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The Freer Gallery, Washington DC |
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The Freer Gallery of Art was the first museum of the Smithsonian Institution to be dedicated to the fine arts. The Freer and the neighboring Arthur M. Sackler Gallery together form the national museum of Asian art for the United States.
Besides Asian art, the Freer houses a collection of 19th- and early 20th-century American art, including the world's largest number of works by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). The Freer is committed to expanding public knowledge of the collections through exhibitions, research and publications. |
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Collection and exhibitions
Art in the Freer Gallery spans 6,000 years and many different cultures, reflecting the taste of its founder, Charles Lang Freer (1856–1919), a Detroit businessman. In his collecting, Freer followed the principles of English Aestheticism, or "art for art's sake," as it was more commonly known. Freer believed in the universality of beauty, and he delighted in finding aesthetic affinities among the art of such divergent cultures as Neolithic China and the 19th-century United States.
Since his death, Freer's legacy of approximately 7,500 works of Asian art has grown through purchase and gift to 28,314 objects, and the collection includes art from China, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Central Asia.
There are also small but important groups of Early Christian art and art from Egypt.
Freer considered his American holdings of 1,582 works by Whistler, Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1850–1938), Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925), Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921), John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) and others to be complete, and so there have been no additions to the American works Freer collected.
Only a small percentage of the gallery holdings are on view at any one time, and selections of light-sensitive paintings and metal ware also are changed regularly. The single permanent exhibition is "Harmony in Blue and Gold, The Peacock Room," an opulent interior made by Thomas Jeckyll and decorated by Whistler for a London town house in 1876–1877 and brought to the United States by Freer.
History of the Freer Gallery
Freer, a self-taught connoisseur, began purchasing American art in the 1880s. He limited his selections to the work of a few living artists and concentrated especially on American expatriate James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). Freer eventually formed the world's most-important collection of Whistler paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints.
Whistler's aesthetic sense was influenced significantly by the Chinese and Japanese textiles, ceramics, screens and other arts that he could purchase from London dealers of the time. With Whistler's encouragement, Freer also began to collect Asian art in 1887 and, by the time of his death, he had assembled a pre-eminent group of masterpieces that he purchased in Asia, as well in Paris, London and New York.
In 1904, Freer offered his art collection to the nation, to be held in trust by the Smithsonian Institution. Its governing body, the Board of Regents, wished to maintain the Smithsonian's scientific focus and hesitated to accept the gift. Only after President Theodore Roosevelt took a personal interest in the matter did the regents finally accept the deed of gift in 1906. Freer then devoted his time to augmenting and refining his gift of art. Afflicted by debilitating illness, Freer died in 1919 without ever seeing the gallery. It opened to the public in 1923.
Location and admission
The Freer gallery, located on Jefferson Drive at 12th Street S.W., on the National Mall in Washington, is open every day except Dec. 25. Hours are from 10 AM until 5:30 PM, and admission is free.
To know more About the Freer gallery: Telephone: 202.633.4880 (Monday-Friday 8:30-5); 24-hour recording: 202.633.0519; TTY: 202.786.2374 (responses sent during business hours) |
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