THE WALTERS ART GALLERY'S COLLECTION OF ASIAN ART HAS BEEN CALLED "A very personal collection," and in Hackerman House, opening to the public at 1:30 p.m. today, it has found a home that fits it well.
Assembled between about 1870 and 1920 by William T. Walters and his son Henry, the collection was first shown to the public at the Walters house, 5 W. Mount Vernon Place, in 1873 and later in a gallery William Walters built behind the house in the 1880s. How appropriate, then, that today the collection has come to rest just two doors away at 1 West, in one of the great town houses of the 19th century.
Moreover, Hackerman House provides more than just a series of galleries for the objects. The Chinese porcelains and Japanese 19th-century art that form the majority of the collection have been given semi-domestic settings in the first floor's grand rooms, while upstairs other aspects of the collection receive more neutral, gallery-like treatment.
Milo Beach, director of the Freer and Sackler galleries of Asian art in Washington, recently said the installation "looks phenomenal" and praised the idea behind it for just this kind of collection. Instead of the more usual practice of mounting art "to evoke the kinds of cultures out of which the objects were taken," he said, putting the collection into the Hackerman House gives it a context that reflects "the important development of American interest in Asia" in the 19th century.
William Walters was at the forefront of that development. He amassed the "first major American collection of Oriental art," says Walters associate director William R. Johnston (at work on a book about William and Henry), and adds that it was recognized as such at the time. "In the 19th-century press that I read, they see him as the pioneer."
He saw collections of Oriental art in London and Paris as early as 1862. In the next 22 years he amassed 4,100 objects, buying significantly at international expositions in Vienna, Philadelphia and Paris.
What was offered at such exhibitions consisted largely of either contemporary work or the work of recent centuries, so that was )) what William, like other collectors of his time, bought. It was Henry who, after his father's death, expanded the collection into older works; but that was in the 20th century when, as Mr. Johnston notes, there was "a much more comprehensive knowledge of Oriental art."
Because what was assembled by William and Henry has remained intact, and because the Chinese and Japanese portions have been little enlarged, this is very much "a particular collection formed by two men," says Rose Kerr, curator of the Far Eastern collections at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. "It's a very personal collection, and in certain areas among the best in the world."
It is, says Walters curator of Asian art Hiram W. Woodward Jr., particularly strong in Chinese porcelains of the Ching Dynasty (mid-17th through 19th centuries) and Japanese objects of the 19th century.
A few figures may help put that in perspective. (All are approximate.) Of 7,000 objects, 6,200 are Chinese and Japanese (the rest from other parts of Asia). Of those, 3,800 are Japanese and 2,400 Chinese. Of the Japanese, 3,500 are 19th century. Of the Chinese, 1,600 are Ching porcelains.
Although there are significant works in other areas, including what Mr. Woodward calls "a small number of major Buddhist sculptures" and a strong holding of Chinese bronzes of 1200 to 200 B.C., in general the works of earlier periods are less well represented.
One reason the collection's "hills and valleys never got smoothed out," Mr. Woodward says, is that there was never a curator of Asian art at the Walters until he was appointed five years ago. But to complain about what the collection doesn't have would be a little like complaining that the Cone sisters didn't like cubism, or Mozart didn't live another 35 years: It won't do any good.
Mr. Beach pronounces a definite "Yes" when asked if the Walters' is among the major American collections of Asian art. And, happily, recent years have seen an increased interest in those areas in which the Walters is strongest.
Lee Bruschke-Johnson, formerly of the Walters and now at the Freer/Sackler, has written an essay about part of the Japanese collection. She notes that the Walterses "chose extremely good pieces." Japanese 19th-century work made after the opening to the West in the 1850s used to be looked down on when compared with older work. But, Ms. Bruschke-Johnson says, "That's an idea that was brought about by scholars around the turn of the century who wanted to promote very traditional Japanese art and depreciated the value of anything that had any scent of Western influence." More recently, she says, "people are coming to realize that these pieces have a lot of value, and they're interesting from the historical perspective of the influence that Japanese knowledge of the Western market has on their traditional art."
Ms. Kerr notes that Ching-period imperial porcelains (made at imperial kilns) are being "avidly collected"; the Walters has "more than a hundred" such pieces, Mr. Woodward says. And Ms. Kerr notes individual riches, including early 18th century peach bloom wares, of which the Walters has two dozen pieces. They are "pretty rare," the curator says. "The [Victoria and Albert] has only two pieces."
