China

The Walters Art Museum’s collection of Chinese art includes works that span almost five millennia, from the late Neolithic period all the way up to the turn of the twentieth century. Chinese porcelains from the Ming and Qing dynasties were some of William T. Walters’s first purchases in the mid-nineteenth century and they form the foundation of the museum’s Asian collections. With the addition to important Buddhist sculptures, carved jades, ancient bronzes, paintings, and calligraphies, Henry Walters rounded out the Chinese collection so that it precisely reflects the early twentieth-century American vision of China.