A Collector's Eye for Artifacts -- and Adventure

Giraud Foster has bounded from one unlikely situation to another in his 80 years, as if a lost character in search of a picaresque novel, a mere figment of the imagination. As a 10-year-old boy, he rafted down the Mississippi with a friend named Jim, just as Huck had. He worked in a Peruvian copper mine the following year and published his first article in a science journal at 12.

As an adult, he served as the personal physician to the elderly king of Yemen, who had a young bride but couldn't consummate the marriage. When the king died, Foster fled, with a price on his head, to Ethiopia and then London. He wanted to take with him two pieces of ancient alabaster art given by the king. But they disappeared in the ensuing revolution, and he wound up buying them in London during a nine-year period in the '60s when he collected Arabian artifacts.

Not that Foster likes to rehash the past. His are bashful wanderings, as enabled by family wealth and position as they are in flight of them. Ask him about his trips, and he'll mumble an awkward demurral, referring you to an essay he wrote. Or he'll continually interrupt himself, saying, "Aww, gosh -- I'm probably telling you more than you want to know."

And yet: He has traveled to New Guinea, where he says he became the first to record native singers. And he introduced rare flower seeds from Asia to the United States, where they were cloned and reproduced. Along the way he went on a date with the future Jackie Kennedy, treated Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, worked as an endocrinologist at Johns Hopkins, released a book of photography of India and had two exhibits about the natural world -- fossils and seaweed -- tour American museums. He also studied next to Einstein once in a library at Princeton and apprenticed in the kitchen of Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

"It's kind of like a Woody Allen movie . . . 'Zelig'! " says Hopkins professor Norman Barker, referring to the 1983 mockumentary about a man who finds himself in one famous scene after another. "That is Giraud Foster."

Now, Foster is beginning to donate the artifacts of his restless roaming. Sixty-one of his carvings and friezes, dating from 6th century B.C. to the 4th century A.D., will make up more than half of the "Faces of Ancient Arabia" exhibit that runs from today to Sept. 7 at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

He arrives in the gallery one recent afternoon in a blue polo, white chinos and Hunter Thompson-style aviators that conceal his eyes. He betrays his age only in a belabored gait; otherwise, he bears the haphazard look of a young traveler roving from couch to couch -- pinkish cheeks and white wispy eyebrows angled askew like little down feathers bursting from a couch.

"Hey, you!" he shouts after a museum staffer who has relieved him of his paisley bag. "Don't carry that -- I'll wrestle ya for it!" And so, taking it back, he strolls through a gallery of his past, passing a flowing-haired figure of fertility rising from a bed of leaves, a 2nd-century alabaster ringer for the maiden of the Starbucks logo, one of the gifts to Foster from the king.

Foster might have inherited his fondness for worldly expedition. His great-great-grandfather, Andrew Foster, glided across the Atlantic from Scotland in his own ship before becoming a major New York merchant in the Brazilian coffee trade. His grandfather, also named Giraud (pronounced gi-ROH), collected exotica from around the world, including mummies and scarabs from Egypt.

As a boy, Foster visited his grandfather's Lenox, Mass., estate, known as Bellefontaine, a few times a year. "I used to play with the tadpoles in the pond out there," he recalls. "I'll never forget putting thyroid hormone in there to make them develop faster. Of course, they all died. But somewhere or other, that was a spur in my life that got me doing thyroid research later on."

His wife, Carolyn, never used to buy the stories, especially the one involving the Mississippi: A friend of Foster's, whose father was high up in the orange business, arranged for them to go down the river in a boat followed by a group of caretakers. The young boys were harnessed to a pole in the middle of the raft so they wouldn't drown, and each night they were taken to a local house, where some nice old ladies would feed them.

"I didn't necessarily believe it," says Carolyn, a former English professor. But several years ago, the couple went down to Missouri to study Victorian architecture and came upon a woman who tended the historical society. "She had stood on the wharf there where the boys had left from and she remembered it," Carolyn says. "And I asked her enough to convince myself that she was totally in control of her information. . . . I couldn't beat it."