Chinese porcelains are given the place of first importance in the Hackerman House installation, occupying two of the first floor's great spaces. These spaces, in the words of Walters director Robert P. Bergman, have been decorated to "reflect the reception of the Eastern aesthetic into the West." But the usual "house museum" concept has been reversed, for the works of art don't decorate the rooms, the rooms serve as background for the works of art.
The largest of them is the former double parlor, now called the Great China Room. This room with its neoclassical architectural decoration has been given the feel of an interior of about 1900, with blue moire draperies sporting tassels in blue, ivory and celadon, a carpet whose main repeated motif echoes the rosettes on the ceiling, and a few pieces of late Federal and Empire furniture of the 1820-1840 period.
Underneath chandeliers in the center of each parlor are cases with pyramid displays, one of which contains 18th- and 19th-century Chinese porcelains fitted with European ormolu (gilt metal) mounts. In a sense the Hackerman House installation is an enlargement of the concept behind these pieces, imported from the East and given Western settings.
Other cases contain a more or less chronological history of Chinese figured porcelains from the 16th to the 19th century, including some extraordinary pieces. A bottle vase dated 1552 is the earliest piece of porcelain known to have been made for a Westerner; he was Jorge Alvarez, the sea captain who took Francis Xavier to China. A mid-17th century blue and white vase with a tiger and a dragon, a phoenix and a unicorn has whites that play more than a background role, as Mr. Woodward states in a newly published handbook of 50 selected works from the collection. The whites are "pictorial, actually standing for the mists that hover in front of waterfalls."
An early 18th-century famille verte ("green family") vase has a framed bird-on-branch depiction that recalls hanging scroll painting. Such richly decorated pieces could be the work of many; "a European visitor wrote that in this period a completed vessel might pass through the hands of 70 workmen," Mr. Woodward notes.
Among famille rose ("rose family") porcelains of the early 18th century is a vase, apparently made for palace use, whose colors include the pink that gave this family its name. Among blue and white porcelains of the same period is a vase in the shape of an ancient bronze ku or wine beaker; upstairs, the visitor will see an ancient bronze ku, of the 12th to 11th century B.C.
Another porcelain vase of the later 18th century, made for palace use, has a depiction of a season on each of its four faces, and these are framed in richly ornamented borders with gilded flanges at the corners, also recalling ancient bronzes.
Pausing at one or another of the cases in this room, Mr. Woodward will say "this case is as interesting for what it has as any museum in the world can put together," or "a case that other museums would have a hard time matching."
Across the hall, the house's original library with its built-in bookcases has been decorated with green-patterned silk wall coverings, green-gold curtains and a figured carpet in tones of plum, green and ivory. Here are monochrome ceramics (one color, as opposed to the figured porcelains in the double parlor) of the 18th century and earlier: the white of blanc de chine, the green of celadon, the red of oxblood. On the center table is a display of 11 peach bloom pieces, including the most famous work in the whole collection, the peach bloom vase for which William Walters paid the then record sum of $18,000 at an 1886 auction, causing him an unwelcome flurry of newspaper publicity. The term "peach bloom" derives from the modulated ++ pink color.
The carpeting here is also used in the first floor's other major room, the original dining room. It has been given an 1880s aesthetic period decoration to reflect what Mr. Woodward calls "a crucial time for the appreciation of Japanese objects." A wide iris border tops green-gold wallpaper with a pattern of small leaves, and green-fringed deep red draperies hang at the bow window and the French doors leading to the conservatory. This is the "Japanese study."
Here a chair and tables from William Walters' 1884 gallery, and the room's original 1850 Gothic revival sideboard (lent by the Maryland Historical Society) mingle with a wide variety of pieces in many materials, from monkeys carved on an ivory tusk to an amusing metal box on which a monkey posing as a collector uses Western eyeglasses to examine a netsuke (small figural ornament) in the shape of -- a monkey.
There are mounted swords, metalworks including a teapot with a spout in the form of a dragon, lacquer works including a box decorated with a spider spinning its web in the trunk of a pine tree. Although the room is primarily devoted to 19th-century objects, this late 18th-century box is one of a few earlier pieces, among them a pair of carved and painted wooden temple doors of about the 17th century. The room's centerpiece is a 3 1/2 -foot-tall model of a pagoda (1910-1915 or earlier) bought by Henry Walters at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.
