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This is a prototype Wiki site designed for the Walters Art Museum by Audrey Scanlan-Teller, Kress Fellow in Medieval Art at the Walters Art Museum. This site makes information about objects in the Walters Art Museum available on-line in a Wiki format in order to provide an on-line forum to discuss these objects and related works. We welcome the help of researchers to enhance the information on our collections.

To contribute information to the site, left click on “log in/create account” at the upper right of the page to request an account from the web-site administrator.

The Walters Art Museum

The Knight's Hall at the Walters Art Museum, 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland.

The Walters Art Museum, located in the historic Mount Vernon district of Baltimore, Maryland, is a small, privately-formed art museum belonging to the City of Baltimore and open to the public. The museum's collection was amassed substantially by two men, William Thompson Walters (1819-1894), who began seriously collecting art when he moved to Paris at the outbreak of the American Civil War, and William's son and heir, Henry Walters (1848–1931), who refined the collection and built an Italianate palazzo to house it. The Walters Gallery first opened to public in 1875, when William Walters invited the people of Baltimore to view the collection in his home every Wednesday in April and May. This open house became an annual event. Henry Walters, in memory of his father, continued collecting in view of creating a public museum and bequeathed the collection to the City of Baltimore in his will after his death in 1931.

The Walters Collection includes the art of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Asia and the Americas, Medieval, Islamic and Renaissance art and manuscripts, Old Master and 19th-century paintings, and a treasury of eighteenth through early twentieth-century decorative arts and jewelry from Europe and beyond.

In the fall of 2001, the Walters reopened its largest building after a dramatic three-year renovation. The Walters Art Museum is where the Archimedes Palimpsest may be seen.

Starting Sunday, October 1, 2006, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum began free admission year-round as a result of grants given by Baltimore City and Baltimore County.