Barbara Walters and her trailblazing American Art collection

 The doyenne of daytime television

During the first Gulf War in 1990, Vanity Fair magazine editor Tina Brown boarded a plane to London that had one passenger: the seasoned journalist Barbara Walters.

Everyone, Brown noted, had chickened out of flying except for Walters – who was travelling to Saudi Arabia to interview the US army general, Norman Schwarzkopf. “That was a girl-power statement,” Brown observed, “there is a reason she is on top.”

For over five decades, Walters was a ubiquitous presence in American homes. Born in Boston in 1929, she began her career in television in the early 1960s. It was a time when the prevailing attitude in broadcasting was that viewers would not take a woman discussing politics seriously. It took her 15 years to shatter the glass ceiling and become the first female co-host of Today, NBC’s current affairs program.

Her heyday was the late 1970s and 1980s – a time of rising hostilities between global superpowers, war in Afghanistan and Reaganomics. Walters covered them all on her prime-time slot, securing interviews with Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi, Hugo Chávez and Margaret Thatcher, as well as every sitting US President from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama.

“Just plop yourself on our couch and discuss your film and your sex life”

Petite and convivial, with a breezy delivery that masked a tenacious desire for the truth, Walters was good at coaxing her guests into divulging more than perhaps they intended. “Are you happy?” she asked Grace Kelly, holed up in her Genoese fortress in Monaco. “I suppose I have a certain peace of mind,” the princess wanly replied.

The journalist’s reputation as the doyenne of daytime television was secured in 1997 when she co-created The View. At its peak, the all-woman talk show was watched by an audience of 4.4 million. Its success, Walters said, was down to its relaxed, cheerful atmosphere, one she humorously described as “just plop yourself on our couch and discuss your film and your sex life.”

Walters understood how to make people feel comfortable, a technique honed as a child by studying her nightclub-owning father conjure up nocturnal fantasies for revellers. She thought nothing of entertaining 50 people for dinner in her impossibly glamorous Upper East Side apartment.

Her home was also her sanctuary, a place filled with art, books and mementoes of her travels. Her walls were adorned with paintings from the first Gilded Age, the one that lit up America in the 19th century. Those from its second – Washington powerbrokers and Park Avenue financiers – were lucky to be able to snag an invitation to dine with Walters in her home.

“A reminder of that moment of perfect contentment”

Morgan Martin, Bonhams Head of American Art, suggests the paintings reflect her personality.

“I see the pioneer journalist – who interviewed the most powerful people in the world – within many of the works she chose to adorn her home,” he says, identifying, by way of example, the “strong, regal, feminine woman” in John Singer Sargent’s portrait Egyptian Woman (Coin Necklace) and “the beautiful girl intrigued and drawn to the fire, much the way Barbara was drawn to the spotlight” in Frank Benson’s Firelight, hung prominently above the fireplace in her living room.

Other artworks recall her New England childhood and her life in New York. There are landscape scenes of Boston’s beloved gardens in John Whorf’s Swan Boat, Boston Public Gardens – which she displayed above her bed – and Maurice Brazil Prendergast’s Franklin Park, Boston, and paintings referencing New York’s Washington Square and Tenth Street by Paul Cornoyer and William Merritt Chase respectively.

These Impressionist painters rejected stifling American society for aesthetic revolt in bohemian Paris. They returned to the East Coast with the spirit of the Left Bank in their souls. It was something Walters understood, having made a bid for freedom as a young woman in the mid-1950s to model in Paris. In her 2008 memoir Audition, she recalled that time:

“I remember walking to the flower market one beautiful, early morning and sitting on a bench, surrounded by bouquets of brilliant flowers and thinking, ‘I’m happy. Utterly and completely happy.’ As a reminder of that moment of perfect contentment, I later bought a small Childe Hassam painting of that same flower market. It hangs in the front hall of my apartment in New York, where I see it every time I come in or go out.”

“I think that is very telling,” says Martin. “There are facets to the collection that give us a real glimpse of the depths and complexities of Walters, one that tells the story of an iconic life.”