Christopher Bedford is hell-bent on putting Baltimore on the museum world stage. When he competed with 270 others for the job of Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in 2016, he asked the recruiting interviewer what the board was looking for: someone to make this the most dynamic and relevant civic museum for Baltimore and a role model for others, was the answer. ‘I knew I’d found my home,’ he recalls. He got the job.

The BMA, Bedford’s home, was founded in 1914 as an idea, with no collection. Since then, locals have been generous, and today the museum holds 95,000 works of art. The crown jewels are the 3,000 pieces left to the museum by the Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, whose collection was rooted in visits to Matisse and Picasso’s Paris studios, where they shopped with the family’s textile fortune: it includes 500 works by Matisse (altogether, the BMA has 1,000 pieces by Matisse, the largest holding of his work in the world). The Cone collection arrived in 1949, on Etta’s death, Claribel having stipulated in her will 20 years earlier that the BMA should get it if ‘the spirit of appreciation for modern art in Baltimore became improved’. The Cones’ distant cousins, Blanche Adler and Saidie May, collected new Surrealist art expressly to give the museum (some pieces were in the recent show ‘Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s’), as did another Baltimore collector, Jacob Epstein, whose Old Master gifts included Titian’s Portrait of a Gentleman. About 18,000 French mid 19th-century works and some artists’ palettes gathered by the Baltimore dealer-collector George A. Lucas – who spent decades in Paris working for American collectors – arrived in 1933 to enrich the prints, drawings and photographs holdings, among the largest in any US museum.

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