand to the galleries and museums of Paris but also required his son to write thoughtful essays on the subject.14 After returning to the United States, Henry Walters enrolled at Georgetown College in Washington, D.C., where he obtained a Jesuit education, rich in the humanities, philosophy, and classical literature. After graduating from Georgetown in 1869, he attended graduate school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Lawrence Scientific School, a division of Harvard, where he studied engineering for three years and later received a Bachelor of Science degree.15
After completing his formal education, Henry Walters joined his father’s banking and transportation business in Baltimore, and their relationship changed, in the words of biographer William R. Johnston, “from a paternal-filial relationship to one of companionship and friendship.” It was not just business, however, that tied them together. In 1873, William and Henry traveled together to Europe, spending five months in France and taking side trips to Italy, London, Belgium, and Switzerland.16 Eventually, Henry Walters became a junior partner in the family’s business and cultural ventures.
The new, mature relationship between father and son was evidenced by the wording on a formal invitation sent to 125 prominent guests from New York, Washington, and Baltimore inviting them to the grand opening on March 6, 1879, of the Walterses’ expanded collection. The invitation for this event was not from William T. Walters alone but instead from “Mr. W. T. Walters and his Son.” The oblique reference in the invitation to Henry reflected his emergence, at the age of thirty-one, from his father’s shadow and into an identity of his own.
In the spring of 1879, shortly after the grand reopening of his father’s gallery, Henry Walters embarked by himself on a cultural odyssey to the great centers of art in Italy, France, and England. From May 9 to May 23, Walters for the first time immersed himself in Italian Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture. Using Baedeker’s scholarly Italy: Handbook for Travellers as his guide, Walters spent a week in Florence, five days in Venice, and two days in Milan.17 As evidenced by a thirty-six page notebook in which he thoughtfully recorded his observations, Walters was no mere dilettante going through the motions of the Grand Tour but a serious and inquisitive student of Italian Renaissance art. What caught his eye in Florence was a panel in Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise in which a female figure balanced a “vase on her head from which grows scrolls, flowers, birds and at top angels”; in Giotto’s Campanile, “the light and airy construction”; at San Miniato al Monte, the “beautiful marble choir screen encrusted with marbles and scrolls, flowers and rosettes in relief”; and at Santa Maria Novella, “the length of the nave enhanced by gradually diminishing distances between the pillars from 49 to 37 feet.” In Venice, Walters’s interest in architecture was reflected in his comments about the interior of Saint Mark’s Cathedral, which “carries out its [oriental] conception,” and the colonnaded interior of Saint Maria del Salute, “with its two systems of columns, one for the Dome and the other for the arches.”18
Among all of the artistic wonders of Florence and Venice, Walters’s favorite place was the Tribuna in the Uffizi Gallery. It was, according to his notes, the place he returned to in order to see “the things I wanted to see” and to enjoy the pure pleasure of its cultural treasures. The unusual, octagonal Tribuna was constructed in 1583 at the direction of Grand Duke Francesco I for the purpose of exhibiting his collection of rare and marvelous objects of art, science, and nature. Like other Wunderkammer designed by princes during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was intended to evoke a sense of wonder and to demonstrate the breadth of Francesco’s intellectual curiosity and far-reaching knowledge. The Tribuna subsequently was converted into an art gallery for showcasing the gems of the Medici collection, and it became one of Italy’s earliest and most remarkable private museums and a key destination for privileged tourists on the Grand Tour. In the late nineteenth century, at the time of Walters’s visit, the Baedeker guidebook described the Tribuna as “a magnificent and almost unparalleled collection of masterpieces of ancient sculpture and modern painting.” Among the masterpieces which were probably on display at the time of Walters’s visit were the famous, classical sculpture of Venus then known as the Medici Venus; Titian’s Venus of Urbino; Raphael’s The Madonna of the Bullfinch; Michelangelo’s Tondo Doni; and Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna and Child with Saint Francis and Saint John the Evangelist.19 It seems as though the seeds of Henry Walters’s interest in acquiring a collection of Italian Renaissance masters, constructing an Italianate palace to house them, and displaying side by side remarkable paintings by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Andrea del Sarto were planted in Walters’s mind at that time and place. Many years later, Bernard Berenson, perhaps at Walters’s suggestion, referred to the “Tribuna” as the place in the Walters Italianate museum where his best paintings should hang.20
