Maryland: The History of its Art

Before the first brushstroke landed on a canvas in colonial Maryland, power was expressed in land grants, legal ink, and heraldic seals. It was a world where status was both inherited and performed, not least through the carefully staged trappings of English gentility exported to the New World. In the mid-Atlantic colony chartered in 1632, art began not as a flourishing cultural sector but as a tool of legitimacy, deployed by a landowning elite to anchor themselves in unfamiliar soil.

The German Painter of Annapolis

One of the earliest known painters in Maryland was Justus Engelhardt Kühn, a German immigrant active in Annapolis around 1708–1712. His clientele came almost exclusively from the colony’s most powerful families: the Darnalls, Carrolls, and Bordleys. The portraits he left behind — among them, the 1712 Portrait of Henry Darnall III and the earlier Charles Carroll of Annapolis — are stiff, hieratic compositions that more closely resemble English provincial portraiture than any local vernacular.

Kühn’s figures stand in posed interior spaces, often surrounded by signifiers of education and lineage: an outstretched arm, a table with books, a sash or sword. They are children or young men shown not as individuals with inner lives, but as heir-bearers. In an age without photography and in a colony with few artists, these likenesses served a legal and emotional purpose. They recorded lineages, preserved reputations, and helped knit Maryland’s Catholic aristocracy into a web of familiar iconography.

Kühn died in 1717, and no known successors immediately filled his place. The scarcity of artists in early Maryland speaks to the colony’s priorities: land, not leisure, was the first preoccupation. And yet his portraits endure in the collections of the Maryland Historical Society and other institutions, acting as visual anchors for a time when painting was a whispered echo of distant English manners.

The Sacred Canvas: Gustavus Hesselius and The Last Supper (1721)

In 1721, something more ambitious appeared. Gustavus Hesselius, a Swedish-born painter trained in Philadelphia, was commissioned by St. Barnabas’ Episcopal Church in Upper Marlboro to paint The Last Supper. It would be, by many accounts, the first public religious painting created in colonial America — a rarity in the visual culture of the British colonies, where Protestant restraint often kept art out of churches.

What survives today is not the original painting, which was damaged and later removed, but the memory of its commission and its significance. Hesselius’s Last Supper was a deliberate gesture of spiritual and artistic confidence in a time when most colonial churches relied on architecture and Scripture alone to inspire devotion. The choice of subject — Christ breaking bread with his disciples — was canonical but also subtly political. Maryland, though founded as a haven for Catholics, had long since come under Anglican dominance. The commissioning of religious painting by the Episcopal establishment marked a shift: art was beginning to serve as an emblem of Protestant refinement as well as Catholic tradition.

Charles Willson Peale: Maryland’s Most Enduring Son

Born in Chester, Maryland in 1741, Charles Willson Peale represents the full flowering of colonial artistic ambition. Trained first as a saddler, Peale was encouraged by local patrons in Annapolis to pursue painting and studied under John Hesselius (son of Gustavus) before traveling to London to learn from Benjamin West. That journey — funded in part by Maryland sponsors — placed him within the transatlantic currents of Enlightenment art, and by the 1760s he had returned to the colonies as a portraitist of growing renown.

Peale’s early Maryland sitters included powerful names: William Paca, Samuel Chase, George Plater. These works, painted in the 1760s and 1770s, survive in Maryland collections and retain their ability to project gravitas. Unlike Kühn’s work, Peale’s portraits throb with Enlightenment energy: his sitters engage the viewer directly, often surrounded by neoclassical references, scientific objects, or architectural columns suggesting civic virtue.

Peale would later move to Philadelphia and become a cultural statesman, but his artistic roots remained in Maryland. His early commissions helped shape the colonial taste for portraiture as a tool of individual and national identity. And in his prolific children, many of whom also became painters, Peale left behind an artistic dynasty that linked Maryland’s colonial past with the young republic’s future.

A Museum Before a Nation: The Peale Museum, 1814

In the summer of 1814, Rembrandt Peale, Charles Willson’s son, opened the Peale Museum in Baltimore — the first building in the Western Hemisphere constructed expressly as a museum. Though formally outside the colonial period, its founding completed the arc begun by the earlier generation. What had started with imported painters and domestic commissions had now arrived at institutional permanence.

The Peale Museum featured not only paintings but natural history specimens, mechanical curiosities, and historical artifacts — a cabinet of wonders in brick and mortar. That it arose in Baltimore, rather than Philadelphia or Boston, signaled Maryland’s growing artistic maturity. The museum suggested a new civic purpose for art: not merely to serve families or churches, but to educate a broader public.

Mount Clare and the Aesthetic of Authority

If the Peale Museum embodied the city’s cultural ambition, Mount Clare Mansion (built in 1763) stood as a symbol of the earlier fusion of art, architecture, and landownership. Constructed by Charles Carroll, Barrister — cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton — the house represented the height of Georgian domestic design in Maryland. Its interiors, though restrained by colonial standards, would have included imported artworks, silver, and furnishings meant to impress visitors and affirm dynastic stature.

Mount Clare exemplifies the colonial idea that art was not only something hung on walls but embedded in the very structure of life. The symmetry of the facade, the proportion of rooms, and the placement of objects inside were all visual codes. Even today, walking through Mount Clare offers more than historic atmosphere; it presents a worldview in which art was enlisted in the service of hierarchy, order, and self-presentation.

A World on the Verge

The colonial art of Maryland — fragmentary, elite, and often devotional — was never intended to be democratic. It was a tool of continuity in a fragile province, linking a new world with old customs and inherited faith. But within it lie the seeds of something broader: a tradition of portraiture that would evolve into individualism, a taste for public art that would develop into civic museums, and a regional aesthetic that would slowly distinguish Maryland from both its southern and northern neighbors.

As the 18th century advanced and war approached, these early works would acquire new meanings. Portraits once meant to secure family legacy would be read for political allegiance. Churches that housed sacred images would become battlegrounds of theology and rebellion. But at the foundation was a simple truth: in Maryland, art arrived early — not as a flowering, but as a scaffold.

Chapter 2: Brushes with Independence — Art in the Revolutionary Period

A Portraitist at the Edge of War

In the tense years before the American Revolution, Maryland’s cultural ambitions were already coming into focus—but war would change everything. As independence became more than rhetoric, the arts in Maryland, particularly portraiture, became a powerful tool for shaping allegiances, enshrining leaders, and constructing a visual vocabulary of the new republic. Nowhere was this more visible than in the work of Charles Willson Peale, whose artistic career evolved in lockstep with the American cause.

In 1774, Peale painted a formal portrait of William Stone, a Maryland statesman and signer of the Declaration of Independence. This portrait, executed just as political turmoil deepened into conflict, is carefully balanced between colonial deference and emerging national pride. The subject’s attire is conventional, the background dignified, but there’s a tension in the sitter’s posture, a readiness that feels less decorative than declarative. Peale was capturing not just likenesses but postures of commitment.

From Easel to Battlefield

When war broke out in 1775, Peale left Maryland and joined the Continental Army as a captain of the Philadelphia militia. It is easy to underestimate how rare it was for an artist to enlist, and rarer still to document the war from within its ranks. Peale sketched battlefields and soldiers in real time, offering one of the only firsthand artistic records from the Revolution’s early years.

He also carried a miniature painting kit with him. Using watercolor on ivory, he produced portrait miniatures of fellow officers, among them George Baylor and William Truman Stoddert. These were not formal commissions but fieldwork—paintings made in camps, under tents, or during moments of reprieve. They fused intimacy and honor, serving as tokens of recognition and remembrance in a war that regularly destroyed both.

These tiny portraits were revolutionary in more ways than one. They captured not just military figures, but the evolving idea of an American type—idealistic, self-possessed, plain in dress but firm in gaze. Peale was quietly shaping the visual identity of the American officer, one square inch at a time.

Commemorating Victory: Yorktown and the State’s Commission

By 1784, the war was over, and Maryland had joined the victorious union. That year, the Maryland House of Delegates commissioned Peale to paint a monumental canvas commemorating the final victory. The result, Washington, Lafayette, and Tilghman at Yorktown, was as ambitious as anything created in the colonies up to that point.

The painting, which still hangs in the Maryland State House in Annapolis, depicts the three generals on horseback, just after the siege of Yorktown. It is not an action scene but a moment of composure and control. Peale had mastered the grand manner of European history painting, but used it to tell a specifically American story. Notably, Tench Tilghman, a Maryland officer who had served as Washington’s aide-de-camp, takes a prominent place beside his more famous counterparts, giving the painting a local resonance.

This commission was no vanity project. It was part of a broader effort by the Maryland legislature to embed Revolutionary memory into the civic landscape. In funding and displaying the work, the state acknowledged that painting was no longer merely private decoration—it had become a public instrument of collective identity.

