Search results for ""author william r. johnston""

In the mid-nineteenth century, Baltimore businessman William Thompson Walters began to patronize the artists of Maryland. Today, the museum that bears his name-Baltimore's Walters Art Gallery-excels in fields as diverse as Egyptian bronzes, Byzantine silver, illuminated manuscripts, medieval carved ivories, early Renaissance paintings, Sevres porcelains, Islamic metalwork, and Chinese ceramics. Surprisingly, the story of how William Walters and his son Henry created one of the finest privately assembled museums in the United States has not been told. With this new book, William Johnston, the Walters's curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, restores William and Henry Walters to their rightful place among America's great art collectors. Drawing upon the knowledge of the early museum staff and gathering valuable information from the few other available sources, Johnston has painstakingly recreated the life and world of the Walterses. Though Henry Walters moved easily in Baltimore and New York social circles, Johnston explains, he kept much to himself and generally purchased art away from the public's eye. Despite the Walterses' reticence, they had a significant influence on the development of American tastes and museums-William in his role as the first chairman of the Committee on Works of Art for the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Henry as the second vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Their personal collection differs from those of other, more familiar collectors, such as J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, in that Henry Walters intended from the very first that the collection form a museum to serve the public. When the museum first opened its doors in 1934, Johnston relates, many visitors were surprised by the collection's size and by its comprehensive representation of the history of art from the third millennium b.c. to the early twentieth century. Richly illustrated with black-and-white photographs and sixteen pages of full color, this book will fascinate anyone interested in Baltimore history, the history of museums and art collecting in America, and the art and culture of nineteenth-century America.

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Collecting Italian Renaissance paintings during America's Gilded Age was fraught with risk because of the uncertain identities of the artists and the conflicting interests of the dealers. Stanley Mazaroff's fascinating account of the close relationship between Henry Walters, founder of the legendary Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and Bernard Berenson, the era's preeminent connoisseur of Italian paintings, richly illustrates this important chapter of America's cultural history. When Walters opened his Italianate museum in 1909, it was labeled as America's "Great Temple of Art." With more than 500 Italian paintings, including self-portraits purportedly by Raphael and Michelangelo, Walters's collection was compared favorably with the great collections in London, Paris, and Berlin. In the midst of this fanfare, Berenson contacted Walters and offered to analyze his collection, sell him additional paintings, and write a scholarly catalogue that would trumpet the collection on both sides of the Atlantic. What Berenson offered was what Walters desperately needed-a badge of scholarship that Berenson's invaluable imprimatur would undoubtedly bring. By 1912, Walters had become Berenson's most active client, their business alliance wrapped in a warm and personal friendship. But this relationship soon became strained and was finally severed by a confluence of broken promises, inattention, deceit, and ethical conflict. To Walters's chagrin, Berenson swept away the self-portraits allegedly by Raphael and Michelangelo and publicly scorned paintings that he was supposed to praise. Though painful to Walters, Berenson's guidance ultimately led to a panoramic collection that beautifully told the great history of Italian Renaissance painting. Based primarily on correspondence and other archival documents recently discovered at the Walters Art Museum and the Villa I Tatti in Florence, the intriguing story of Walters and Berenson offers unusual insight into the pleasures and perils of collecting Italian Renaissance paintings, the ethics in the marketplace, and the founding of American art museums.

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