The value of Walters’s notes made during his trip to Italy is that they tell us more about him than merely what he saw. They provide us with a rare glimpse of the qualities inside him that made him tick. Walters, throughout his life, was a secretive man. He wrote very little about himself. Rarely did he speak to the press. To our knowledge, he kept no personal diary in which he expressed any of the inner passions of his life. Other than his letters to Berenson and his usually curt letters of direction to the superintendent of his gallery in Baltimore, no correspondence, not even a note expressing his affection for his wife, exists to reveal his personal side. We know the details of his life primarily from the history of the grand monuments to art and business that he successfully built. But his notes written in Italy at the age of thirty-one reveal the unspoken romantic side of his personality and the things both prosaic and cultural that personally moved him. The notes express not only his interest in painting, sculpture, and architecture but also his interest in opera, which he eagerly attended, as well as his pleasure in the metaphors and similes of poetry. The notes also reveal that he was a man of letters who knew not only how to write but how to write well. Comparing the gloom of a dark and rainy afternoon in Venice with the beautifully clear and cool weather of the following day, Walters wrote: “I have never seen such a metamorphosis. The sun seems to have renovated the city. The dilapidation has entirely disappeared. The holes are filled with light and sunshine, and what in the rain seemed blackness of age now assumes all shades of colors.”21 What emerges from these notes is the portrait of a sensitive young man whose powers of observation and passion for all manifestations of culture would in combination lead him to the pinnacle of art collecting by the turn of the twentieth century.
During the next several years, Henry Walters assumed more responsibility in shaping the Walters collection, traveling to London and Paris in the spring of 1879 to purchase Oriental art and returning to Europe in the winter of 1880–81 to purchase crystal in Vienna and watercolors and more Oriental art in Paris. In February of 1884, William Walters, having completed the conversion of his home into a museum, hosted another large gala, inviting diplomats from France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and China; prominent figures in Walters’s ever-expanding business and cultural communities; and members of the New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore press. In publicizing this event, William T. Walters not only recognized Henry’s contribution to the collection but suggested that it belonged to him as well. The Baltimore Sun reported that “Mr. W. T. Walters and his son, Mr. Harry Walters, gave a reception yesterday on the occasion of opening their picture and Oriental galleries” (emphasis added).22 The idea of joint ownership by father and son suggested in this article must have kindled within Henry a lifelong commitment to treat the collection not simply as his father’s or later as his own but as “their” collection, a collection that would remain indistinguishable from his father’s legacy and the Walters family name.
In the summer of 1884, Henry Walters left Baltimore, never to reside in the city again, and moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. The reason for Walters’s move to Wilmington was to assume the post of general manager of his father’s railroad, which was headquartered there. His success in managing this business was well recognized, leading one contemporary writer to observe that, “although young in years, he [Henry Walters] has had a large experience and has already acquired the reputation of being one of the best educated, most intelligent and practical railroad men in the country.”23
Walters’s move to Wilmington was a dramatic change in course that would essentially sever his social ties to Baltimore and lead to an unusual relationship with Pembroke and Sadie Jones, a wealthy, socially prominent couple whose marriage that same year was billed as the South’s equivalent to a royal wedding.24 Pembroke Jones was known for his unrestrained appetite for high living and his ambition to get “the utmost flavor out of life.” Sadie Jones, the daughter of a wealthy U.S. congressman, surpassed even her husband in seizing all of the pleasures of life and enjoying the benefits of high society. Some even considered her as the second coming of Scarlet O’Hara.25 With an annual budget of $300,000 to spend each year for entertainment, she captivated society in both the nation’s capital and Wilmington with her lavish hospitality. With the assistance of an internationally renowned horticulturist, she developed at her Wilmington estate (known as Airlie-on-the Sound) a magnificent garden containing more than 600,000 multicolored azalea bushes, which she opened to the public each spring. She expanded the family mansion, adding thirty-eight guest suites to its existing twelve bedrooms and placing a covered tennis court in the middle of the house. It was in this mansion that Walters maintained a private office. Later, with Walters’s encouragement, Sadie and her husband constructed on an adjacent property an Italianate lodge, which the Italian ambassador to the United States characterized as “the most perfect note of Italy in America.”26 The extravagance of the Joneses became legendary; and the adage “keeping up with the Joneses” was reportedly coined after them.