The Washington Ideal: Between Myth and Man

Throughout the 1780s, Peale painted multiple portraits of George Washington, including his now-iconic Washington at Princeton (1779). Though Washington was a Virginian, his relationship with Maryland was longstanding, and the state frequently sought to present him as a kind of honorary son. Peale’s portraits were key to this effort.

In Washington at Princeton, painted for the city of Princeton but widely copied and admired in Maryland, Peale places the general in the aftermath of battle, calm amid ruin. The setting is carefully constructed: broken cannon, captured flags, and fallen British soldiers underscore the cost of the conflict. Yet Washington stands untouched, more symbol than man.

These portraits weren’t just celebrations—they were blueprints. Maryland’s young political class, many of whom sat for Peale themselves, would have seen in these images a model of virtue, command, and republican restraint. Peale was painting a mythology in real time, one brushstroke ahead of history.

Art as Allegiance

Not all portraiture during this period aligned with the revolutionary cause. Maryland, like many mid-Atlantic colonies, had a significant Loyalist population. Some families avoided commissions altogether, while others preferred to be painted in quiet domestic settings, far from any political symbolism. The very decision to commission a portrait during the war years was often a political act.

This quiet tension appears in some of Peale’s less formal works—portraits that avoid overt revolutionary reference, choosing instead to focus on family, inheritance, or pastoral calm. In a time when the political future of the colonies was anything but secure, these visual choices carried implicit weight.

Indeed, for Maryland’s gentry, art during the Revolutionary period became a coded language.

• A military uniform signaled allegiance to the cause.
• A classical column might indicate a belief in Enlightenment governance.
• An anchor, globe, or book might suggest loyalty to British order.

It was a time when even stillness could be read as a stand.

Peale’s Departure, Maryland’s Transformation

Though Charles Willson Peale would eventually settle in Philadelphia and found the Peale Museum there, his departure marked not the end but a transition in Maryland’s artistic culture. The Revolution had made painters into chroniclers, and art into a civic responsibility. In the years that followed, the state would continue to commission portraits, erect monuments, and collect art that reinforced its place in the nation’s story.

The Maryland of 1784 was not the Maryland of 1774. Its artists had marched into war; its legislature had become a patron of art; its citizens had begun to see themselves not just as subjects or planters, but as Americans. The brush, once a tool for aristocratic likeness, had become an instrument of independence.

Chapter 3: Federal Confidence — Maryland Artists and the Early Republic

A Museum for a Nation That Had None

In August of 1814, as British forces burned Washington just thirty miles away, Rembrandt Peale opened the doors to a new kind of building in Baltimore: the Peale Museum. It was the first purpose-built museum in the Western Hemisphere—a physical declaration that art, science, and history belonged not only to monarchies and universities, but to the citizens of a republic. In its galleries, the aspirations of a young nation found form in oil and bone: portraits of founding fathers hung beside the skeletal remains of a mastodon.

The location was no accident. Baltimore, recently incorporated as a city and swelling with commercial energy, had become one of the most vital ports in the new nation. And yet, until Peale’s arrival, it lacked a formal institution to collect, exhibit, and interpret art. The museum, with its neoclassical façade and Enlightenment ethos, gave the city—and Maryland—a cultural anchor amid the political volatility of the War of 1812.

From Private Faces to Public Icons

The centerpiece of the new institution was portraiture. On the walls hung paintings by Rembrandt Peale, his father Charles Willson Peale, and his brothers Titian Ramsay Peale and Raphaelle Peale—names chosen with unapologetic ambition. These were not family keepsakes. They were public representations of national ideals. Among the most prominent were likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Maryland’s own Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

These portraits were carefully staged exercises in civic pedagogy. Washington appears composed, noble, physically commanding—an image the Peales carefully cultivated across multiple copies. Jefferson is cooler, more austere, with the look of a philosopher statesman. In this setting, portraiture was not an art of vanity but of instruction: a visual syllabus for citizenship.

The Peales were deliberate in their choices. They resisted European styles of ostentation, opting instead for clean backgrounds, restrained color palettes, and classical poses. The message was subtle but firm: America would have its heroes, but not its kings.

Bone and Brush: The Mastodon’s Role

In an adjoining gallery, a full skeleton of a mastodon stood beneath a vaulted ceiling. Exhumed in 1801 by Charles Willson Peale in New York and brought to Baltimore by Rembrandt, the fossil was more than a curiosity—it was a symbol of American wonder, strength, and scientific seriousness. Visitors walked past oil portraits of Revolutionary generals and cabinet members, only to stand face to face with the ancient bones of a creature no European had ever seen alive.

This juxtaposition—man and beast, modernity and prehistory—was revolutionary in its own right. It reflected the Enlightenment conviction that knowledge could be unified, and that art and science were not separate pursuits but parallel ways of understanding the world. In early republican Maryland, to support a museum was to support the very idea of public reason.

Three types of visitors came to the Peale Museum:

• Merchants and tradesmen, eager to associate themselves with refined taste
• Families, many of whom brought children to see the fossil and return for lectures
• Statesmen, who used the museum’s galleries as informal spaces for dialogue and diplomacy

It was a place of convergence—not merely of disciplines, but of classes and ideas.

Republican Space, Republican Taste

The layout and architecture of the Peale Museum also reflected the aesthetic priorities of the early republic. The neoclassical building, designed by architect Robert Cary Long Sr., featured symmetry, clarity, and light—visual metaphors for reason and order. Visitors were meant to move upward, both literally and intellectually, as they progressed through galleries that elevated the eye and mind alike.

Baltimore, in this period, developed a distinctive public aesthetic: solid but not grandiose, learned but not arcane. In taverns, courtrooms, and drawing rooms, portraits proliferated—echoes of what hung in the Peale. The city’s art scene was still small, but the museum gave it a center of gravity. By the 1820s, amateur artists, scientific lecturers, and collectors had begun to orbit around it.

The First Canon

Perhaps the Peale Museum’s most lasting contribution was the role it played in creating the first American canon of painters. The Peale family’s own self-regard aside, their work helped establish standards of technique, subject, and moral tone that defined early American art. Rembrandt Peale’s 1823 portrait Porthole Washington, in which the President gazes out through a circular window frame, became one of the most reproduced American images of the century.

In Maryland, this canon included not only portraits but early genre scenes and still lifes, especially those produced by Raphaelle Peale, the family’s most gifted technician. While his delicate renderings of fruit and tabletop arrangements lacked overt political content, they demonstrated that American painters could master subjects traditionally dominated by European studios. In their own quiet way, these works contributed to the federal confidence of the era.

The Watershed of 1830

By 1830, the museum began transitioning into a broader institution, later known as the Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts. Although this evolution occurred unevenly, it laid groundwork for the collecting culture that would later flourish in the city. The Peale collection itself, dispersed and partly absorbed by other institutions, seeded several generations of civic collecting.

This period also marked the beginning of a new era in Baltimore’s private collections. Though beyond the immediate scope of this chapter, William T. Walters, a future titan of art collecting, was born in 1820 and would grow up in a city shaped by the values the Peale family helped instill. His eventual creation of what would become the Walters Art Museum would owe much to the foundation laid by the Peales: a belief that art could educate, elevate, and consolidate civic identity.

Confidence, Not Complacency

The art of Maryland in the Early Republic was not flamboyant, and it did not try to rival the scale of Europe. But it was confident: confident in its values, its heroes, and its ability to shape a public worthy of the republic it served. In this period, Maryland stopped being a client of English taste and became a producer of its own cultural institutions. The paint was still drying, but the frame had been built.

Chapter 4: The Chesapeake Landscape — Romanticism and Regional Identity

A Nation Invents Its Scenery

In the decades after the War of 1812, as the United States entered a phase of energetic expansion, American artists turned their attention away from faces and toward landscapes. Portraiture had served the needs of the republic’s founding generation—but the next would claim the land itself as subject. From the Hudson River to the Mississippi, painters sought to depict not only the terrain but the ideals embedded within it: grandeur, abundance, and divine order. Maryland, situated between the commercial centers of the Northeast and the agrarian South, developed its own variation of this Romantic landscape tradition—one shaped by the marshes, farms, and coastlines of the Chesapeake Bay.

Though not the birthplace of the Hudson River School, Maryland absorbed its influence early. The state’s proximity to both Philadelphia and New York placed it in the artistic slipstream of the movement’s founders. Thomas Cole, the English-born painter widely regarded as the school’s progenitor, traveled through the mid-Atlantic in the 1820s and 1830s, sketching the Susquehanna River and other regional landmarks. His works, with their blend of wild scenery and moral allegory, set the template for what landscape painting could achieve: not just a record of terrain, but a meditation on civilization’s fragile presence within it.

