In June 1923, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the target of a potentially embarrassing inquiry about the bona fides of some of its art. Charges had been filed that there were many pieces of spurious Gothic art in the collection. Henry Walters, who had served as a trustee of the Metropolitan since 1905 and had been elevated to vice president, was asked to respond to the claims. Walters was painfully familiar with the widespread problem of mislabeled art. Ever since his purported masterpieces had been swept away by Berenson, the once stellar reputation of his gallery in Baltimore had faded from public memory. To deflect the criticism directed at the Metropolitan, Walters informed the New York Times that there was not a museum or significant collection in the United States into which bad pieces had not found their way. Then, referring to his own collection of art, Walters made an unusual admission. He stated, “I have an art collection . . . and I keep a special case into which I put pieces which I discover to be spurious. There are, perhaps, thirty false pieces in that case now, and they represent approximately $100,000.” The headline in the New York Times that introduced this story stated: “Walters, Metropolitan’s Vice President, Says Any Fakes That Are Found Must Go.” Immediately below this headline was a second, more abbreviated headline which, like a dagger, stabbed at Walters personally. Referring to Walters and the troubled history of his collection, the headline, in bold letters, stated: “ADMITS HIS ART MISTAKES.”1
Walters’s admission, however, represented only a small slice of the truth. The “special case” was in reality a cavernous room in the basement of Walters’s gallery which he had labeled as the “Long Museum” and in which he continued to retain over one hundred paintings of dubious authenticity. Most of these paintings had been condemned by Berenson during his inspection of the collection in 1914. Walters had disposed of some of these paintings in 1915 and 1922, but they represented only a fraction of the paintings that were problematic. Although Walters preached, in his interview with the New York Times, that spurious works of art should be discarded, when it came to such paintings in his own collection, Walters remained hesitant to pull the trigger. For the remainder of his life, Walters sequestered in his Long Museum scores of misattributed paintings which he had acquired from Massarenti, including the self-portraits allegedly by Raphael and Michelangelo and other pictures that had been erroneously attributed to Giotto, Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, Andrea del Sarto, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and Andrea Mantegna.2
The year after Walters’s admission, Edith Wharton published a novella about the tribulations of a father and son whose desire to establish an important collection of Italian Renaissance masters was foiled by the pervasive problem of misattributions. The story in many ways was reminiscent of William and Henry Walters. Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Henry Walters (1848–1931) were contemporaries who traveled in the same circle of high society and likely knew each other personally or indirectly through their mutual friendship with Berenson. They both visited the Villa I Tatti in the spring of 1912, and their paths might well have crossed there. Wharton remained a close friend and confidant of Berenson and enjoyed the luxury of her own suite with writing room at I Tatti, where she spent about one month each year. Wharton always had her ears perked high to absorb any tidbits of information about the manners, morals, and values of the members of New York’s upper class and the tribulations that accompanied their wealth. Whether through Berenson or other art lovers she met at I Tatti, Wharton would have been aware of and keenly interested in the fate of Henry Walters’s famous collection of Italian paintings.3
In Wharton’s short story False Dawn (which was the first story in the book Old New York), Halston Raycie, a wealthy member of New York’s establishment, was planning to open a private gallery which would proudly display many of the well-known masters of Italian Renaissance art, such as Raphael and Giotto. He entrusted his son Lewis, who was traveling to Italy on the grand tour, with a substantial sum of money to acquire original works of art by the great masters, and he instructed him to assiduously avoid any copies. “Copies,” he emphasized, “are for the less discriminating or for those less blessed with this world’s goods.” Much to his father’s consternation, Lewis returned without any authentic painting by Raphael but instead with a slew of copies and paintings by relatively unknown Italian artists. He told his son that he could not bear the idea of displaying paintings by artists whose names were unfamiliar to his friends. “God, my son,” Halston exclaimed, “do you realize you had a trust to carry out?” Following his father’s death, Lewis Raycie converted his house into an art gallery to show his Italian pictures. At first, the gallery was crowded with visitors, but gradually they disappeared. Without any professional staff to assist him, Lewis found himself alone in a deserted gallery hung with paintings by unknown artists and haunted by the notion that his collection constituted an affront to his father’s memory.
