Qualla: Freer Gallery of Art

Freer Gallery of Art: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries, CC BY-SA 2.0. James McNeill Whistler told Charles Lang Freer, in effect, that there was no point in collecting Whistlers if no one was going to see them. Whistler had decorated a dining room for the Liverpool ship owner Frederick Leyland in the early 1870s with a riot of blue and gold peacocks against gilded leather, and the room had become famous in London art circles. Leyland and Whistler quarreled bitterly over the bill and the painter's liberties with the original design. Leyland died. The room sat for decades. In 1904, Freer bought the entire room, had it carefully dismantled and shipped from Princes Gate in London to his house in Detroit, and reinstalled it there. When he gave his collection to the Smithsonian in 1906, the Peacock Room came with it. It now occupies a permanent gallery on the south side of the Mall in Washington, painted gilded peacocks still glaring at each other across the room that started a feud.

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Image: Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries | CC BY-SA 2.0

Freer Gallery of Art: A Railroad-Car Maker Becomes a Connoisseur

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown artist, Public domain. Charles Lang Freer made his fortune manufacturing railroad cars in Detroit, the Michigan Car Company being one of the most successful suppliers to a rapidly expanding national rail network. He retired wealthy at the age of forty-six in 1900. He had been collecting art since the 1...

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Image: Unknown artist | Public domain

Freer Gallery of Art: The Roosevelt Letter

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Another Believer, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1904 Charles Moore, an aide to Michigan Senator James McMillan and later the chairman of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, persuaded Freer to leave his collection permanently to the federal government in Washington. Freer offered the Smithsonian his collection, a buil...

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Image: Another Believer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Freer Gallery of Art: Charles Platt's Building

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lev Yakupov from Russia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Freer hired the architect Charles Adams Platt to design the building, which he wanted to feel Italian rather than imperial: a Florentine palazzo of granite, with a central interior courtyard open to the sky, lined with arcades, and surrounded on the ground floor by galleries arra...

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Image: Lev Yakupov from Russia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Freer Gallery of Art: Peacock Room

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, Public domain. The Peacock Room remains the Freer's most famous single object. Whistler's original design for Frederick Leyland's London dining room transformed an existing space of carved Cordoba leather and antique shelving into a unified visual statement of blue and gold. Whistler painted fo...

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Image: Daderot | Public domain

Freer Gallery of Art: Twenty-Six Thousand Objects

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ryōzen, Public domain. The Freer collection today spans six thousand years and most of Asia. Egyptian stone sculpture and ancient Near Eastern ceramics, Chinese paintings from the Tang through the Qing dynasties, Korean celadons and ink paintings, Japanese folding screens (including some of the finest ...

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Image: Ryōzen | Public domain