1 
INSTALL FREER 
ART TREASURE 
Woman in Charge of $5,- 
000,000 Collection Be¬ 
ing Housed Here. 
The $5,000,000 Freer collection, re¬ 
puted the most costly art gift ever 
made to the American government, 
now is in process of installation in 
the $1,25'0,000 stone gallery hearing 
the same name and standing west 
of the Smithsonian Institution in 
the Mall. 
Placing of the hundreds of pieces 
is being directed by Miss Katherine 
N. Rhoades, formerly secretary to 
Charles Lang Freer, millionaire 
manufacturer and art collector of 
Kingston, N. Y., and Detroit, by 
whose gifts and bequests the beau¬ 
tiful gallery has been erected and 
is being filled. 
It • will be months before all is 
suitably arranged within the clas¬ 
sic structure and before the land¬ 
scape treatment is completed, and 
not until then ■ will the public be 
enabled to view the collection. Miss 
Rhoades came here from Detroit 
Tuesday. She possesses more inti¬ 
mate knowledge of the collection 
than anyone else and so has been 
entrusted with its disposition. 
The Freer Chinese art group is 
declared to be the finest in the 
world, while the connoisseur’s inter¬ 
est in Japanese art resulted in as¬ 
sembly of Nipponese pieces nearly 
as noteworthy. Of equal interest 
are the more than 100 paintings and 
etchings by Whistler, ranking with 
Sargent in the lead of American 
masters. Freer and Whistler were 
great friends, and the former ac¬ 
quired the latter’s superlative 
works with the implied under- 
" -A ' - ( 1 
standing that they should go into 
a public g'allery, preferably in the 
District of Columbia. The Freer 
gallery, to be administered as part 
of the National Gallery of Art, un¬ 
der the Smithsonian regents, is the 
fulfillment of this trust. 
The Leylapd Peacock Room, for¬ 
mer pride of the founder of the 
Leyland Steamship Line, will live 
again in a special chamber in tho 
gallery. The rare and colorful fit¬ 
tings of this apartment were taken 
to Detroit and thence brought to 
Washington. American paintings 
selected by Freer, which he believed 
would carry on the Whistler tradi¬ 
tion, will have places of honor. 
Visitors Are Expected. 
It is expected that the gallery 
will be a Mecca for pilgrimages of 
artists and scholars from every 
civilized country. Its beauty is 
bound to impress even the lay ob¬ 
server, but its true treasures are 
for the initiated. 
The building was designed by 
Charles A. Platt, New York archi¬ 
tect; is of stone throughout, and 
absolutely fireproof. Platt will in¬ 
spect the reproduction of his plans 
on a visit here today and tomorrow. 
Among the recent visitors to the 
gallery was Sydney C. Cockerell, 
director of the Fitzwilliam Muse¬ 
um, at Cambridge, Eng., and a rec¬ 
ognized authority on art matters. 
Cockerell was also taken through 
the Lincoln Memorial. His one 
comment upon leaving that marvel¬ 
ous edifice was: “You’ve hit the 
bull’s-eye this time.” 
