The Chrysler Museum: Glass, Old Masters, and Walter Jr.

The Chrysler Museum of Art sits on a curve of the Elizabeth River in the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk, inside a building that started life in nineteen thirty-three as the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences. For its first four decades, it was a regional institution of modest ambitions. Then Walter P. Chrysler Junior arrived.

Chrysler was the son of the founder of the Chrysler Corporation, and he had spent his life doing something his father had not: collecting art. By nineteen seventy-one, when he donated most of his collection to the Norfolk museum, it amounted to more than thirty-five thousand objects spanning five thousand years of human history. The museum was renamed in his honor.

What he gave them was remarkable for its breadth. Renaissance masters, Tintoretto, Veronese. Baroque heavyweights, Rubens, Velázquez. Among the sculptures, a marble bust of Jesus Christ by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, made as a gift for Queen Christina of Sweden, one of Bernini's final works. American moderns, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol.

And then there is the glass. The Chrysler holds one of the largest glass collections in America, approximately ten thousand pieces including major works by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The museum's Perry Glass Studio, which tripled the size of the glass studio when it completed expansion in early twenty twenty-five, has made Norfolk a working center of the studio glass movement.

For a city of its size, Norfolk has no business having a museum this good. But here it is.