The Chesapeake as Subject and Symbol

Unlike the jagged mountains of the Hudson Valley or the dramatic gorges of the American West, Maryland’s landscape offered a subtler palette. Here were oyster beds, slow rivers, and farms stitched into rolling hills—scenery less inclined to awe than to envelop. For Romantic painters, this required a different vocabulary: one of atmosphere, mood, and pastoral equilibrium.

Artists trained in the Hudson River idiom began to adapt their style to these settings. Trees no longer stood like monuments but wove themselves into low riverbanks. Sunlight filtered through humidity rather than alpine air. Boats drifted through inlets rather than charging down rapids. This shift didn’t dilute the Romantic vision—it refined it.

One of the earliest significant works to capture this sensibility in a Maryland collection was Asher Brown Durand’s The Catskills (1859), now in the Walters Art Museum. Though painted from sketches made in New York, the canvas was commissioned in 1858 by William Thompson Walters, a Baltimore industrialist and one of the state’s first serious art patrons. The painting’s serene woodland path, radiant light, and careful draftsmanship became a model for how nature could be idealized without becoming fantastical.

Durand, a key figure in the second generation of the Hudson River School, believed in what he called “truth to nature”—a principle that suited Maryland’s quieter topography. His influence would reverberate through local artists for decades.

The Jones Brothers and Baltimore’s Pastoral School

Among those who absorbed and localized the Hudson River School’s ideals were Hugh Bolton Jones and his brother Francis Coates Jones, both Baltimore natives. Born in 1848, Hugh Bolton Jones became one of the most admired American landscape painters of the late 19th century. His early training came under the tutelage of David Acheson Woodward, a Baltimore painter who emphasized close observation of nature.

Jones’s landscapes—soft, pastoral, exquisitely detailed—were in many ways the visual equivalent of chamber music. They depicted farm fields outside Baltimore, quiet forest lanes, and stretches of the Monocacy River. There was no thunder in these works, no melodrama. Instead, they offered a cultivated intimacy with the land, portraying Maryland not as wilderness to be tamed but as country already known and loved.

By the 1870s and 1880s, Jones’s work began to appear in prominent exhibitions in New York and Boston. Yet he always returned to Maryland as a subject, even as he traveled and painted abroad. His canvases form a kind of visual memory of the state’s rural life in the decades after the Civil War—its quiet rhythms and settled landscapes made lyrical.

Painting Industry and Idleness

Not all Maryland landscapes of the Romantic era were rural idylls. Some works depicted the expansion of industry along the Patapsco River, where mills, warehouses, and waterwheels dotted the terrain. Though Romantic in tone, these images hinted at the tension between man and nature—a central theme of the Hudson River School.

The Maryland State Art Collection includes multiple examples of these contrasting views. Thomas Doughty’s Susquehanna River, for example, portrays a riverbank softened by light, yet marked by clearings and trails. Doughty, though not a Maryland native, passed through the state and captured elements of its middle landscape—neither fully wild nor wholly tamed.

Three themes recurred in Maryland landscape painting of the mid-19th century:

• Transition — scenes of farmland encroaching on forest, or roads cutting through hills
• Reflection — mirrored water, quiet skies, and symmetrical composition suggestive of repose
• Scale — human figures made small, even incidental, against the landscape’s broader frame

Each element served to reinforce the central Romantic idea: that nature was not merely a setting but a stage on which time, history, and memory played out.

The Mood of Water

No feature shaped Maryland’s artistic identity more than the Chesapeake Bay itself. Its vast, brackish waters resisted grand narrative and demanded instead a painterly attentiveness to surface, color, and light. Skiffs and canoes became compositional anchors; shorelines receded into mist. Artists working near St. Michaels, Solomons Island, or Kent County captured what might be called the atmospheric sublime—a vision of nature not in turmoil, but in equilibrium.

This aesthetic of calm would prove surprisingly durable. Long after the Romantic era passed, Maryland artists returned to the Chesapeake as muse. Even today, the best landscape paintings of the region often echo the restraint, melancholy, and gentle reverence that Romanticism instilled.

Toward a Regional School

By the 1880s, Maryland’s landscape tradition had matured into a regional style. Artists no longer looked north for instruction, but drew from a growing local canon that included the Jones brothers and others trained at the Maryland Institute. Exhibitions in Baltimore began to feature Maryland scenes alongside European works, and collectors like William T. Walters recognized the state’s landscape as worthy of inclusion in private and public collections alike.

What emerged was not a school in the formal sense—no manifesto or academic curriculum bound these artists together—but a shared sensibility: that Maryland’s beauty was subtle, layered, and worth preserving in paint. This was Romanticism not in its heroic or sublime form, but in its reflective mode—anchored in daily observation and local pride.

The Land Remembered

By the close of the 19th century, much of the Maryland countryside that had inspired Romantic painters was under pressure from development, railroads, and urban expansion. But the paintings remained. They became records of a landscape that was changing—slower than in the North, but no less inexorably. In this sense, the art of Maryland’s Romantic period holds a dual role: it reflects a moment of national confidence, and it mourns the loss that would follow.

Unlike the frontier paintings of the West or the grand allegories of empire, Maryland’s landscapes were rarely dramatic. But they were deeply felt, and finely wrought. They show a state not on the edge of civilization, but at its quiet center—where water met land, and art met memory.

Chapter 5: Grand Houses, Private Tastes — Art Collecting in the Gilded Age

From Counting Houses to Picture Galleries

In the second half of the 19th century, Maryland entered the Gilded Age not with a roar, but with a quiet accumulation of taste. While New York flaunted its robber barons and Boston groomed its Brahmins, Baltimore developed its cultural identity through private refinement rather than public display. It was an era of elite confidence, when the city’s most powerful families turned their attention from shipping manifests and railroad contracts to oil paintings, tapestries, and carved marble. Maryland’s most influential contribution to the American museum landscape began not in a public institution, but in the drawing rooms and parlors of private homes.

Chief among these was the townhouse of William Thompson Walters, a merchant, railway magnate, and early collector whose holdings would eventually seed the Walters Art Museum. His ascent as a collector mirrored Baltimore’s rise as a city of serious private wealth—not as concentrated or ostentatious as New York’s, but deeply cultivated. Walters’ approach was both personal and encyclopedic. His purchases ranged from Renaissance altarpieces to modern French academic painting, and from Greco-Roman sculpture to Chinese ceramics. But in the 1870s and 1880s, he kept them largely to himself.

A Springtime Ritual of Access

Beginning in 1874, Walters began opening his personal gallery to the Baltimore public for several weeks each spring. The event became a minor ritual in the city’s social calendar. Visitors entered not a public museum, but a series of opulent private rooms transformed into salons of art. The effect was theatrical, intimate, and controlled. Paintings were hung densely, European style; heavy velvet drapes, polished floors, and gaslight added an atmosphere of Old World elegance. It was a spectacle of connoisseurship, not philanthropy.

The contents, however, were anything but provincial. Among them were masterworks of French academic art—then considered the height of sophistication—purchased through the expertise of George A. Lucas, a Baltimore-born art agent working in Paris. Lucas, an associate of artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jules Breton, had a finely tuned sense of what would appeal to Walters’ eye and American tastes. Through him, Walters acquired canvases that bridged the classical and the contemporary, the didactic and the decorative.

Three hallmarks distinguished the Walters collection during this period:

• Historical breadth — Works ranged from Egyptian antiquities to Renaissance painting to modern sculpture.
• European orientation — Unlike some American collectors of the era, Walters showed little interest in American landscape painting or domestic scenes.
• Controlled access — The gallery was open, but only occasionally, and only under conditions determined by its owner.

This was not yet a public museum. It was a declaration of taste.

Henry Walters and the Expansion of Empire

If William Walters built the foundation, it was his son, Henry Walters, who transformed the collection into a museum in all but name. Born in 1848, Henry inherited his father’s eye, fortune, and ambition. But his vision was grander. Where William had favored select acquisitions through trusted agents, Henry traveled widely and bought on a monumental scale.

The defining moment came in 1902, when Henry acquired the entire Massarenti Collection in Rome—some 1,700 works of art, including Renaissance paintings, medieval ivories, and decorative arts from across Europe. The purchase stunned the museum world and dramatically expanded the breadth and depth of the Walters holdings. Among the most celebrated works acquired during this period was Raphael’s Madonna of the Candelabra, purchased in 1900—one of the first major Italian Renaissance paintings to enter an American collection.

Henry’s acquisitions were informed not only by European connoisseurship, but by a distinctly American desire to democratize access—eventually. In 1909, he opened a purpose-built museum space adjacent to the family’s Mount Vernon townhouse. It was not yet a public institution, but the architecture suggested a shift: the new building, with its Beaux-Arts grandeur and marble interiors, felt more like a civic monument than a private residence.

