Charles Lang Freer was an American art collector and donor of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington.
Background
Charles Lang Freer was born on February 25, 1854, at Kingston, New York. He was the son of Jacob R. and Phoebe Jane (Townsend) Freer.
He was of French- Huguenot ancestry and was descended from one of the original patentees of New Paltz, New York.
Education
Charles attended a public scool.
Career
After attending a public school, Freer entered the employ of a cement-manufacturing company near his home. At the age of sixteen, he was a clerk in the general store of John C. Brodhead at Kingston, in a building which also housed the offices of the New York, Kingston & Syracuse Railroad, and in 1873, he was appointed to the office of paymaster of this railroad.
In August 1876, when Frank G. Hecker became general superintendent of the Eel River Railroad with headquarters at Logansport, Indiana, he selected Freer to accompany him and to serve as the first accountant for the company, and later as its treasurer.
Upon the absorption of the Eel River Railroad by the Wabash three years later, Freer and Hecker left the company and went to Detroit, Michigan, where they lived for many years. There they organized the Peninsular Car Works, which later became the Peninsular Car Company and later still was merged with the Michigan Car Company.
Of this corporation, Senator James McMillan was chairman, and Freer was one of the managing directors. In 1899, Freer took an active part in consolidating thirteen of the car-building manufactories of the country in the organization known as the American Car & Foundry Company, but a year later he retired permanently from active business, and from that time to the end of his life devoted the greater part of his leisure to collecting works of art.
Freer had begun collecting in the early eighties, and among the first works, he acquired were Whistler etchings. When a little later he bought Whistler pastels, he became eager to know the artist. The meeting was extremely unconventional and led to a remarkable friendship.
From the nineties on Freer never went to Europe without seeing Whistler in London or Paris, and gradually he acquired his paintings, etchings, or drawings, either directly from him or from owners willing to sell. From this friendship also undoubtedly sprang Freer’s increasing interest in Oriental art and his theories concerning art which not only colored but determined the direction of his collecting.
From 1900 to 1903, Freer spent much time in Europe; the following six years he spent chiefly in Asia and the Near East, adding through personal exploration and investigation to his collection of Oriental art, which by 1910 included over 8, 000 rare and beautiful objects.
Then his health failed and his travels ended, but to the last his interest in his collection and its development never ceased. His association with Senator McMillan, which undoubtedly increased his interest in the National Capital, and his promise to Whistler that his works should sometime be housed in a public gallery, preferably in Washington, doubtless led to his generous gifts to the nation.
In 1906, he gave his entire collection, supplemented later by a sum of money to be expended for the erection of the Freer Gallery at Washington and for the establishment of a fund for additional acquisitions. At the time the deed was transferred it was understood that the collection should not pass out of Freer’s possession during his lifetime, but he himself later withdrew this condition, and the building on the Mall designed under his direction was almost completed at the time of his death.
Achievements
Views
By comparing the works of the great masters of the East with those of Whistler and a few other Western artists, he thought he discerned a definite relationship between them. In support of these theories, and as a sensitive art lover, he succeeded in bringing together, as the late Ernest L. Fenollosa has said, “first, by far the largest and most representative series of all the pictorial work of James McNeill Whistler that now exists in any one group, or that it is physically possible shall ever exist; second, the most comprehensive and aesthetically valuable collection anywhere known of all the ancient glazed pottery of the world, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese; and third, the finest and best unified group of masterpieces by the greatest Chinese and Japanese painters of all ages that exists outside of Japan, with the possible exception of that in the Boston Art Museum. ”