An alcove off of this room will be devoted to changing exhibitions of Japanese prints, and the house's front hall with its curving staircase will contain Japanese armor, Chinese jades and a wall-size Japanese tapestry, showing a battle scene, that provides a variation on the West's interest in the East: The Japanese artisan Kawashima Jimbei II traveled to Gobelins, France, to learn how to make such a tapestry.
The conservatory that stretches across the back of the house's first floor will contain only a few pieces, but they include a rare 16th-century wine jar decorated with swimming fish and a vase of about 1915 by the Japanese artist Itaya Hazan, described by )) Mr. Woodward as "the most important contemporary work Henry ever bought."
The house's second floor, largely devoted to earlier Chinese and Japanese works, has a quite different feeling. It contains a series of relatively spare rooms with soft green walls and straw-colored floor covering. The natural tour of seven galleries begins with ancient to medieval Chinese works including the ancient ku, two pieces of jade dating from as far back as the Neolithic period (about 3500-2000 B.C.), a charming painted earthenware dragon the fourth-fifth century A.D., and a Tang-period painted camel (seventh-eighth century).
Mr. Woodward calls the next gallery's centerpiece "maybe the most important piece in the collection": an early seventh-century wood and lacquer Chinese Buddha whose austere beauty endows this gallery with an aura of quiet contemplation. It is the oldest Chinese wood and lacquer Buddha known to be in existence.
Chinese Buddhist images are joined by Japanese in the next gallery, which contains the largest object on view: a 6 1/2 -foot-tall, sixth-century Chinese quartz sandstone bodhisattva ("enlightenment being"), with traces of its original gold, red and blue painting. Here, too, is a distinct personality, a fierce-looking Japanese painted wooden lion (13th-14th century).
The final Chinese gallery has 15th- and 16th-century paintings and an "archaizing" case, works done in older styles.
Three Japanese galleries begin with one devoted to screens, hanging scrolls and objects relating to the tea ceremony and the incense game. Following is a room that will be one of the most popular in the house, with Japanese "little things," including pipes and pipe cases, the delightful netsuke in the shape of people and animals, lacquer writing and document boxes and women's objects: combs, cosmetic boxes, incense burners. Finally, a gallery devoted to weaponry includes a 17th-18th-century seated suit of armor, helmets, swords and the small decorated sword guards, called tsubas.
An important part of the Asian collection is not even in Hackerman House, devoted as it is to Chinese and Japanese art. In the carriage house that serves as a connector between the Walters' 1904 building and Hackerman House is a gallery of Indian and Southeast Asian art.
This is the repository for important pieces from the Alexander Griswold collection of Thai art. Mr. Griswold has already given the gallery several dozen pieces and has promised the rest of the collection consisting of several hundred more pieces housed at his estate, Breezewood, north of Baltimore. When it all comes, it will constitute what Freer/Sackler researcher Forrest McGill calls "the largest and best collection of Thai sculpture in the country." Already at the Walters are significant pieces such as the 14th-century Sukhotai Buddha image which Mr. Woodward calls "as fine as any Sukhotai image in this country."
In all, the Walters is now able to show 1,000 of its 7,000 works of Asian art, where previously it could show 200 at most. Long hidden away, the Asian collection has found a home that always was a home.
HACKERMAN HOUSE: A BRIEF HISTORY
BUILT BETWEEN 1849 AND 1851 to a design by Baltimore architects Niernsee and Neilson for Mr. and Mrs. John Hanson Thomas, Hackerman House is notable for its generous proportions and especially its handsome first-floor rooms with their rich architectural detailing. The main floor has a 60-foot neoclassical double parlor, an Elizabethan revival library with much carved woodwork, a dining room originally Gothic revival with 1890s Renaissance style alterations, and an entrance hall with sweeping curved staircase beneath an oval Tiffany stained-glass dome.
Originally owned by Mr. and Mrs. John Hanson Thomas (until 1892), it passed to Mr. and Mrs. Francis Jencks (1892-1953), was empty from 1953 to 1963, and owned by Harry Lee Gladding from 1963 for two decades. In 1984 businessman Willard Hackerman bought it and donated it to the city, which subsequently awarded it to the Walters Art Gallery for renovation as its Museum of Asian Art.