The Private Becomes Public

In 1931, shortly before his death, Henry Walters signed over the entire collection—artworks, buildings, endowment—to the city of Baltimore. It was one of the most generous cultural gifts in American history at the time. The new Walters Art Gallery opened to the public in 1934, amid the economic despair of the Great Depression. In its vast rooms, visitors could see works ranging from ancient Egyptian funerary masks to medieval reliquaries, Islamic calligraphy, Dutch still lifes, and Greek vases.

What made the gift extraordinary was not just its scale, but its quality. The Walters collection had been assembled with care, breadth, and a remarkable consistency of taste. There was no haphazard accumulation, no chase after fashion. It was a collector’s museum in the best sense—an institution that reflected two lifetimes of quiet, deliberate acquisition.

Though it would later be overshadowed in national prestige by museums like the Met or the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walters remained one of the finest encyclopedic collections in the country—especially notable given its origin in a single city and a single family.

Grand Houses, Lasting Legacies

Baltimore’s Gilded Age collecting culture was not limited to the Walters. Other families—Ridgelys, Garretts, Carrolls—maintained estates like Hampton and Evergreen that contained smaller but significant collections of European and American art, rare books, musical instruments, and decorative objects. These homes, now preserved as historic sites, offer glimpses into a cultivated world where art was inseparable from architecture and domestic ritual.

Yet the Walters story remains central. It marked a turning point in Maryland’s art history: the moment when private taste began to shape public experience. The old model of collecting as personal legacy was giving way to a civic ideal—still elite in origin, but increasingly inclusive in aspiration.

Henry Walters, who rarely gave interviews and avoided public speeches, summed up his philosophy quietly but clearly in a codicil to his will: that the people of Baltimore should have free access to the great works of human achievement, “without charge and without distinction.”

Gilded, But Not Gaudy

Maryland’s entry into the world of serious art collecting was neither brash nor imitative. It followed its own tempo, shaped by the commercial gravity of Baltimore and the discretion of its merchant class. The homes were grand, but the tastes behind them were serious, sober, and often scholarly. In this way, the Gilded Age in Maryland lived up to its name—ornamented, yes, but not hollow. Beneath the gilt lay structure.

Chapter 6: Piety and Pedagogy — Ecclesiastical Art and Catholic Institutions

Sacred Geometry in the New Republic

In the early 19th century, as Protestant churches multiplied across Maryland’s towns and villages, the state’s Catholic institutions quietly built a parallel world—one shaped not only by doctrine, but by a distinctive visual and architectural tradition. Art in these settings was not ornamental but integral: statues, altars, and stained glass served as instruments of devotion and tools of instruction. Nowhere was this synthesis of piety and pedagogy more developed than in the churches, seminaries, and sanctuaries of Baltimore, the seat of American Catholicism.

At the heart of this sacred infrastructure stood St. Mary’s Seminary, founded in 1791 as the first Catholic seminary in the United States. The seminary’s chapel, built between 1806 and 1808, was designed by J. Maximilien Godefroy, a French émigré and one of the most gifted architects working in early Baltimore. His design—a spare yet striking Neo-Gothic structure—was a deliberate departure from the Palladian ideals dominating Protestant ecclesiastical architecture. Godefroy’s chapel featured pointed arches, a vaulted ceiling, and lancet windows, subtly invoking the heritage of French Gothic churches without descending into theatricality.

More than a place of worship, the chapel was a teaching tool. Seminarians encountered sacred space as a living classroom, where architecture expressed hierarchy, mystery, and harmony. Godefroy’s fusion of French ecclesiastical forms with American materials became a visual grammar for Catholic sacred space across Maryland.

Light Through Glass: The Didactic Window

By the mid-19th century, as Catholic congregations expanded and Baltimore grew into a city of parishes, stained glass became the preferred medium for transmitting sacred history. At St. Ignatius Church, completed in 1856 with later stained glass additions in the 1870s, windows began to illustrate biblical scenes, saints, and allegories in radiant color. These windows were more than decoration—they functioned as theological narratives for a largely immigrant and often illiterate congregation.

One notable cycle of windows depicted the lives of the evangelists: St. John, St. Luke, St. Mark, and St. Matthew, each rendered with their traditional symbols and often accompanied by scenes from their Gospel accounts. The aesthetic followed the Munich School style—deep blues and reds, painterly detail, and rich Gothic tracery. Their glow was not merely physical; it cast memory, story, and doctrine into the visual rhythm of daily liturgy.

At Emmanuel Parish, whose historic stained glass program began in 1883, the windows took on a more meditative tone. Here, solitary saints stand against architectural backdrops or stylized foliage. These figures seem to pause, inviting contemplation rather than narrative reading. Their stillness made them appropriate for the increasingly introspective tone of late 19th-century Catholic devotional life in America.

Three features distinguished these stained glass programs:

• Imported craft — Most windows were made by European studios, especially in Germany and France.
• Catechetical intent — Subjects were chosen not for aesthetic variety but to reinforce Catholic teaching.
• Communal memory — Many windows were dedicated to deceased parishioners, binding memory and doctrine.

In this way, stained glass in Maryland’s Catholic churches became a hybrid form: part scripture, part shrine.

Carved Doctrine: Statues and Sculptural Programs

While glass illuminated, sculpture gave form. In churches like St. Leo’s in Baltimore’s Little Italy, built in the late 19th century, sculpture became central to the interior experience. Crucifixes, pietàs, angels, and saints appeared in marble, plaster, or painted wood, often imported from Italy or modeled after European originals. The effect was both visual and spatial: art wrapped around the worshiper, compressing centuries of theological meaning into a walkable space.

Some churches housed entire narrative tableaux. At St. Leo’s, a series of relief sculptures depicted the Stations of the Cross, winding along the walls with calibrated solemnity. These were not merely artistic features—they were essential components of Lent and Holy Week, used ritually and collectively. Sculpture, like stained glass, functioned liturgically.

In other settings, such as St. Ignatius, ceiling paintings and painted altarpieces played a similar role. The work of Wilhelm Lamprecht, a German-born artist who decorated the church’s interior in the late 19th century, included elaborate ceiling frescos with angels and Marian imagery, further Europeanizing the visual identity of Catholic Baltimore.

Cathedrals of Ambition

While the 19th century saw a proliferation of parish churches, the 20th century brought new scale. The most notable example is the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, consecrated in 1959 and located in north Baltimore. Designed in a neo-Gothic idiom with Romanesque touches, the cathedral was funded by the estate of an oil magnate and intended to replace the Basilica of the Assumption as the archdiocese’s primary church.

The cathedral’s sculptural program—much of it executed by Joseph Coletti—includes depictions of saints, American religious figures, and abstracted Christian symbols integrated into doorways, façades, and interior niches. Here, Catholic art in Maryland reached a new synthesis: traditional in form, modern in interpretation, and thoroughly institutional in scale. This was no longer immigrant piety—it was establishment religion, confident and architecturally fluent.

In its fusion of medieval forms with midcentury American resources, the cathedral stands as a monument to the long arc of Catholic visual culture in Maryland—from small chapels built by French refugees to monumental cathedrals shaped by oil wealth and liturgical modernism.

Piety and Pedagogy in Balance

What distinguished Maryland’s Catholic art from that of other states was its dual orientation: inward toward education, outward toward beauty. In seminary chapels, parish churches, and cathedrals, art was used to form both the mind and the senses. Statues taught theology, glass narrated history, and architecture imposed order upon devotion.

Yet this did not produce uniformity. Each parish developed its own tone—some Baroque, others austere. A church like St. John the Evangelist in Frederick, with its postwar Jacob Renner stained glass, shows how even smaller towns embraced sacred art as a dynamic and living form. Though the windows were made in the 1940s, they carry the visual DNA of the 19th-century European glassmakers who trained Renner—a reminder that ecclesiastical art does not stand still but renews itself generation by generation.

A Living Tradition

To walk through Maryland’s Catholic churches is to trace an evolving relationship between art and belief. From Godefroy’s geometries to Coletti’s limestone saints, the buildings and their contents form a visual archive of faith as it took root and flowered in a pluralist republic.

This tradition is neither sentimental nor ornamental. It is didactic, immersive, and exacting—art made not to provoke, but to sustain. And in a culture increasingly untethered from historical continuity, these works continue to offer form, story, and permanence.

Chapter 7: Regional Realism — Maryland in the American Scene Movement

Art in the Time of Breadlines

As the Great Depression deepened across the United States, Maryland’s artists—like those in every state—faced the collapse of the private art market and the disappearance of commissions. Painters, printmakers, and sculptors who had once served wealthy patrons or academic institutions now stood idle. But rather than disappear, many of them were drawn into a new kind of national project—one that treated art not as a luxury, but as a form of labor. With the creation of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) in 1935, the federal government did something unprecedented: it put artists on the payroll.

In Maryland, this program gave birth to an entire body of regional realist work—murals, prints, and sculptures that reflected the physical and social fabric of the state. These were not studio-bound pieces. They were designed to be installed in post offices, hospitals, schools, and government buildings, where ordinary citizens encountered them daily. The art told stories not of mythology or abstraction, but of labor, agriculture, faith, and resilience. It was art of the street, not the salon.

