Henry Walters (1848-1931)

He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and had just one sister who married the brother of FDR's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt. He graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. before taking further studies at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. In 1889, he moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, as General Manager of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad which had been established by his father. After his father died in 1894, he became the line's president and moved its headquarters to New York where he was Vice-President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had not only inherited his father's substantial art collection, but also his passion for art. In 1900, to display his collection, he built a palazzo-style building which opened to the public in 1909 as the Walters Art Gallery. Among the several substantial additions he made to the collection in the early 1900s included the Marcello Massarenti Collection for which he paid $1-million in 1920 for the 1,700 paintings, Renaissance bronzes, Greek vases and Roman antiquities. He married Sarah, daughter of U.S. Congressman and Colonel in the Confederate Army, Wharton Jackson Green. She was the widow of his good friend Pembroke Jones and although he had two stepchildren he had none of his own.