When Walters read Wharton’s story—we can safely assume that he did—he must have seen traces of his own persona in the fictional character of Lewis Raycie. The similarities likely registered on Walters’s conscience with a disquieting ring: the relationship between the father and son and the son’s obligation to honor the memory of his father; the disappointment in discovering that a prized painting by Raphael was merely by an unknown artist; the endless copies of old-master paintings that tarnished the collection’s reputation; the criticism by the press; and the loneliness of a deserted museum with no one left to care for it. From Walters’s viewpoint, the story as a whole must have felt like an uncomfortable pair of shoes which did not quite fit but had been tailor-made for the owner. Strangely, just as the plight of Raycie seems to have been patterned after Walters, after the publication of Wharton’s book, Walters’s gallery seems to have followed a similar path as Raycie’s fictional gallery, as the separate lines of fact and fiction began to merge.4
By 1929, the Walters Art Gallery had become an even lonelier place. Although Walters, consistent with the precedent established by his father, continued to allow the public to enter the gallery three days each week from February to May, the once enthusiastic crowds had dwindled to occasional visitors and the once proud reputation of the gallery as a “Temple of Art” had been reduced to a distant memory. The few who visited the gallery complained that it was so dark that little could be adequately seen. In January 1929, this prompted the gallery’s building superintendent to inform Walters that “I have had several requests for artificial light even on bright sun lit days, but I do not feel justified in turning them on under your instructions not to do so.” In an effort to convince Walters to grant such permission, the superintendent delicately observed, “It seems to me that the galleries are getting darker and darker every season.”5
Like the paintings that were increasingly hard to see, information about where they came from and what they cost was hidden by Walters from the public. When James Anderson provided such information to a visiting scholar, Walters gave him a tongue lashing. “You made a great mistake,” Walters wrote to Anderson, “in telling Professor Goldschmidt from whom I bought certain objects. Please impress upon your mind that I don’t want this ever done again, and I will also especially never want anybody told anything about prices of things I have bought.”6
On January 20, 1929, an article appeared in the Baltimore Sun about the loss of public interest in the Walters Art Gallery. “The Walters Galleries remain deserted,” it reported. The reason for the loss of interest, according to the reporter, was that the museum had discarded almost all of its Italian masterpieces, the attributions of many of its remaining paintings were questionable, and, most discouragingly, visitors would find “little immediate beauty.” The report stated:
It is true that only one master of the first rate, namely Raphael, in his Madonna of the Candelabra is worthily represented, and even then with reservations . . . The Italians in the Walters collection do not commend themselves to the beginner without effort on his part . . . The attributions are in a number of cases doubtful, and will remain so until Mr. B. Berenson, the eminent critic, who is making a study of the collection, has completed his work.7
At the end of that year, the Baltimore Sun printed an editorial bemoaning the absence of visitors to the Walters Art Gallery. It raised the following rhetorical but unanswerable question: “Why so many Baltimoreans overlook the Walters Gallery is not easy to say.”8
Around that time, Walters confided to a friend that he had one regret about his interest in art. The regret involved his inattention to the art collection he had assembled in Baltimore. Although Walters accomplished his original goals of acquiring a collection of paintings that broadly represented the history of Italian art, that elevated his own status as a collector of Italian art and that served as the cultural centerpiece of a palazzo in Baltimore memorializing his father, he was troubled that his collection of Italian paintings would appear, like the Massarenti collection thirty years earlier, unrefined. He confided to his friend that he was “greatly distressed” by his failure to discard “objects of inferior importance.”9
Walters’s disappointment about his own failure to refine his collection of Italian paintings continued to haunt him. In January 1931, while providing a personal tour of his collection to a reporter, Walters disclosed “with some dismay” his belief that he had failed to live up to the standards established by his father in caring for his collection of paintings. He stated:
When my father was alive we made a practice each year of taking everything off the wall and judging it calmly, to decide which of all the works we wanted to put back up for another year. Thus we eliminated those which we felt could be dispensed with. I keep promising myself to do the same thing now, but I never do, and I cannot bring myself to take any of the paintings down singly. One becomes attached to them.10
It was the last thing Walters is known to have said about his collection of paintings prior to his death later that year.