The story
Walter Chrysler Jr. was the son of the man who built the car company, and he collected glass before most people thought of glass as art. He gathered vessels spanning 3,000 years, from Egyptian and Roman flasks to shimmering Tiffany lamps, and in 1971 he gave thousands of works to the museum in Norfolk, Virginia that now carries his name.
The place did not start with him. It opened in 1933 as the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, built by a local arts society whose roots ran back to two schoolteachers, Irene Leache and Anna Cogswell Wood. When Chrysler's collection arrived, the town renamed the museum for him.
Today the glass holding runs to some 8,000 pieces and is among the finest in the country, shown in galleries near a hot shop across the street where glassblowers work in front of visitors. The paintings reach from Renaissance Italy to American art, but the furnace and the Tiffany glass are what people come to see.