Public Walls, Private Visions

Among the most visible products of this era were WPA murals—large-scale narrative paintings applied directly to the walls of civic buildings. Though often constrained by tight budgets and political guidelines, these murals gave artists a chance to define a visual identity for their communities.

One of the most significant Maryland examples was the mural Maryland (1925) painted by Lee Woodward Zeigler for the Maryland Institute College of Art. Though technically pre-dating the WPA, Zeigler’s work anticipated many of the themes that would define Depression-era public art: allegories of industry, agriculture, and the arts, all presented with clarity and dignity. His style—figural, classical, and slightly archaic—fit perfectly into the American Scene movement’s broader aesthetic, which favored legibility over experiment.

WPA guidelines emphasized exactly this kind of clarity. Art was to be “comprehensible to the average man,” not theoretical or obscure. That goal suited Maryland’s pragmatic visual traditions. As a state of farms, ports, and industrial centers, it had a long familiarity with work as a subject of dignity.

In the 1930s, Florence Riefle Bahr, a Baltimore-born artist and graduate of MICA, received a WPA commission to paint murals for the Harriet Lane Home for Children at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Her work, now lost but documented in records, used cheerful imagery to soothe and engage young patients—a departure from more heroic depictions of labor found in post offices and train stations. Bahr, like many WPA artists, worked on a human scale. She believed that art should comfort, instruct, and include.

Printmakers of the Crisis

While murals drew the most attention, the WPA’s printmaking workshops offered employment to a wider group of artists. Maryland’s printmakers, many of whom worked in linocut, woodblock, and etching, turned their attention to local landscapes, domestic interiors, shipyards, and tobacco fields.

The Baltimore Museum of Art houses a significant number of these prints, including works by artists such as Boris Gorelick, Grace Turnbull, and others active in the regional arm of the WPA’s graphics division. Their prints shared certain traits:

• High contrast — the visual equivalent of hard times, with stark black lines and minimal tonal variation
• Local specificity — rowhouses, canneries, factory interiors, and scenes from the Eastern Shore
• Figurative focus — workers at benches, women doing laundry, children on stoops

These images were small in size but large in implication: they created a folk documentary of a Maryland in transition—working, waiting, and enduring.

The Artist as Organizer

A pivotal figure in this cultural moment was Morris Louis, later known as a key figure in American abstraction. But in the 1930s, Louis was a young Baltimorean trying to survive the Depression. Between 1934 and 1936, he worked under the Public Works of Art Project (the WPA’s precursor), and later served as president of the Baltimore Artists’ Union—a collective that advocated for fair treatment and visibility for local artists.

Louis’s involvement in the WPA was more political than pictorial. He didn’t produce major works under the program, but his leadership helped organize exhibitions, meetings, and protests that kept Maryland’s art scene afloat during its leanest years. This activist background would later inform his painting philosophy, but in the 1930s, it served a more urgent function: securing paychecks and wall space for artists whose talents had been pushed to the margins.

A Vernacular of the Ordinary

The American Scene movement, as it manifested in Maryland, rejected grandeur. Its visual language was simple, direct, and local. Farms were not Arcadian but productive. People were not idealized but individualized. Churches, stoops, and city blocks appeared without embellishment. This realism was not cynical—it was affectionate, even moral. It celebrated survival, community, and the visible structure of daily life.

Maryland’s contribution to this movement was modest in scale but rich in tone. Unlike New York or Chicago, Baltimore lacked a dominant art school or avant-garde center. But this very absence gave its artists the freedom to observe and reflect—to paint the world as it was, not as it might be.

Three key themes emerged in Maryland’s American Scene output:

• Maritime labor — depictions of longshoremen, oystermen, and dockworkers along the Chesapeake
• Urban domesticity — rowhouse interiors, laundry lines, and back alleys in Baltimore
• Religious and school life — churchgoers, students, and community festivals as scenes of quiet continuity

These works rarely shouted. They spoke softly, with attention and respect.

Legacy in the Collections

The impact of this period is preserved in several institutions, especially the Baltimore Museum of Art, which holds a deep archive of WPA-era prints and watercolors. Many were considered “minor” works for decades—too humble, too documentary, too sincere. But in recent years, they’ve been re-evaluated not only as art but as historical record, capturing a texture of life that no photograph or census could replicate.

And though the murals have suffered from neglect or overpainting, their influence remains. They shaped a generation of Maryland artists, gave public art a foothold in civic life, and proved that beauty and hardship are not mutually exclusive.

Work, Witness, and Wonder

In Maryland, the American Scene movement was never a doctrine. It was a witness—a way of seeing and showing the world in a moment of economic and emotional compression. The WPA did not produce masterpieces, but it preserved the artistic infrastructure of the state. It kept artists working, kept communities engaged, and created a body of work that still speaks with quiet eloquence.

As the war approached and the Depression faded, the aesthetic would give way to abstraction and ideology. But in those years, Maryland’s artists gave us a map of what people valued, how they lived, and what they saw outside their windows. That vision—gritty, grounded, and generous—endures.

Chapter 8: The Modernists Arrive — Abstraction and Urbanism in Baltimore

From Rowhouse to Canvas

By the early 1960s, the American art world had declared its new capital: New York. Abstract Expressionism had conquered the galleries of 57th Street, and the giants of the movement—Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning—had reshaped the language of modern painting. Yet in Baltimore, far from the hyper-commercialized circuits of Manhattan, a quieter revolution was underway. The city was not immune to modernism’s appeal, but here it assumed a different tone—more grounded, more local, and more intimately tied to the rhythm of the city itself.

At the center of this shift stood Grace Hartigan, one of the few women to be included in the original Abstract Expressionist canon. Known in the 1950s for her moody, semi-figurative canvases and close associations with poets like Frank O’Hara and artists like Willem de Kooning, Hartigan shocked many of her New York peers when she left the city in 1960. She moved to Baltimore permanently, exchanging the center of the American art world for the modest grit of Fells Point, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life.

Hartigan’s move wasn’t a retreat—it was a repositioning. In Baltimore, she found a city rough around the edges, with working ports, ethnic neighborhoods, and an art scene young enough to be shaped. She established a large studio space in an old warehouse, continued to show in major galleries, and began teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)—a role that would define her legacy as much as her paintings.

The Painter as Educator

In 1964, Hartigan became director of the newly formed Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA. It was a graduate-level program intended not just to teach painting, but to sustain it as a serious intellectual and visual discipline in an age of increasing conceptualism. Hartigan held fiercely to her belief in painting’s relevance, even as art critics pronounced it dead or obsolete.

Her teaching style was rigorous, even severe. She demanded commitment and emotional honesty. She warned her students that painting was not a lifestyle, but a form of devotion. This ethos attracted a generation of ambitious young artists who were eager to combine formal experimentation with personal vision. MICA, once a regional art school, now became a node in the national modernist network.

At the same time, Hartigan’s own painting underwent a transformation. The Fells Point years were marked by a looser, more saturated palette, often drawn from the harbor’s light and the neighborhood’s textures. She moved between abstraction and figuration with increasing fluidity. Series like her “Great Queens” or “Interior Saints” blended mythic themes with modern urban sensibility—paintings populated by regal women, domestic objects, and ambiguous spaces that felt both intimate and monumental.

Three themes defined Hartigan’s Baltimore period:

• Urban color — rich, earthy reds and marine blues reflecting the city’s waterline
• Private allegory — symbolic forms grounded in daily observation
• Repetition and revision — motifs revisited across years, gaining resonance through iteration

Her Baltimore paintings may never have matched the critical sensation of her New York work, but they were deeper, richer, and, by her own measure, more authentic.

A Modernism of Restraint

Baltimore modernism was never defined by excess. Its best practitioners developed a visual language of controlled experimentation, drawing on abstraction, simplification, and localized forms. Herman Maril, active from the 1930s through the 1980s, exemplified this tone. His landscapes and cityscapes stripped away surface detail to arrive at balanced, luminous compositions—works that quietly married formal discipline with emotional atmosphere.

Maril’s work gained national attention in his lifetime but was later overshadowed by louder movements. In 2009, the Walters Art Museum mounted a retrospective titled Herman Maril: An American Modernist, restoring his place in the lineage of restrained, lyrical abstraction. His palette was light—whites, creams, soft ochres—and his brushwork precise. He painted what he saw, but only after it had passed through a clarifying lens of memory and structure.

Where Hartigan’s paintings strained toward archetype, Maril’s hovered at the edge of minimalism. A pier, a skyline, a single tree—each reduced to its essential weight and place within the frame. His version of modernism was closer to poetry than proclamation.

