ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
being developed in other museums of 
America of giving such immediate 
service to those who come in contact 
with the art exhibited that they will be 
unable to go away without really being 
illuminated, even compelled, as it 
were, to understand what it is they 
have seen. That specialists may enjoy 
special facilities in the Freer galleries 
and workrooms is not enough; it is 
important that the casual visitor be 
made to feel what Mr. Freer hoped 
every American would feel in the 
presence of masterpieces of other cults, 
other climes, other civilizations, mostly 
y Asiatic. 
This apart, but it is not a negligible 
matter, the Freer gallery cannot but 
make a most delightful impression on 
all who are familiar with the art 
museum world of America. In the 
first place the building, designed by 
Charles A. Platt of New York, the long¬ 
time friend and adviser of Mr. Freer, 
fully and adequately meets the ideas of 
Mr. Freer as to how his collection 
should be displayed in public. Then, 
since the architect was in close touch 
with Mr. Freer up to the time of his 
death in 1919, from the day when the 
collection was offered to the nation, 
December 27th, 1904, though the actual 
acceptance did not occur until the 
Annual Meeting of the Board of 
Regents of the Smithsonian Institution 
on January 24, 1906,—and what hap¬ 
pened in the meantime is a very 
interesting and dramatic story in which 
President Roosevelt played a leading 
part—the consequence is that so far as 
housing and displaying a collection goes 
the architect has triumphed. Moreover, 
the design, which is a simple one-storied 
Italianate palazzo—really a Florentine 
palazzino—with a partly concealed 
basement containing the administra¬ 
tive offices, an auditorium and the 
working rooms and ateliers, so far as 
its exterior goes, adds another beautiful 
building to the long list of fine struc¬ 
tures with which American architects 
are now glorifying the supreme vistas 
of the capital—never so beautiful as 
under the blue skies and the greenery 
and the flower bedecked reaches of 
May—and is in picturesque contrast 
to the older buildings nearest to it. 
These are the relatively new buildings 
of the Department of Agriculture, a large 
and elaborate Renaissance structure, 
Suggesting the great days of the Chicago 
World’s Fair, the old red Romanesque 
mid-Victorian turreted building which 
once housed the National Museum, and 
the new classical and somewhat formal 
and overweighted structure given over 
to the parent institution, the Smith¬ 
sonian, of which the Freer Gallery of Art, 
as well as the National Gallery of Art, 
is an important part. 
Compared with the older buildings 
the granite simplicity of the Freer 
gallery has a special charm and the 
rusticated exterior, far from severe in 
color or design, with the dignified 
entrances, is an earnest of a very happy 
treatment of the interior which allows 
whatever may be exhibited at any given 
time in any of the eighteen rooms to 
make an intimate appeal. For Mr. 
Platt has developed the exhibition floor 
of the gallery, the piano nobile as the 
Italians would call it, around a central 
open court, gay with flowers and 
foliage and a tinkling fountain, a lovely 
patio which gives light to the corridors 
and to certain of the eighteen rooms, 
none of them over large and all lighted 
from above, which run around the four 
sides of the square and in which the 
treasures of the collection are displayed 
so sparingly that there is no crowding 
and everything shown can be seen to 
full advantage. This arrangement is 
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