obituary 
Charles L. Freer 
oo-iS' (9 9 
Charles L. Freer, the eminent 
art collector, who presented his 
collections to the Smithsonian In¬ 
stitute at Washington for the Nation 
and gave $1,000,000 for the erect¬ 
ion of a Gallery to house the same, 
died suddenly in this city Sept. 25 
last. The funeral took place at his 
birthplace, Kingston, N. Y. Sept. 29 
last. 
Mr. Freer was born in 1853 and 
never married. He received a public 
school education and, about 1879, 
went to Logansport, Ind. , where, 
with his fellow collector, Mr. Frank 
Hecker of Detroit (in which city Mr. 
Freer made his home and lived among 
his art treasures for many years), 
he engaged in railroading and amas¬ 
sed a tidy fortune. Later the two 
men started the Peninsula car comp¬ 
any, the first of its kind in the 
West, out of which they made many 
mill ions, 
About 1895, Mr. Freer began to 
collect art works, and devoted his 
time to the building up of his col¬ 
lections, especially of the works 
of Whistler, of whose art he was a 
devotee, and later still of Oriental 
porcelains, pottery, pictures and 
prints. He travelled much in Japan 
and China in pursuit of fine speci¬ 
mens of the art of those countries, 
and visited England and France an¬ 
nually, where he added to his Whist¬ 
lers. He bought the famous Whistler 
Peacock room decorations, and trans¬ 
ferred them to his Detroit home. 
Mr. Freer, unlike most of his fellow 
American art collectors, did not 
neglect American art and bought ju¬ 
diciously examples of Tryon, Dewing, 
and other tonalists. His collection 
including a rare assemblage of Cor- 
ean, Chinese, Japanese, Babylonian 
and Central Asian potteries, when 
presented to the Smithsonian some 
five years ago, was valued at a mil¬ 
lion. One of the most valuable ob¬ 
jects in the Freer collection is an 
Egyptian Mss. of the Bible, purch¬ 
ased in 1906 from an Arab dealer 
near Cairo, which has been trans¬ 
lated by Prof. Sanders of the Uni¬ 
versity of Michigan. 