Modernism on Furniture and Pavement

In the final decades of the 20th century, Baltimore modernism took on new, hybrid forms. Among the most singular voices was Tom Miller, a Baltimore-born artist educated at MICA who worked in painted sculpture and furniture. Calling his style “Afro-Deco,” Miller blended geometric abstraction with personal and cultural symbols. His best-known works are functional objects—chairs, cabinets, dressers—transformed into bright, heavily patterned sculptures.

Though not an abstract painter in the Hartigan or Maril tradition, Miller’s work belongs to the same broader urban modernist sensibility: inventive, hybrid, tactile, and unafraid of beauty. His pieces drew on West African motifs, jazz rhythms, and the saturated hues of urban storefronts. They asserted a place for the decorative within the serious, and for local identity within modernism’s international field.

Miller’s art, often playful in surface, carried undertones of memory and displacement. His Baltimore was not a mythic city but a real one—racially segregated, commercially unstable, yet culturally alive. In his hands, modernism became personal.

The Modern City Reflected

What united these artists—Hartigan, Maril, Miller—was not a shared style but a shared engagement with the city. Baltimore’s post-industrial urban fabric, its density and decay, offered modernists both raw material and metaphor. Whether in Hartigan’s mythic women, Maril’s quiet rooftops, or Miller’s vibrant furniture, the city was always present: as mood, as matter, as memory.

This urban consciousness set Maryland modernism apart from the loftier, more utopian strains that dominated New York or the existential detachment of the California scene. Baltimore’s artists were modernists, but not doctrinaires. They made room for narrative, place, and craft within a framework of abstraction.

Three visual modes defined this era:

• Studio modernism — shaped by art schools, gallery systems, and private workspaces
• Urban modernism — rooted in the texture, rhythm, and light of the city
• Hybrid modernism — blending abstraction with craft, design, and local symbolism

Together, they formed a vocabulary of modernism as responsive rather than prescriptive, rooted rather than universal.

The Studio and the Street

By the end of the 20th century, modernism in Maryland had become institutionalized—taught in schools, preserved in museum collections, and embedded in the city’s visual culture. But its origins remained personal. It had come not through manifestos or collectives, but through individual artists making difficult choices: to stay, to teach, to keep working in cities no longer celebrated as artistic centers.

Baltimore’s modernists did not follow the market. They followed the practice. And in doing so, they gave Maryland a chapter in American art that was both distinctive and enduring—one defined not by a single movement, but by a shared seriousness of purpose.

Chapter 9: The Quiet Studios — Craft Traditions and Decorative Arts

A Table, a Bowl, a Life

In Maryland, as in much of the early United States, the line between art and utility was once imperceptible. Chairs, clocks, quilts, silver goblets—these were not just objects but extensions of identity, of time, of skill. Long before galleries filled with canvases, Maryland’s cultural heritage took shape in workshops, parlors, and farmyards. This was a tradition not of aesthetic declaration, but of functional beauty—a quietly assertive belief that the things we live with deserve attention, intention, and craft.

The legacy of that belief runs deep. From the high-end Federal-era furniture of Baltimore cabinetmakers to the folk decoys carved along the Chesapeake, Maryland’s decorative arts form an unbroken record of material intelligence. These objects do not proclaim, but they endure. They speak not in manifestos, but in joints, glazes, grain, and polish.

Baltimore Furniture: Carved, Joined, and Proportioned

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Baltimore emerged as a major center of American furniture production, rivaling Philadelphia in quality and refinement. Its furniture—particularly in the Federal style—was characterized by a restrained elegance: inlaid veneers, balanced proportions, and fine joinery. Baltimore makers such as the School of John and Hugh Finlay (active c. 1800–1830) became known for combining neoclassical influences with local hardwoods like walnut and cherry.

Surviving examples—sideboards, tall case clocks, bow-front chests—are found today in the Smithsonian, the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, often unsigned but unmistakably regional. The best pieces feature delicate string inlay, turned legs, and sometimes symbolic motifs drawn from neoclassical architecture. These were not mass-produced goods but custom works for Baltimore’s merchant elite, made by artisans who understood both aesthetic trends and the grain of local wood.

Three traits marked Maryland furniture of this period:

• Classical symmetry — balanced forms influenced by Greco-Roman ideals
• Restraint — decorative, but never ostentatious
• Regional materials — native hardwoods used in construction and veneer

These were pieces made to last—not just in structure, but in style.

Silver in the City: Baltimore’s Metal Traditions

Alongside furniture, silverwork thrived in Baltimore throughout the 19th century. Local silversmiths such as Richard Y. Graves and John R. Burrows produced tableware that blended European influence with American practical needs. Silver spoons, ladles, pitchers, and communion chalices from Baltimore workshops often bear the hallmarks of careful hammering, precise engraving, and subtle repoussé.

Silver was both a commodity and a cultural object. In churches, it served sacramental purposes; in households, it marked status and occasion. The Walters Art Museum houses a representative collection of 19th-century Baltimore silver, much of it understated in decoration, with an emphasis on surface clarity and balance. These pieces, like the furniture of the same period, were part of a visual vocabulary that privileged durability, proportion, and discretion.

Notably, Baltimore’s silver industry did not rest on luxury alone. It provided steady employment to apprentices, engravers, and metalworkers—men (and some women) whose training often began in adolescence and continued for life. Their work was technical, but it was also interpretive. To shape a silver goblet was to negotiate weight, form, reflection, and use—decisions not so different from those of a sculptor.

The Age of Glass: Baltimore’s Industrial Crafts

If furniture and silver defined Maryland’s early domestic artistry, glassmaking signaled its entry into industrial craft. Founded around 1900, the Maryland Glass Corporation in Baltimore became known for its pressed and blown glass tableware—most famously the “Royal Lace” and “Madrid“ patterns of the Depression era.

These pieces, mass-produced but carefully designed, reached thousands of American households. Their elegance lay in repetition: geometric motifs, even mold lines, and smooth curves made them decorative and durable. This was craft adapted to scale—what William Morris might have called “art for the people.” The factory operated until 1970, and many of its molds and products now live in private collections and museum storage, underlining the paradox of the industrial object: at once ubiquitous and collectible.

Though rarely attributed to named artisans, these glassworks represent a form of anonymous authorship—beauty born of collaboration, consistency, and craft knowledge distributed across hundreds of hands.

The Folk Crafts of Water and Field

Away from the city, along the Eastern Shore and Chesapeake Bay, another tradition persisted—one rooted not in fashion, but in function. Here, duck decoys, boat carvings, patchwork quilts, and woven baskets emerged from a culture of subsistence and self-reliance. These were tools first, but they carried aesthetic weight.

The Maryland decoy—especially the working duck decoys carved by watermen—has become one of the most studied and collected forms of American folk art. Carvers such as R. Madison Mitchell of Havre de Grace produced thousands of decoys in the 20th century, each with subtle variations in form, paint, and character. What began as a hunting necessity became, over time, a sculptural tradition.

Similarly, quilts made in rural Maryland, especially among African American and Mennonite communities, reveal deep layers of pattern memory, improvisation, and color theory. These quilts were not drawn from formal design schools but from domestic experience—scraps, gestures, and inherited rhythms stitched into warmth and beauty.

In the Chesapeake folk tradition, three principles dominate:

• Use precedes design — beauty emerges from necessity
• Material governs form — available wood, cloth, or paint shapes the result
• Skill resides in habit — repetition refines technique over time

These were not objects made for exhibition—but for survival, celebration, and seasonal ritual.

The Studio Revival: Ceramics, Weaving, and the Craft Renaissance

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Maryland artists joined the national revival of handcraft under the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Pottery studios appeared, producing hand-thrown wares with matte glazes, botanical motifs, and simplified silhouettes. Though less widely documented than furniture or silver, these ceramics aligned Maryland with a larger cultural turn toward authenticity and material honesty.

By the mid-20th century, the revival had reached Baltimore’s schools and workshops. The Maryland Institute College of Art added departments in textile arts, ceramics, and metalwork, reflecting a shift in the status of craft—from domestic utility to serious art form. Weaving studios multiplied, glassblowing returned in experimental form, and exhibitions began to feature functional objects as gallery-worthy works.

Today, Maryland’s craft legacy survives in the hands of contemporary artisans—ceramicists, blacksmiths, textile artists, and furniture makers who blend tradition with innovation. Many keep workshops open to the public, reasserting the old ideal that beauty belongs in use.

Holding Form

Craft in Maryland has always moved between invisibility and permanence. It does not always hang on walls, nor command headlines. But it survives. In sideboards and quilts, in decoys and pitchers, in the quiet steadiness of useful things made well, it carries a cultural knowledge deeper than theory.

The artist in the studio, the weaver at her loom, the carver with his gouge—each is part of a lineage that predates abstraction, survives fashion, and demands nothing but care. In Maryland, that care has taken many forms. And in the objects it leaves behind, the story remains touchable.

