Even as the Walker Art Center opens a new exhibiton, Benches and Binoculars, that may, in displaying art salon-style, echo the way in which the museum's founder showed his impressive art collection in his home, we can be reasonably certain that the art itself probably does not reflect T. B. Walker’s aesthetic preferences.

AMONG Minnesota's many “monuments” to Thomas Barlow Walker are an art museum and library in Minneapolis, a town in northern Minnesota, and a grandiose structure sporting Corinthian capitals and neoclassical female figures near the main entrance of Lakewood Cemetery, where he was buried in 1928.

T. B. Walker was a lumber baron, an art collector, and the driving force behind the move to open a free public library in Minneapolis (for more on that, please go here). A solid, pro-business Republican, he read socialist newspapers to better understand other points of view.

In the 1860s, he built a grand mansion in Minneapolis at 803 Hennepin Avenue, and proceeded to fill it with a vast art collection, which he made available to anyone who wanted to come in and see it, instructing his servants to act as docents and show people around. At a time when wealthy enclaves such as his were surrounded by impressive walls, his property was unfenced and even offered benches for people to sit on. But he kept a loaded gun under his pillow, and provided the same for his house guests.

He joined the Minneapolis Athenaeum, a member-owned lending library, even though his home library was thought to be among the largest collections of books in the northwest, and he soon was agitating to make access to the Athenaeum affordable to more people, eventually taking control of the board and leading the effort to open a free public library in Minneapolis.

The Ohio native was an iconic, Progressive-era philanthropist, investing heavily in his adopted city to boost culture and learning -- to help the public reach “a higher grade of character and citizenship,” he wrote in a pamphlet titled, “Character as Related to Citizenship.” It was Walker’s idea that the public library should be a sort of “People’s University.” Like other movers and shakers of this era, Walker believed that if the people were properly educated, they wouldn’t be tempted to turn to such unsavory doctrines as “bolshevism” and socialism. They would appreciate that the American capitalist free-enterprise system offered the best opportunities for all.

His ideas and philanthropy won him a great deal of respect among the city’s elite, who would invite him to give after-dinner speeches imparting his wisdom and relating the story of his success. Unfortunately, those who attended later described his talks as tedious, long, and boring.

Walker had been displaying several pieces from his private art collection on the top floor of the first Minneapolis Public Library building at 10th and Hennepin when, in 1915, the Society of Fine Arts moved their collection and art school out of the library building and into the new Institute of Arts in South Minneapolis. Walker didn’t want to send his art there and eventually built his own museum where the Walker Art Center now sits. His collection emphasized the old masters, rare jade and jewelry, and Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese pottery. It wasn’t until 1940, a dozen years after his death, that the museum turned to modern art and the Walker Art Center as we know it today was born.

The museum gradually sold off his original collection; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts bought the famous Jade Mountain and 25 other jades that Walker once owned. He donated several religious paintings to Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church for their Sunday school rooms; now displayed in a gallery attached to the church, they include museum-quality paintings by 16th- and 19th-century European masters.

Benches and Binoculars opens Saturday, Nov. 21, at the Walker Art Center, and will be on display through August 15.

This article, which has been slightly altered with updated information, first appeared in the spring 2008 issue of MOQ, a quarterly magazine that is at once both timely and timeless. For information about the current issue, please go here.

The Walker monument at Lakewood Cemetery