chairman and Reid as secretary. Through effective lobbying and fundraising ($5,000 each from 10 benefactors), the Ontario Legislature later that year passed a bill incorporating the Art Museum of Toronto. Walker became president of its board of trustees and served until his death. The initial challenge was to find a home for the new institution. It was Walker who convinced his friends, writer Dr. Goldwin Smith and his wife, the former Mrs. William Henry Boulton, to leave their historic house, "The Grange," to the new museum. Before the news became public, Walker bought surrounding land so that the museum would have space for future expansion. The Art Museum of Toronto (later renamed the Art Gallery of Toronto and then the Art Gallery of Ontario) officially opened its first galleries in The Grange in April 1913. In 1926, two years after his death, when the gallery was expanding, the Canadian Bank of Commerce donated the funds to build the magnificent room that bears his name, the Walker Court. The Royal Ontario Museum The campaign for a world-class public museum for Toronto was led by Walker, philanthropist Sir Edmund Boyd Osler, then director of the Canadian Pacific Railway and president of The Dominion Bank, and Dr. Charles Trick Currelly, the first curator of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology. An archaeologist, Currelly had been doing fieldwork in Egypt, Crete and Asia Minor for the purpose of collecting artifacts as a core collection for the small museum he established at Victoria College in 1907. But he wanted a larger museum for the university and others soon became involved. Walker, Osler and others provided funds and solicited financial support from the government. Together, Osler and Walker created an organizational structure for the museum, including how funding was to be shared between the university and the government. In 1912, the Royal Ontario Museum Act was passed. A Board of Trustees was created, with appointments shared equally by university and government. Walker was its first chairman. The Royal Ontario Museum opened on 19 March 1914. Currelly became director in 1914 until his retirement in 1946 and Walker remained chairman of the Board of Trustees until his death. In the ensuing years he contributed financially, and assisted through generous lines of credit from the Canadian Bank of Commerce, notably for Currelly's substantial acquisitions of Chinese artifacts. Walker's fossil collection became the nucleus of the museum's paleontology collection,