Chapter 10: Collectors and Curators — The Shaping of Public Taste

From Private Obsession to Public Legacy

The art that fills Maryland’s museums today did not arrive by decree or accident. It was selected, purchased, inherited, and, in many cases, fought for—first by private collectors with the means and the nerve to trust their eyes, then by curators who transformed those choices into public heritage. In Maryland, this progression from private passion to civic resource occurred with unusual clarity. It produced not just collections, but a distinctive culture of taste shaped by women and men who bought art with conviction, and by curators who displayed it with strategy and restraint.

This chapter traces the transition from drawing room to gallery wall. In particular, it focuses on two foundational narratives: the 19th-century collecting vision of William T. Walters and Henry Walters, which laid the groundwork for the Walters Art Museum; and the 20th-century modernist ambitions of Claribel and Etta Cone, whose collection now defines the identity of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Together, these two trajectories—historic and modern, male and female, global and avant-garde—helped Maryland claim a place in the broader story of American cultural stewardship.

The Walters Legacy: Empire in Miniature

William Thompson Walters, a railroad magnate and industrialist, began collecting art in the mid-19th century with a scholar’s curiosity and a businessman’s decisiveness. He acquired paintings, sculpture, and antiquities from Europe and the Near East, often with the help of art dealers such as George A. Lucas, a Baltimore-born expatriate in Paris. Over the decades, his purchases accumulated into a private museum of sorts—one that emphasized technical quality, historical range, and visual richness.

His son, Henry Walters, inherited the collection and its underlying ethos. But he brought a deeper institutional vision to the project. In 1902, Henry made his boldest acquisition: the Massarenti Collection in Rome, a trove of some 1,700 works ranging from early Christian mosaics to Renaissance panels and Baroque statuary. He built a grand Beaux-Arts structure next to the family townhouse to house the growing collection—an act that made visible the shift from private connoisseurship to public responsibility.

When Henry Walters died in 1931, he left both the collection and the building to the city of Baltimore. The Walters Art Gallery officially opened to the public in 1934, offering free admission to all. It was not only an act of generosity, but a deliberate redefinition of art as civic inheritance. The Walters gift transformed taste from a private ritual into a public education.

Three features distinguished the Walters vision:

• Chronological scope — From ancient Egypt to 19th-century French academic painting, the collection told a global, continuous story
• Technical mastery — Emphasis on fine craftsmanship across media and periods
• Institutional permanence — The museum was conceived from the start as a serious scholarly resource

To walk through its galleries is to see the tastes of two generations of collectors who believed that art could be both beautiful and instructive.

The Cone Sisters: Modernity from the Inside Out

If the Walters family gave Baltimore a museum of historical depth, the Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, gave it a modern conscience. Born into a wealthy German-Jewish textile family, they used their inheritance not to retreat into society life, but to assemble what would become one of the most important modern art collections in America. Their tastes ran radically against the grain of American collectors in the early 20th century, who largely favored Old Masters and decorative arts. The Cones chose instead to support living artists, often in Paris, and often long before they were fashionable.

Their collecting journey began around the turn of the century. Claribel, a pathologist and professor, was the more intellectually adventurous of the two; Etta, quieter and more methodical, kept the books. Together, they cultivated friendships with avant-garde artists—most famously Henri Matisse, whom they supported financially and collected obsessively. The sisters acquired more than 500 works by Matisse, many gifted directly by the artist, as well as paintings and drawings by Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh.

Their collection was never exhibited during their lifetimes. Instead, it lived in their Baltimore apartment—salons, bedrooms, and hallways densely hung with paintings, draped with textiles, and filled with small sculptures. The sisters lived with the art as if it were part of their household, not a status symbol. Their letters and purchase records (now archived at the Baltimore Museum of Art) reveal a deep engagement with the formal and emotional qualities of the works they acquired—not speculation, but intimate dialogue with the material.

Claribel died in 1929; Etta continued collecting until her death in 1949, at which point she bequeathed the entire collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was a seismic gift. Not only did it enrich the BMA’s holdings—it established its identity. Today, the Cone Collection remains the core of the museum’s modern art wing, giving Baltimore access to works that would be the envy of any institution in the world.

Curators as Interpreters

The power of these collections was not automatic. Their public meaning had to be constructed—selected, interpreted, arranged. This is the work of the curator, whose role in Maryland has historically been both scholarly and civic. At institutions like the Walters and the BMA, curators have done more than mount exhibitions. They’ve shaped how the public understands art, what stories are emphasized, and which works are foregrounded or left in the vault.

At the Walters, curators in recent decades have worked to recontextualize historical art—rearranging galleries to reflect more accurate historical groupings, updating wall labels to avoid outdated interpretations, and expanding the representation of Byzantine, Islamic, and East Asian collections. Their job is not just to maintain the collection, but to refresh the conversation around it.

At the BMA, curatorial practice has often centered around interpretation of the Cone Collection—balancing its private origins with its public role. Exhibitions have explored not only the aesthetics of modernism, but the social networks, gender roles, and intellectual frameworks that shaped the Cones’ collecting. These exhibitions don’t simply show what the sisters bought—they reveal why it mattered, and still matters.

Taste and Its Consequences

The question of taste—who defines it, who challenges it—has never been abstract in Maryland. From the start, collectors and curators here have operated within a specific context: a city shaped by commerce, immigration, and a certain pragmatic restraint. Baltimore has never had the financial firepower of New York or the aristocratic ambitions of Boston. But it has had discernment, and, more importantly, persistence.

The Walters and Cone collections are not just examples of taste—they are instruments of public culture. They determine what schoolchildren see on field trips, what students study in art history seminars, what casual visitors encounter on rainy afternoons. These collections shape expectations, raise questions, and open possibilities. Their curators act as stewards—not only of objects, but of meaning.

What the Eye Teaches

Ultimately, the shaping of public taste is not about imposing opinion—it’s about expanding perception. In Maryland, that process has taken the form of gifts given carefully, and decisions made deliberately. The state’s greatest art collections are not encyclopedic by accident, nor are they revolutionary for novelty’s sake. They are the product of minds trained not just to acquire, but to see.

And in that seeing—in the act of choosing what endures—we glimpse the deep cultural work of taste: not snobbery, not fashion, but attention, seriousness, and belief in beauty as a shared good.

Chapter 11: Architecture as Art — From Georgian Symmetry to Brutalist Assertiveness

Brick, Order, and the Colonial Ideal

Before Maryland had museums or formal art schools, it had architecture. In the 18th century, buildings served as the colony’s first public statements of artistic intention—crafted not on canvas, but in brick, wood, and stone. Among the thirteen colonies, Annapolis emerged early as a city of exceptional visual coherence, shaped by the Georgian architectural idiom that privileged symmetry, proportion, and classical restraint.

In this period, architecture was not simply shelter or status—it was symbolism. To build in the Georgian style was to align oneself with order, reason, and cultural legitimacy. Maryland’s gentry, many of them lawyers, planters, or merchants enriched by tobacco and trade, expressed their power in Palladian façades, formal gardens, and axial plans. These were not merely homes; they were arguments—about authority, taste, and civilization.

The clearest examples survive in a trio of houses built in Annapolis between 1763 and 1774:

• The William Paca House (1763–1765), with its balanced façade and walled garden, belonged to a Declaration signer and governor who used architecture to mirror political ideals.
• The Brice House (1766), one of the largest brick houses of its time, featured five bays and rigorous classical symmetry—a structure of pure composure.
• The Chase–Lloyd House (1769–1774), with its grand staircase and carved interiors by William Buckland, pushed Georgian interior design to the edge of opulence without breaking its rules.

Together, these buildings established a visual language for authority in Maryland. Their materials—red brick, white trim, stone lintels—were repeated across churches, public buildings, and later rowhouses. Their ideals of symmetry and decorum would outlast the Revolution and inform civic architecture well into the 19th century.

From Idealism to Utility: The Rowhouse City

As the 19th century advanced and Baltimore eclipsed Annapolis in size and economic power, the architectural focus shifted. No longer the province of gentry villas, Maryland’s urban architecture became a matter of density, repetition, and pragmatism. The Baltimore rowhouse, built in variations from the early 1800s through the 1920s, became the dominant vernacular form.

Rowhouses are rarely discussed as art, yet their impact is architectural in the deepest sense. Their facades, when aligned in endless streets, create urban rhythms—shadows, setbacks, lintels, and cornices arranged in semi-musical patterns. The best examples feature marble steps, cast-iron fences, and decorative brickwork, elements that suggest care for visual detail even in mass construction.

In these houses, art entered daily life not through display, but through design integration. Front porches became stages. Window transoms filtered light in colored glass. Rear courtyards allowed for garden ornament, laundry, and ritual. The rowhouse was not grand, but it was formal, and its structure encouraged an architectural dignity rooted in repetition.

