Henry Walters - Collection Highlights

Collection Highlights

Henry Walters envisaged a museum that would fulfill an educational role within the community, but initially only made modest additions to his father's collection. In 1897 the purchase of a 15th-century Koran, originally thought to be Persian, but now regarded as Indian, may have initiated the manuscript collection.

In 1900 Henry bought Raphael's Madonna of the Candelabra, which had passed through both the Borghese and Bonaparte family collections. The USPS featured this painting on their 2011 Christmas stamp.

In 1902 Henry undertook an acquisition on a scale unprecedented in the history of American collecting: he bought the contents of the Palazzo Accoramboni in Rome. The collection abounded in works of significance, many of them by masters other than those to whom they had been ascribed, and others by artists not in fashion at that time. In the latter category fell El Greco's painting, St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata. Among the collection's archeological treasures were seven magnificent sarcophagi from a burial chamber associated with the Calpurnii Pisones family. Henry agreed to buy the collection for the sum of five million FF or $1,000,000.

He enhanced the breadth of the 19th-century holdings with such early works as Ingres' Betrothal of Raphael, bought in 1903. Although he did not find French Impressionism to his liking, he agreed in 1903 to buy two examples from Mary Cassatt, including Monet's Springtime.

Henry Walters continued to augment his holdings, buying both in New York and abroad. He collected Egyptian, ancient Near Eastern, and Islamic art, as well as a number of key classical and western medieval objects, including a pair of limestone heads of Old Testament rulers that had come from the abbey church of Saint-Denis.

Beginning in 1903, Henry Walters served on the executive committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1913 he became second vice president, a position he retained for the rest of his life. His experiences on a number of museum committees may have resulted in a change of direction in his collecting after World War I, at which point Walters was less concerned with acquiring works representative of various fields and more committed to objects of major historical and artistic significance.