John Gilmore Ford, who accumulated an extensive collection of South Asian art and shared it with the Baltimore public, has died.

At the Walters Art Museum, the Ford Gallery of Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan Art is named for the collector and his wife, Berthe. Peter Bain, the president of the museum’s board of trustees, said Ford was an “ardent, longtime supporter” of the museum who, with his wife, “made a profound impact on the Walters with their transformative gift of South Asian Art to the museum.”

“The invaluable ways he’s enriched the Walters and the entire Baltimore arts community can be seen and felt by all who come to the museum and visit the Ford Gallery,” Bain said in an email.

Ford, a lifelong trustee of the Walters, was fascinated by Asian art from an early age. In a 2019 interview with Cultural Property News, Ford said he grew up in a Baltimore home where his parents both collected Chinese decorative arts.

“My parents inculcated in me a desire for visiting museums and private collections from childhood,” Ford said at the time.

Another influence was his godfather, Edward Choate O’Dell, also a collector of Chinese art. Ford told Cultural Property News that his parents and godfather “fortified me in the ability to make judgments about the arts that were foreign to my training but resonated in my mind and heart.”

Ford attended the Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and he started his career in the 1960s as an interior designer. He had become fascinated with India and made his first trip there in 1963.

In the 2019 interview, Ford recounted his visit to a gallery of Indian antiques in New Delhi, where he asked the owner if the store had any Tibetan art. He ended up finding hundreds of thangkas, Tibetan Buddhist paintings on cotton or silk, and bought 10 of them. He shipped them directly to Baltimore.

Ford said he made three additional trips to South Asia that decade to find and purchase more artwork. By 1970, he’d acquired more than 150 Hindu, Mughal, Nepalese and Tibetan pieces. He showed them to Edward S. King, the former director of what was then known as the Walters Art Gallery, who admired his collection for hours.

A short time later, Ford recounted, he received a letter from the museum’s director asking if he would show his collection at Walters the next year. The exhibit was called “Indo-Asian Art from the John Gilmore Ford Collection.”

At the opening of the exhibit, Ford met Berthe Hanover, a United Nations translator pursuing her political science doctorate. She, too, enjoyed Himalayan art, and the couple married in 1972.

“Our meeting that night resulted in a marriage expressing desire and devotion that has enriched and ripened over the past thirty years,” Ford later wrote in a 2002 catalogue for a traveling exhibit of the couple’s collection. “The love of South Asian art brought us together and still binds us in inexpressible ways.”

In his professional life, Ford founded the John Ford Associates design studio in Baltimore and became a senior appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers, according to Cultural Property News. He continued his relationship with museums and in 1980 joined the South Asian and Himalayan Acquisitions Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

He was also a trustee of the Freer-Sackler Museum, whose collection is now housed in the National Museum of Asian Art, for a decade. In 1983, he founded the Friends of the Asian Collection at the Walters Museum, and he served as a trustee there for decades.

“John Gilmore Ford, more than anyone, has assumed the mantle of the collector whose scope and ambition has a civic dimension,” Gary Vikan, the former director of the Walters Museum, told the Cultural Property News.

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