Freer Gallery of Art
The Freer Gallery of Art is a major art museum and part of the Smithsonian Institution . The collection includes art from East Asia (China, Korea, Japan), South Asia , India , Southeast Asia , Egypt , Greece , the ancient Near East , as well as American works. Together with the Sackler Gallery , the Freer Gallery forms the Smithsonian Museums of Asian Art . The gallery opened to the public in 1923. It's located on the south side of the National Mall in Washington, DC
history
The gallery was founded by Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), a manufacturer of railroad cars from Detroit, who donated his collections and funds to the United States to build the building. The gallery, designed in the Italian Renaissance style, was built with granite and marble. It was influenced by the Italian palazzi Freer had seen on his travels and designed by the American architect Charles A. Platt . When it opened in 1923, it was the Smithsonian's first museum to be devoted to the visual arts. The Freer was also the first Smithsonian Museum to be born from the legacy of a private collector. The condition for the donation was that Freer kept full control of the collection until his death. The Smithsonian hesitated at first because of the requirement, but the advocacy of President Teddy Roosevelt got the project going. In the following years, through donations and acquisitions, the collections grew to almost three times the size of Freer's legacy.
Maintenance of the collection began long before the museum existed when Charles Lang Freer hired the Japanese painting restorer to look after his works and prepare them for their future home as part of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1932 the Freer Gallery of Art hired a full-time Japanese restorer, creating what would later become the East Asian Painting Conservation Studio . The specialized laboratory and the first use of scientific methods in the study of art at the Smithsonian began in 1951 when the chemist Rutherford J. Gettens moved from the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University to the Freer Gallery. The East Asian Painting Conservation Studio and the laboratory were merged in 1990 to form the Conservation & Scientific Research department .
The Freer Gallery is also a major research facility. The archive of the Freer Gallery includes, among other things, the extensive estate of the important archaeologist and excavator Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) who worked in Persepolis , Pasargadae , Samarra , Paikuli and many other places , the personal estate of Charles Lang Freer, and extensive documents the estate of the archaeologist Myron B. Smith (1897–1970) and a large part of the estate of photographs by Antoin Sevruguin (c.1830–1933).
Collections
Visitor favorites include Chinese porcelain and painting , Korean porcelain and earthenware, ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern archaeological objects, Japanese wall screens, Indian and Persian manuscripts, and Buddhist sculptures from different regions and ages. The gallery's artwork ranges from Neolithic to Modern Art , with a variety of painted works of art mostly from the Song Dynasty , Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasties of China.
A highlight of James McNeill Whistler's work is the Peacock Room, a dining room designed for the British shipowner Frederick Richards Leyland . In 1876, Whistler richly decorated the room with a blue and gold peacock pattern. After the owner's death, Freer bought the entire room, shipped it to the United States and exhibited it in the Freer Gallery.
gallery
- China
- India
- Egypt
- Japan
- Nepal
- Persia
- Korea
.jpg)
- Syria
- Kushan
Individual evidence
- ↑ Conservation & Scientific Research ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Whistler
- ↑ Peacock Room ( Memento of the original from December 9, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Web links
Coordinates: 38 ° 53 '17.1 " N , 77 ° 1' 38.4" W.
