Behind these neoclassical walls sits the leading art museum in Maryland, holding the single largest collection of work by Henri Matisse anywhere in the world. The Baltimore Museum of Art was founded in 1914 and moved to its current neoclassical building, designed by John Russell Pope, in 1929. The museum's Cone Collection — assembled by Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone over five decades of travel to Paris — includes 42 paintings, 18 sculptures, and scores of works on paper by Matisse, documenting his entire career from his early Fauvist canvases through the late cut-paper compositions.
The Cones were wealthy Baltimore textile merchants who began visiting Paris in 1905 and became part of the circle around Gertrude and Leo Stein, where they met Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian avant-garde. They bought directly from the artists and accumulated a collection that would today be worth billions. The museum also holds one of the finest collections of African art in the country, an outstanding collection of American decorative arts, and significant holdings of Old Master paintings.
The outdoor sculpture garden, added in a 1982 renovation, features works by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and other twentieth-century masters. In 2018, the museum made headlines by announcing that all future acquisitions would be exclusively works by women and gender-nonconforming artists — a bold institutional statement about who has been excluded from art history.