Shortly after arriving in Wilmington, Walters became acquainted with the Joneses, and then, through the magnetism of their wealth and fame, Walters moved into the Joneses’ residence, and his personal and social life in Wilmington quickly became bound to theirs. Little is known about Henry Walters’s interest, if any, in the opposite sex. During the many years that he resided in Maryland, there were no reports of any relationship, courtship, or interest in any young woman. The notes from his trip to Italy indicate that he spent his evenings with male friends. Simply stated, Henry Walters was not known to have had any close female friends during the first thirty-five years of his life. As a result, questions remain as to the focus of Walters’s attraction to Pembroke and Sadie Jones.27 In any event, the three became inseparable—traveling around the world together and later electing to live together as a ménage a trois, an unusual relationship that led some to refer to Sadie Jones as “the woman with two husbands.”28 With the Joneses by his side, Walters ascended to the top of the social and cultural worlds of both Wilmington and New York and to positions of prominence and cultural influence that would far exceed his father’s earlier accomplishments.
In the 1890s, Walters’s railroad opened an office in New York, and Henry Walters, in the company of Sadie and Pembroke Jones, began to reside there, living lavishly while ascending the social ladder to gain the acquaintance of similarly well-bred members of the upper class. He joined almost thirty exclusive social clubs in New York and elsewhere, which included the Metropolitan Club, the Manhattan Club, the Players Club, the Racquet and Tennis Club, the Atlantic Yacht Club, the New York Yacht Club, the Westminster Kennel Club, and the Zodiac Dining Club. He became a clubman, a yachtsman, a world traveler, and gourmand and made the acquaintance of other leading members of New York society, like J. P. Morgan, who were privileged to live similarly self-indulgent lives. For close to ten years, from 1884 to 1894, while his social life expanded, his interest in collecting art remained quiescent, but that would soon change.29
In November 1894, William Walters died, leaving Henry an estate valued at $4.5 million (roughly equivalent to $110 million today), a valuable art collection, and the presidency of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. William Walters’s death, however, did more than enrich his son monetarily. It was for Henry Walters a transformative event that seemed to reawaken his cosmopolitan spirit and to redirect his energies from the narrow pleasures of his self-indulgent flirtation with high society to more noble objectives. Henry Walters’s renewed interest in world culture was demonstrated by his influential role in helping to establish the American Academy in Rome. In 1897, Henry Walters joined the academy’s small board of trustees and launched a campaign to raise an endowment of $750,000. Besides contributing $50,000 to the campaign, Walters convinced J. P. Morgan to join him in issuing a public appeal for financial support. The central idea expressed in the appeal was reminiscent of Jarvis’s earlier effort to promote the Italian Renaissance as a cultural model for America. The appeal from Walters and Morgan stated: “We, the undersigned, believe the time has come when this country is ready for its [the American Academy in Rome] permanent establishment and endowment, and that such an institution would prove of incalculable value in building up the national [American] standards of taste.”30 As suggested in this appeal, it was the standards of taste developed during the Italian Renaissance that Walters would turn to with passion in launching his own collection of art.
The collection that Henry Walters inherited from his father was rich in nineteenth-century European art but limited in paintings and sculpture created before then. At the time of William Walters’s death, there were approximately 175 paintings in his collection, 113 of which were by contemporary French artists, 23 by English artists, and 8 by Americans.31 William Walters’s collection, although rich in Chinese and Japanese porcelains, contained few objects from classical Greece, Rome, or other ancient civilizations. The collection was also devoid of any French impressionists or other art that might have been characterized as avant-garde. William Walters’s taste in paintings was not parochial (he was not attached to American art) but was characterized by a risk-free, conventional preference for beautiful art by well-known nineteenth-century artists, art that comforted the eye and that would hang fashionably in his Baltimore home or in the French salons of that time.
