PACIFIC ERA 
63 
A wonderful art, this of pottery, bristling with suggestions of scientific dis¬ 
covery, aesthetic enthusiasms, graces of domestic service, democratic brother¬ 
hoods of labor. It is the romantic transmission of such social secrets across the 
ages that can be fully studied only in Mr. Freer’s charmed galleries. This 
very year he has discovered ancient objects of Egyptian ware among pre¬ 
historic Buddhist hill-heaps in Ceylon. The neutral mottlings of Japanese tea- 
jars point back to dull tawny glazes such as the Sung masters, Ririomin and 
Kakki, loved to couple with their pictorial monochromes. Still earlier Chinese 
blues and greens and grays refer far back to the peacock azures of Persian or 
proto-Babylonian, and it is no loss to these shootings of tone through tone, 
that they are spilled over the surfaces of forms that rival the lovely lines of 
Greek urns. 
If now, we examine more minutely the mysteries of light-play in the 
composition of these tones, we shall see the secret chord that pulls Whistler’s 
painting into their harmonic scheme. The under-clays,—gray, yellow, olive, 
brick-red, or stone-brown,—which I have already compared to old papers, are 
full of the dissolved light of opaque surfaces, a diffused luminosity almost 
peachy and down-like. And it is this sort of cool depth which Whistler, even 
in his oil work, loved to prepare upon the tea-jar grounds of his canvasses. The 
whole subject was first painted in undertones of opaque darks. But when this 
ground was thoroughly dry, and sometimes after years of waiting for the vital 
inspiration, these clay-like shadows were overtouched by him with light, swift 
scumblings from a broad, dry brush,—translucent films half-concealing, half- 
revealing. Whistler patiently let time help paint his finest effects, knowing well 
that all washed surfaces, with whatever tintings of zinc or white-lead, are not 
really opaque, but only a soft integument that will come to reveal, like human 
skin, all the more ravishingly, what it seemed designed to hide. Small wonder 
that his landscapes and portraits, set beside a Persian jar, the vortex of a 
Chinese saucer, or a muffled Kioto cup, are seen so perfectly to balance that 
the two ranges of harmony become identical. And this identity is all the 
more striking when what we compare with a low-toned Wbistler is a box- 
surface of the old pictorial potters, Kenzan and Koyetsu. The exact effects of 
transfused lights which the former has mastered in his oils; these glorify in 
eternal opaque enamels. And this technical identification by Mr. Freer of arts 
apparently so diverse, is doubtless the ground of his belief in the special aduca- 
tional value which his collection will have for students in Washington. 
The third component of Mr. Freer’s vast museum, is his almost unrivalled 
series of Chinese and Japanese paintings, by the greatest masters of all ages. 
Perhaps it is this part which the critics of the present least appreciate, just be¬ 
cause, one suspects its aesthetic value so far transcends the narrow practice of 
our day. Here the bold originality of Mr. Freer’s view will eventually be seen 
to count. The prejudice that oriental painting is so remote from our problems 
that it must remain only a curiosity, is refuted by the influence it has already ac- 
