Lew York Tribune 
FREER MUSEUM I 
SOON TO BE BUHT 
IN WASHINGTON 
Ground To Be Broken for 
$1,000,000 Structure Be¬ 
fore Next Summer. 
A TALK WITH THE 
GIVER ON HIS PLANS 
Point of View from Which He 
Regards Oriental and 
American Art. 
By ROYAL CORTISSOZ. 
The art museum which Charles L. ! 
Freer, of Detroit, projected for the 
| benefit of the nation and deeded to the 
Smithsonian Institution in 1900 is pres¬ 
ently to take tangible form in Wash¬ 
ington. Announcement was made yester¬ 
day that the donor had completed the 
necessary financial arrangements, that; 
the architect, Charles A. Platt, of this j 
city, was well advanced upon his plans ! 
for the building, and that the erection 
of the latter would be begun in the 
j spring of 1910. It will take probably 
two years to finish the structure and 
| at least another year to install Mr. 
! Freer’s collection. The work will be 
pressed as rapidly as possible, but not > 
too rapidly for the full realization of 
a high ideal. In this great enterprise 
the man Who invented it aims at noth¬ 
ing less than perfection. 
He is the more encouraged in his 
hope to reach that goal for the rea¬ 
son that from the beginning the fates I 
have been kind to him. When he first 
framed his scheme there were, of 
course, many difficulties to be encoun¬ 
tered. Among them were the proper j 
organization of the museum, the choice ' 
I of the right custodians, and, not least j 
! among these problems, the straight- i 
! ening out of the inevitable legalities, 
i How was the exact function of the 
! museum to he secured in perpetuity ? 
It was characteristic of Mr. Roose¬ 
velt, who was in the White House at 
the time, to lend all his sympathy and 
energy to the fulfilment of Mr. Freer’s 
purpose, and with his aid the collector’s 
dream became an accomplished fact.; 
There remained the question of a 
building. That this would not be avail¬ 
able until after the founder’s death j 
long seemed a settled thing. But again j 
the gods were good. To the present ■ 
writer he explained yesterday how it' 
happened. By the sale of a block of) 
shares in the corpqration of Parke, * 
Davis & Co. he suddenly procured the ! 
$1,000,000 which would serve to put ’ 
up the building. At the outset he had .> 
supposed that half that sum would \ 
suffice. But in the interim he has been I 
j adding to his collection until it has 
I more than doubled in bulk. Greater 
\ space was needed. This transaction, 
' not previously thought of, covered the 
lease as if by ( magic. 
, Deo. 5, 191 5 
It is easy to think of things in terms 
of enchantment Avhen Mr. Freer is talk¬ 
ing about his collection and its des¬ 
tiny. which is to say about the purpose 
which both have given to his Me. i 
have known many connoisseurs, but 
never one with a more romantic ardor 
, for the subject that has engaged his 
enthusiasm. “It is such fun,’’ he says 
| -—fun that embraces the joy of pursuit, 
1 the stern pleasures of archaeological re¬ 
search. and, above all, the inspiration 
of beauty. His collection, as has long 
been generally known, is divided into 
two parts, one devoted to Oriental and 
the other to American art, Only for 
Mr. Freer there is no division. As his 
friend Whistler used to say, art is ai’t 
and mathematics is mathematics. All 
art, all real art, is an expression of 
the same universal spirit. When we 
talked of Dewing's work—of which he 
has nearly twoscore examples—he said 
that he had found qualities akin to it 
in the work of the Chinese Emperor 
Hui Tsung, who painted still life and 
the figure and landscape in the eleventh 
century of the Christian era. And this 
led to the story of his initiation into 
the fascinating world of Oriental art. 
Some time in the late Eighties he vis¬ 
ited an exhibition at the Grolier Club, 
where Mr. Hieromichi Shughio was 
showing a few prints by Hokusai. He 
saw in them points of contact with the 
etchings of Whistler, and later talked 
the matter over with Shughio as they 
examined a collection of the Ameri¬ 
can master’s plates. He bought some 
Japanese prints then, jlnd they proved 
the beginning of his now extraordinary 
Oriental collection. He recalled with 
gayety Whistler’s reception of the news 
of his discovery. “Why I knew the 
Japanese in 1804,” jauntily exclaimed 
the artist, and took Freer off at once 
to see a picture he had painted in that 
ancient time, a picture into which he 
had daintily introduced a print of 
Hiroshige’s. At this period of the col¬ 
lector’s activity the aesthetic motive 
prevailed. He bought works of art be¬ 
cause they were beautiful. He has 
never bought them since for any other 
reason. But delight has promoted 
study, and when the museum at Wash¬ 
ington is opened it will be a monument 
not only to taste but to scholarship. 
The field of Oriental art has been 
widely explored, but it still contains 
tracts as mysterious as they are vast. 
Mr. Freer showed me a magnificent jade 
sceptre, just within a few hours added" 
to his treasures. It was borne by some 
Chinese monarch who reigned two 
thousand years before Christ. What is 
its relation to the tradition of Chinese 
art? What link does it stand for in 
the history of craftsmanship and of 
style? Theses and a thousand other 
questions perplex the present genera¬ 
tion of experts and will perplex the 
! next. But in so far as taking pains 
will do it, Mr. Freer intends that the 
administration of his museum shall 
help to extend human knowledge of his 
subject. He has learned from experi¬ 
ence how tangled are the artistic prob¬ 
lems of the East. Not flair alone, but 
hard study must be given to them be¬ 
fore the collector may hope to know 
what is worth while in his special 
sphere. And in this sphere the riddles 
are sometimes maddeningly hard to 
I’ead. There are paintings which can¬ 
not be identified as to authorship or 
period by ordinary processes. If light 
is ever to be thrown upon their origin 
the student must analyze pigment, fer¬ 
ret out the secrets of manipulation, get 
literally under the skin of the given 
masterpiece, and explain it, so to say, 
from within. At the Freer museum 
there will be the materials for such 
research, and, into the bargain, pe¬ 
culiarly stimulating facilities. 
