Mount Vernon Cultural Walk: Walters Art Museum

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Cultural Walk is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.explorebaltimore.org/tours. Located at 600 North Charles Street The Walters Art Museum is among America’s most distinctive museums, forging connections between people and art from cultures around the world and spanning seven millennia. With a campus of five historic buildings and 36,000 art objects, the museum is free for all. Visitors encounter everything from 19th-century paintings of French country life to Ethiopian icons, richly illuminated Qur’ans and Gospel books, ancient Roman sarcophagi, and images of the Buddha. The collection, begun by liquor wholesaler and railroad magnate William T. Walters, was expanded by his son Henry, who opened the palazzo-like structure in Mount Vernon Place to visitors in 1909. He gifted the collection to Baltimore in 1934. Since then, the Walters has evolved into a civic institution that creates space for dialogue, reflection, and artistic creation. The museum is committed to examining its past and sharing the histories of its origins and the art that it stewards. This includes acknowledging the original occupants of the land on which the City of Baltimore and the museum were created; William and Henry Walters’ embrace of the Confederacy; and how their original collections reflect the Eurocentric worldview that drove collecting in the United States and Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries.