A Perfect Harmony: The American Collection in the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art

Description:

American art occupied a key role in the collecting philosophy of Charles Lang Freer, the founder of one of the world’s foremost museums of Asian art. Indeed, it was an American, the expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler, who shaped Freer’s cross-cultural aesthetic philosophy. The two men met in 1890 and over the next thirteen years, Whistler helped Freer amass what the artist called “a fine collection of Whistlers!!—perhaps The collection.” Whistler also encouraged Freer to visit Asia and seek out “the story of the beautiful,” from which his own art was descended. Freer thus conceived of his museum as a monument to Whistler and the “points of contact” between East and West, ancient and modern, that he believed the artist’s work embodied. Freer’s relationships with Whistler and other American artists are the focus of A Perfect Harmony.

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