Walter Conrad Arensberg (April 4, 1878 – January 29, 1954) was an American art collector, critic and poet. His father was part owner and president of a crucible steel company. He majored in English and philosophy at Harvard University. With his wife Louise (1879–1953), he collected art and supported artistic endeavors.[1]
Between 1913 and 1950 the couple collected the works of Modern artists such as Marcel Duchamp,[1] Charles Sheeler, Walter Pach, Beatrice Wood,[1] and Elmer Ernest Southard, as well as Pre-Columbian art. They donated their collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art including correspondence, ephemera, clippings, writings, personal and art collection records, and photographs documenting the couple's art collecting activities as well as their friendship with many important artists, writers and scholars.
Intrigued with writer Francis Bacon, particularly the aspects of alchemy, cryptography, Rosicrucianism, and, inevitably, the Shakespeare-Bacon debate, the Arensbergs researched his work. In 1937 they established the Francis Bacon Foundation in Los Angeles intending to promote "research in history, philosophy, science, literature, and art, with special reference to the life and works of Francis Bacon" and in 1954 endowed it with funds and their collection of Baconiana. The Foundation's library was housed in its own small brick building at the Claremont Colleges beginning in 1960. In the intervening years, the collection grew from its original 3,500 volumes to over 16,000 volumes. With the failing health of the collection's longtime librarian and curator, the Foundation decided to transfer it to the Huntington Library in San Marino. The collection is now known as the Francis Bacon Foundation Arensberg Collection.
Arensberg's work The cryptography of Shakespeare (1922) claims to find acrostics and anagrams in the published works of Shakespeare which reveal the name of Bacon. In The secret grave of Francis Bacon and his mother in the Lichfield chapter house (1923) and The Shakespearean mystery (1928) he used a "key cipher" to find further messages connected with the Rosicrucians. Analysis by William Friedman and Elizebeth Friedman[2] shows that none of the methods has cryptographic validity.
Several volumes of his Symbolist-influenced verse were also published, including 1914's Poems and 1916's Idols. His poem Voyage a l'Infini was anthologized by Edmund Clarence Stedman.