Walters Art Gallery Opens After $6-Million Overhaul

Three years after the original 1904 Walters Art Gallery closed for a $6-million overhaul, Baltimore’s Renaissance palace museum has been restored to the glory that railroad magnate Henry Walters envisioned for one of the greatest private art collections in the world.

The renovation has created for Walters’ precious jewels, bronzes, paintings and sculpture what gallery director Robert P. Bergman calls a “seamless museum environment” that is easy on the eye and alluring even to those not trained in art history.

“In a lot of ways, we think the public is going to see the collection for the first time,” Bergman said recently, pointing proudly to carefully concealed display spotlights designed to lure viewers. “We direct people directly to the object through the lighting.”

The massive stone building with a marble-columned court fashioned after the 17th-Century Palazzo Balbi in Genoa, Italy, is one of six comprehensive museums in the United States. Walters bequeathed it to the city upon his death in 1931, along with the 22,000-piece collection.

The leaking roof, blackened marble, drab painted walls and poorly lighted rooms Bergman inherited when he left an art history post at Harvard University and arrived here are gone. In their place stands a pristine and colorful complex of rooms featuring gleaming stone; rich, silk moire; red, blue and gold cotton damask; polished woods, glass, lucite and plaster. The works themselves were carefully conserved to bring out colors and features hidden for centuries.

The renovated gallery holds some of the 30,000-object collection spanning 5,000 years of history. A 1974 addition that stayed open during the renovation holds many of the works, while thousands more lie in storage.

Walters, who made his fortune with the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, left the collection--along with a $3-million endowment--to his native city “for the benefit of the people.”

The works include such masterpieces as one of three surviving 14th-Century Italian perspective paintings called “View of an Ideal City,” an early life-size Italian crucifix from the school of Cimabue, the first Raphael Madonna to come to America and one of only 12 known paintings by Hugo Van Der Goes.

Now, however, their future is assured by a climate and light-controlled environment that is so high-tech that special louvers regulate the amount of natural light let in by skylights, and storage spaces for metal works vent outside to prevent oxidation from destroying other valuable pieces.

Bergman jokingly calls the project a “modest calling.”

“We wanted to create the finest facility possible for this collection of Renaissance, Baroque and 18th-Century paintings and sculpture and decorative arts,” he said.

“To do that was a special project. The building is a work of art. We had to respect at every turn the character of this landmark structure,” said the medievalist who moved from the rarefied atmosphere of art history theory to a comfortable position as ceaseless champion of his world-class museum.

Bergman is satisfied with the effort, financed with $1 million in city funds, $1 million in state funds and another $4 million in contributions. In fact, he considers the workmanship he got for the money a bargain, pointing out how the wood in new doorways matches original woods and marble-painted sculpture bases mimic the marble columns for a consistent look.

Going room to room, Bergman marvels at the miraculously preserved royal jewel cabinet in wax and wood made for Marie Antoinette; a collection of European porcelains considered second only to the British royal collection at Windsor Castle; and some of the nearly 1,000 pieces of jewelry spanning the styles from ancient Egypt to art nouveau.

The installation includes a 19th-Century alcove modeled on a French goldsmith’s shop for Walters’ delicate Faberge enamels, an iris corsage ornament created by Tiffany & Co. and an ivory orchid comb by Lalique.

The gallery went up between 1904 and 1909, and before Walters’ death, he would open the doors a few times a month, charge admission and donate the proceeds to charity just as his father, who began the collection, had done.

More recently, the gallery has been drawing 150,000 to 200,000 visitors a year, including 1,500 museum members who celebrated the official opening on May 15. The first visitors to the reopened gallery included former employees as well as local visitors seasoned by a lifetime of trips.

One after another, they stopped Bergman to thank him for restoring the collection to splendor.

“Just hearing these people convinces me we did the right thing,” he said.

‘The building is a work of art. We had to respect at every turn the character of this landmark structure.’