In 1899, at the age of fifty-one, Henry Walters broke from this tradition and launched his own career as a collector by initially focusing on Italian art. Perhaps because he had waited so long, he had developed a voracious but discriminating appetite for acquiring art that reflected his interest in world history and culture. Although he initially gave priority to the collection and display of Renaissance paintings, Henry Walters’s collection ultimately would include more than twenty-two thousand works of art, including Egyptian reliefs; ancient Greek, Etruscan, and Roman sculpture; Medieval arms and armor; Renaissance bronzes; ceramics from Persia; early Christian antiquities; medieval ivories and enamels; and one of the largest collections of Medieval, Renaissance, and Islamic illuminated manuscripts in America. Among all the great collectors during the Gilded Age of America, Walters’s collection was the most encyclopedic in scope. His view of culture was, in a word, cosmopolitan. Walters harbored for his collection an ambitious goal that he expressed simply but eloquently: “My hope for the collection has been to make it a thoroughly rounded collection which would give to the observer an understanding of the whole history of the world’s artistic development.”32 Walters became, as one colleague from the Metropolitan Museum of Art observed, a collector whose intellectual spirit not only was comparable to the mighty Humanists of the Renaissance but also, in relationship to the other cultural leaders of America at the beginning of the twentieth century, “great among his peers.”33
Walters’s early interest in Italian Renaissance art had been nurtured by his own cosmopolitan upbringing, his periodic visits to Europe’s great museums, his activities on behalf of the American Academy in Rome, and his memorable trip to Florence and Venice in 1879. With the exception of Isabella Stewart Gardner, he was one of the earliest American collectors to have a firm appreciation for “primitive” Italian art that led to the Renaissance.34 Along with J. Pierpont Morgan, he was also one of the earliest collectors of Etruscan and Renaissance bronzes.35 One of Walters’s earliest purchases of art from Italy was an exquisite, small bronze statue of an Etruscan priest, cast around 200 B.C., which he acquired from Sotheby’s in New York.36 The half-draped priest bearing a radiant crown stands in contrapposto, with the upper part of his body twisting slightly to face the viewer while he confidently extends his right hand, which holds an offering dish. Walters would have recognized in this balanced pose the influence of the famous Apollo Belvedere, which he probably saw during his earlier visit to Rome. Perhaps mindful of the significance of that statue in cultural history, Walters might have hoped that this purchase would signify his own ascendancy to the upper ranks of America’s art collectors.
Henry Walters’s next purchase, however, was considerably more adventuresome and heralded a willingness to trust his own judgment in art against the tide of contrary assessments. In 1882, Raphael’s Madonna of the Candelabra (see plate 1), the first Raphael ever to be shown in the United States, was exhibited with considerable fanfare at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the hope and expectation that the Metropolitan would purchase it. The circular painting had a noble provenance tracing its ownership back to the Borghese family in Rome. However, at some time it had been reduced in size, resulting in the elimination of the figure of Saint John the Baptist and the truncation of the Virgin’s halo, and, upon its arrival in the United States, it had been touched up by the renowned landscape painter Frederick Church. Critics in the United States greeted the painting with widespread skepticism regarding its authenticity, and it was shipped back with a tarnished reputation to its owner in England. Among the doubters was Bernard Berenson, who, in August 1897, discouraged his client Isabella Stewart Gardner from pursuing its purchase, opining that there was “nothing” of Raphael in the painting except for the idea of the composition, that “all” of the painting’s execution was by Raphael’s students, and that in his estimation it was of little value.37 Other authorities similarly opined that the painting, in particular the two angels, was done mostly by Raphael’s students.38
Henry Walters undoubtedly knew about the painting’s controversial history; Nevertheless, in June 1901, he quietly purchased it from its Scottish owner.39 The price was rumored to have been between $100,000 and $200,000.40 As suggested by its steep price, a painting of the Madonna by Raphael was one of works of art most sought after by America’s new millionaires. As a result of this purchase, Walters became the first American to have a “Raphael Madonna” in a collection in the United States, and the purchase placed him in the vanguard of America’s foremost collectors of Italian Renaissance paintings. As later expressed to Bernard Berenson, Walters recognized that parts of the painting were done by Raphael’s students, but he purchased it because of its rarity. He wrote, “Like others, I doubt that Raphael painted the two angels, but there are few obtainable pictures by him that I would have in preference to the Madonna of the Candelabra.”41 Walters’s purchase of the Madonna of the Candelabra also demonstrated his recognition that paintings by Italian Renaissance masters were seldom completed without the help of their assistants and that to acquire great works of Italian art required a willingness to accept a calculated risk that attributions could be mistaken. These considerations were again in play when, less than one year later, Walters was faced with a more monumental decision involving his acquisition of the Massarenti collection.