Wonders of Walters

Baltimoreans began to discover last week what fabulous wonders Henry Walters (Atlantic Coast Line R. R, Louisville & Nashville Ry.) left them in the block-long grey stone pile behind his house on Mount Vernon Place when in 1931 he died, the South's richest man. To the city of Baltimore he bequeathed the pile and all it held, an art collection his father William, friend of Millet and Corot, had begun and he had carried on. On the evidence of what was hanging on the walls experts agreed it was the biggest private collection in the U. S. But when they began delving into crates and tarpaulin-covered mounds in the basement, they realized that a lot of the best of everything in the world was there.

They found things that art connoisseurs had long given up for lost. They found an Etruscan vase that has only one mate extant. They found one of the rare horse's heads left by the early Greeks. They found the original of Rodin's The Thinker. They found stacks of William Walters' favorite paintings: by Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Alma-Tadema, Gerome, Constable, Rembrandt, Hals, Poussin, David, Greuze, Fragonard. There were also heterogeneous hauls from the Italians: Raphael, Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandajo, Perugino, Guido Reni, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. There were forests of sculpture, acres of ceramics, jewelry, enamels, and a cuneiform tablet ascribed to 2230 B. C. The usual conglomeration of 119th Century genre and story-telling paintings was discovered, some of them not of great value, but Mr. Walters had also collected Degas, Manet and Monet. He possessed no less than 23 Turner watercolors, as well as a collection of Millet crayon and charcoal cartoons.

The experts soon saw that the job of disentangling, identifying and cataloging the items in this treasure house would take a quarter-century. By last week they had scarcely disturbed the mounds in the basement, had cataloged only the paintings on the walls. Without ceremony they opened the doors to the public. Though they had half-emptied many of the rooms, piled the surplus in bales in other rooms, there was still room for only 600 visitors at a time. Said Charles Morgan Marshall, chairman of the temporary managing committee: "We have tried hard to show the gallery as Mr. Walters arranged it. He made no effort at having the objects set out chronologically. The contents of some cases have a spread of 25 centuries."

Headliner of the show was the original autographed manuscript of Francis Scott Key's "The Star Spangled Banner" in a room by itself with a Gilbert Stuart Washington. Owned by Henry Walters but not bequeathed to Baltimore, this historic relic was bought in for the Walters Art Gallery last month at a Manhattan auction for $24,000 (TIME, Jan. 14).

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