Midcentury Visions: Assertiveness in Concrete

The Second World War and its aftermath brought dramatic shifts in architecture across the United States, and Maryland was no exception. Federal funding, institutional expansion, and modernist theory combined to produce a new kind of public building—one that rejected ornament and embraced functional, often monumental form. Nowhere is this shift more visually and philosophically stark than in Brutalism, the concrete-heavy style that emerged in the 1950s and reached its peak by the 1970s.

In Baltimore, Brutalist architecture arrived with both ambition and controversy. The most dramatic example was the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre, built in 1967 and designed by John M. Johansen, a member of the Harvard Five. With its projecting concrete forms and windowless bulk, the building resembled a defensive sculpture as much as a theater. Some praised it as modern urban art; others found it aggressively alienating. Over time, its critical fortunes declined. It was eventually demolished in 2014, after years of preservation battles.

This fate was not unique. Brutalist buildings, many of them once admired for their seriousness and lack of sentiment, have often become victims of changing taste. Yet they remain crucial chapters in Maryland’s architectural story. Consider:

• The Walters Art Museum’s 1974 expansion, a Brutalist addition that eschewed the decorative stonework of its older neighbors for blocky mass and internal focus.
• The Baltimore County Circuit Courthouse expansion, another example of Brutalist public architecture using repetition and scale as visual tools of authority.

Brutalism, for all its harshness, carried forward the Enlightenment impulse of earlier Maryland architecture: to express values through structure, not surface.

Continuities of Form

Despite the aesthetic gulf between 18th-century Georgian symmetry and 20th-century Brutalist massing, certain continuities thread through Maryland’s architectural history:

• A concern with permanence — from brick to concrete, materials signal endurance.
• A public dimension — whether private homes or civic theaters, buildings reflect broader ideals.
• An engagement with rhythm — in Georgian cornices, rowhouse repetition, or Brutalist bays, Maryland architecture has often preferred compositional order over asymmetry.

In this way, Maryland’s buildings form not a single style, but a dialogue between restraint and assertion, repetition and individuality, classicism and brutalism.

The Future of the Past

Today, many of Maryland’s historic buildings are caught between reverence and neglect. The Brice House, the Paca House, and the Chase–Lloyd House are preserved and open to visitors, testaments to a period when architecture spoke of Enlightenment ideals. But other structures—particularly midcentury public buildings—are more precarious. Their maintenance is expensive, their aesthetics unfashionable, and their symbolism contested.

Yet they remain essential. In each case, architecture does more than house art—it is art. It shapes experience, encodes values, and reflects not only the tastes of the time but the aspirations of those who commissioned and built it.

In Maryland, that architectural art has taken many forms—from the measured brick of colonial Annapolis to the raw concrete of downtown Baltimore. Each form, in its own way, demands attention. Not all survive, but all leave an imprint—in shadow, skyline, and ground.

Chapter 12: Continuity and Preservation — Maryland Art in the 21st Century

What Remains, and Who Decides

Art in Maryland today exists in a dynamic tension between what has been inherited and what is still unfolding. In historic mansions and climate-controlled vaults, on civic walls and digital archives, in public parks and private foundations, the legacy of the state’s artistic past is not simply stored—it is constantly being preserved, interpreted, and redefined. The 21st century in Maryland has not ushered in an aesthetic rupture, but a deepening of cultural memory through conservation, curation, and community stewardship.

Preservation here is not only the safeguarding of objects, but of relationships: between artist and audience, between place and story, between past intention and present use. Across the state, this work is being carried out not just by major museums, but by local institutions, activist curators, anonymous conservators, and citizens who understand that to protect art is to protect meaning.

Museums as Memory Engines

In Baltimore, the Walters Art Museum stands as a model of 21st-century institutional stewardship. Though its collection was shaped in the 19th century, its role today is firmly contemporary. Its curators and conservators engage in an ongoing process of interpretation—reassessing wall labels, adjusting gallery narratives, and expanding digital access. Exhibitions now often pair old masterworks with modern scholarship or local commentary, reflecting a belief that preservation includes context.

The Walters has also made major investments in conservation science. Its 1974 Brutalist wing includes one of the region’s most advanced conservation labs, where chemists, art historians, and technicians collaborate on the long-term care of everything from Roman sarcophagi to Japanese screens. Here, preservation is not nostalgia—it is problem-solving.

Elsewhere in the city, the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM), founded in 1995, presents a radically different approach to collecting and display. Focused on self-taught, intuitive, and “outsider” artists, AVAM preserves works that might otherwise be lost—fence sculptures, bottle-cap mosaics, narrative paintings made in kitchens and garages. These are not traditional fine art objects, but the museum’s team treats them with equal seriousness, often collaborating with living artists to stabilize, display, and interpret their creations. AVAM’s curatorial philosophy reflects a broader shift: that preservation means valuing what was once overlooked.

Private Magnitude, Public Access

Outside Baltimore, Glenstone, a private museum in Potomac, offers a newer model of artistic stewardship. Founded in 2006 by Mitchell and Emily Rales, it houses one of the country’s most ambitious collections of contemporary art, much of it installed in purpose-built pavilions designed for contemplation. Glenstone is free to the public, but access is controlled, encouraging quiet and close viewing.

While its ultra-minimal architecture and focus on blue-chip contemporary art may feel distant from Maryland’s more grounded traditions, Glenstone’s commitment to permanence, curation, and spatial experience makes it part of the same lineage. It reaffirms that how art is presented matters as much as what is collected, and that the atmosphere of viewing can itself be a form of interpretation.

In a more civic spirit, the Maryland State Art Collection continues to place artworks in government offices, courthouses, and public buildings, maintaining a decentralized presence that dates back to the New Deal. Many of the works originate from WPA commissions, regional art societies, and local competitions. Though these pieces often receive less fanfare than museum works, they quietly affirm the principle that art belongs in public life, not behind a velvet rope.

Keeping the Houses Standing

Art preservation in Maryland has never been limited to objects. The state’s historic architecture—especially its colonial and 19th-century buildings—serves as a kind of monumental archive. Organizations like Preservation Maryland have fought to keep these structures from decay, demolition, or erasure. Whether it’s a Federal-style courthouse, a brick African Methodist Episcopal church, or a post office with a WPA mural, these buildings contain not only visual beauty, but civic memory.

The challenges are many: funding, maintenance, political will. But success stories abound. The restoration of the Brice House in Annapolis, the conservation of industrial sites in Baltimore, and adaptive reuse of historic theaters all point to a cultural logic that treats place as part of the art.

Behind much of this work is the Maryland Historical Trust, a state agency that catalogs, protects, and supports preservation efforts at all scales. Its registry is vast—over 13,000 historic properties—and includes both landmark structures and humble vernacular buildings. It affirms that cultural significance is not always tied to grandeur, and that preservation can be as much about community as aesthetics.

Stewardship Through Research and Education

Maryland is also home to institutions that preserve the scholarly and cultural frameworks around art, not just the objects themselves. The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, founded to honor one of the most influential African American art historians and painters of the 20th century, maintains a growing archive of works by Black artists and documents of the Black arts movement. Its exhibitions, publications, and fellowships have positioned Maryland as a critical hub in national conversations about representation and cultural heritage.

Similarly, the Banneker–Douglass–Tubman Museum in Annapolis continues to expand its role as a custodian of African American visual culture, housing works, artifacts, and exhibitions that might otherwise be excluded from mainstream narratives. The preservation work here is often political, but always visual: photographs, quilts, religious icons, posters, and fine art all help tell the story of Marylanders who shaped their world through image and object.

Challenges of the Digital Shift

In the 21st century, preservation increasingly means digitization, and Maryland’s museums have embraced this with mixed results. The Walters, BMA, and Glenstone have developed online platforms that offer high-resolution images, catalog information, and curatorial essays. These tools extend access and offer researchers new forms of interaction with the collection.

But digital access also raises questions. What is lost when viewing replaces visiting? How do we preserve not only the object, but the experience of its scale, surface, and spatial context? These questions are especially pressing in an era of declining museum attendance, rising conservator costs, and cultural shifts that place pressure on traditional institutions.

Yet Maryland’s cultural institutions, for all their variety, share a commitment to stewardship rather than spectacle. Whether in high-tech conservation labs, school partnerships, or historic house tours, the message is consistent: art is not static. It requires care, thought, and sometimes resistance to forgetting.

A Future with a Past

Preservation in Maryland today is not about freezing art in amber. It’s about maintaining vitality—ensuring that paintings, buildings, and craft traditions remain intelligible, engaging, and available to future generations. This work is sometimes visible (a restored mural, a reopened gallery) and sometimes invisible (a stabilized foundation, a corrected attribution), but it is always necessary.

In a culture that often prizes novelty, preservation can seem like a quiet act. But in Maryland, it is often a deliberate resistance to cultural amnesia—a way of honoring labor, legacy, and the forms that outlast their moment.