| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

William and Henry Walters, the Reticent Collectors. By William R. Johnston. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xviii, 309 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-6040-7.)

This biography adds a new chapter to the excesses of American collectors during the Gilded Age. In 1841, William Walters fled from an unpromising future in the primitive Pennsylvania iron industry to bustling Baltimore. There, the twenty-two-year-old began building a handsome fortune selling whiskey and began dabbling in collecting art. Siding with the Confederacy, Walters and his family spent the Civil War years in comfortable exile in Paris and on intensive art shopping expeditions elsewhere in Europe. Back in Baltimore, William applied much of his growing fortune, now from railroads, banking, and other investments, to a near-obsessive accumulation of objects. . . .

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