PACIFIC ERA 
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exist:—second, the most comprehensive and aesthetically valuable collection 
anywhere known of all the ancient glazed pottery of the world, Egyptian, 
Babylonian, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese:—and third, 
the finest and best unified group of masterpieces by the greatest Chinese and 
Japanese painters of all ages that exists outside of Japan, with the possible 
exception of that in the Boston Art Museum. 
The limitations in this grouping are obvious at first sight. Sculpture is 
practically omitted. The whole great world of European painting finds no 
place, except in its greatest modern representative. Metal is excluded from the 
list of materials. Even in ceramics, the important field of porcelain is not 
touched, and in the varied lines of Far Eastern pictorial art, the large and 
popular class of Japanese color prints is not exemplified. This last omission 
is the more remarkable in that, of the Whistler series, the prints, in all man¬ 
ners, form a conspicuous member. 
But this narrowness, as it may appear to the ordinary student, though deli¬ 
berately adopted by Mr. Freer, does not imply any arbitrary whim upon his. 
part; rather has it a definite purpose. It is true that he would lay chief claim 
for the merits of his treasures on the fact that they embody a single, clearly 
followed taste. But that their vast variety only exemplifies a single set of 
principles is perhaps the strongest ground of our belief in their future educa¬ 
tional value. It is not true, of course, that Mr. Freer would claim his princi¬ 
ples to be the only important ones, but he, of all our collectors, |is the most 
wisely aware of the dangers and weaknesses involved in uncertain aim and 
omnivorous purchase. Just as the total work of a deceased master contains 
a unique message for the world,—so should, Mr. Freer thinks, this summation 
of works whose manifold meanings are all, and narrowly, interrelated. 
As a whole, this collection strikingly illustrates the most conspicuous fact 
in the history of art, that the two great streams of European and Asiatic 
practice, held apart for so many thousand years, have, at the close of the 
nineteenth century, been brought together in a fertile and final union. The 
future historian will look back to the year 1860 as a nodule, a starting point 
of the whole subsequent course in the world’s art. It was about then that 
Japanese art, recently revealed to the West, began its course of freeing our 
Western practice from a narrow realism of long tradition. But the service 
was already a much more positive one than mere freeing. It had creative 
qualities to suggest to any Western master of insight strong enough to avoid 
the mere copying of pungent externals. Millet, Carot and their confreres had 
already been influenced by Japanese prints, which they eagerly went up to 
Paris to buy. The general absence of shadow in the print encouraged their 
explorations of natural values. Manet and others had been helped by oriental 
example in their daring adoption of flat-tones, local darks and lights, new 
angular spacing, and more sympathetic brush-work. But among these groups 
of pioneers in France there was one young American student whose mind was 
