ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
country and did symbolize Leyland in 
the fighting peacocks, one of them 
standing in a pile of golden coins, was 
unable to overcome the Eastlakian 
perpendicular effects of the numerous 
shelvings in gilded wood, devised by 
Norman Shaw the architect, and he had 
also to allow for the blue and white 
hawthorne vases and bowls with which 
Leyland had filled his shelves and plate 
mouldings. Today there is no real blue 
and white on the shelves. As was the 
case at the Freer home in Detroit, 
where the Peacock Room was first set 
up, the Freer treasures of rarer Oriental 
faience have been drawn on for the 
greens and turquoise and browns and 
reds of celebrated kilns and these, in a 
way, fit in better with the Whistler 
decorations, though there are one or 
two extraordinary jarring notes that 
will naturally lead to those differences 
acrimonious and otherwise which this 
“only mural” of Whistler has ever 
aroused. The Pennells are very fair 
to Leyland as a Maecenas and patron 
of art and self-made man of general 
culture, very like Mr. Freer himself. 
In fact both men had much in common, 
quite aside from their friendship for 
Whistler which, in the case of Mr. 
Freer, continued until his very last 
moments, and it is a very curious 
commentary on. the fact that life is short 
and fleeting, and art is long and a great 
many other things, to note that Leyland 
lives entirely in memory simply because 
of the fact that Whistler re-decorated 
a very ordinary dining room for him, 
and that Mr. Freer also is forgotten as 
a very able and successful business man 
of the type that Emerson admired, and 
lives through his relations with Whistler 
and his devotion to the great art of 
China, Korea and Japan. 
With one-half of the gallery rooms 
given over to the Orient a fair idea is 
conveyed as to what the collector and 
the curators believe is the real sig¬ 
nificance of the Freer collection, taken 
as a whole. For one thing easily the 
greatest Oriental collection of its kind 
anywhere, the Freer gallery tells to 
the world what is generally admitted by 
dealers and collectors that, whether or 
not the great collections of European art 
now possessed by America surpass those 
of Europe, the great collection of Asi¬ 
atic art and especially Chinese art now 
owned here do go ahead of anything 
owned abroad. It is today necessary 
for the foreign student, if he wishes to 
study Chinese art, to visit the great 
museums of New York, Boston and 
Philadelphia and, particularly, to come 
to the Freer gallery if he wishes to see 
Chinese paintings dating from noo 
B. C., jades from the Han period from 
206 B. C. to 221 A. D. and all the way 
down to the eighteenth century, with 
superb examples of the rare jade 
plaques and scimiters and sceptres of 
of the T’ang dynasty A. D. 618, with 
bronzes of all these rare periods, Budd¬ 
histic sculptures in stone in the large 
and in the small, and the greatest of 
Chinese scrolls, in color, as well as in 
sepia monocromes, the superb originals 
of that style of painting that Japan in¬ 
herited through Korea. While in the 
ceramics all those colors that the 
Chinese poetize themselves in calling 
them “Liquid Dawns” and “Liquid 
Moonlights,” vases of the Sung and 
Ming periods in the bean blossom reds, 
the egg plant purples, the apple green 
reds, the oxbloods, are in the collection 
and such shimmering things as the Han 
mortuary pottery running back to the 
second century B. C. encrusted with a 
pearly iridescent tone of greenish moon¬ 
light effects, while the Korean mortuary 
pottery, a little later, represents a glaze 
untarnished and unaffected of a deli- 
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