ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
very important for a collection of this 
character and seen at the opening it was 
evident at once that the separate rooms 
meet every test that might be asked of 
them. 
For it is to be remembered that the 
Freer collection is three things. In the 
first place, a very great Oriental or, 
more exactly, an Asiatic collection of 
surpassing range and rarity; secondly, 
a Whistler collection unequalled any¬ 
where which, with the Whistler collec¬ 
tion given by the Pennells to the 
Library of Congress, easily makes 
Washington a point of pilgrimage for 
all those interested in the output of one 
of the greatest of American artists; and, 
thirdly, a small but select collection of 
paintings—no sculpture—by a group 
of Americans which includes Abbott 
Thayer, Thomas W. Dewing, Dwight 
W. Tryon, Winslow Homer, George De 
Forest Brush, John Singer Sargent and 
a few others. Since it is probably not 
the policy of the gallery management 
to add to this last named group, it 
represents a sort of closed, if illumi¬ 
nating, chapter in American art, the 
selection revealing Mr. Freer’s own 
personal friendships and early associa¬ 
tions with the American artists repre¬ 
sented rather than, as is so markedly 
the ease with the great Oriental collec¬ 
tion, indicating an effort to cover the 
entire range of historic artistic achieve¬ 
ment in painting, bronzes, ceramics and 
sculpture in stone. 
The Whistler collection itself does, 
however, take on a historic character 
of a fairly wide range, and is easily the 
most notable display, as the public is 
likely to view it, in the gallery, and it 
is given a special dramatic interest since 
the collection possesses the actual “ Pea¬ 
cock Room” once the property of F. 
R. Leyland, the celebrated Liverpool 
shipping magnate who in the early ’70’s 
had erected an elaborate mansion at 
Prince’s Gate, London, in which the 
Peacock Room was the dining room. 
Leyland, by reason of his purchase of 
Whistler’s early masterpiece “La Prin- 
cesse du Pays de la Porcelaine,” which 
he placed over the fireplace in the dining 
room, was persuaded by the artist to 
allow him to re-decorate the room in 
order to make it a beautiful setting for 
a “beautiful picture,” as Whistler put 
it. And, consequently, as arranged at 
the opening of the gallery the American 
pictures of Thayer, Dewing, Sargent, 
Tryon, Homer, Melchers and De Forest 
Brush were given four rooms while the 
Whistler selections filled four rooms with 
the Peacock Room as the more or less 
radiant fifth. All the other nine rooms 
and the corridors were given to the 
Oriental collections, which disposition 
of the works possessed by the gallery 
represents very practically the relative 
importance of each group. For, of 
course, when it is remembered that the 
Oriental objects alone number nearly 
five thousand, that in addition to the 
sixty-two Whistler oils, there are forty- 
four water colors, thirty-two pastels, 
and the hundreds of drawings and etch¬ 
ings and lithographs, it can easily be 
seen that only a small portion of the 
Freer collection can be exhibited from 
time to time. Moreover, the gallery 
in only showing a small portion of the 
collection, is following the habit of Mr. 
Freer developed in his home in Detroit, 
growing out of his acceptance of the 
methods of his friends in Japan and 
China, where it is not the wont to 
exhibit all the treasures that any col¬ 
lector may have at any one time, but, 
instead, to bring them out for special 
occasions and in small numbers under 
conditions that allow them to reveal all 
the beauty that is in them. 
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