Three Objects the Freer Name Covers, and the One Freer Owned

The Freer name appears on three objects in this archive and means three things

A museum credit line naming a collector tells the reader which fund or gift brought an object in, and it does not always tell them who owned it. Three records in this archive show the difference at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington.

Whistler's Princess is the object Freer chose and owned

Freer bought Whistler's La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine on 20 August 1903 for 3,750 pounds sterling, a few weeks after the painter's death on 17 July 1903. The record gives the contemporary report as 18,240 US dollars.

He signed the deed of gift to the Smithsonian in 1906 and died in 1919, and the bequest was received in 1920. The Gallery opened in 1923 and the painting hangs above the fireplace of the Peacock Room. The record states that the terms of the bequest prohibit the painting from being lent outside the Gallery.

The canteen came from a dealer 22 years after Freer died

The Freer Canteen was bought from the New York dealer Hagop Kevorkian in 1941, and the Smithsonian's record gives the credit line as a purchase from the Charles Lang Freer Endowment. Its earlier chain is thin: the Gallery's provenance names Prince Filippo Andrea Doria of Genoa to 1845, then the London collector George Eumorfopoulos, who died in 1939, then Kevorkian. The record states plainly that no owner is documented between Doria and Eumorfopoulos and that no purchase price has been found.

Nothing in the sources consulted suggests Freer ever saw it. He had died twenty-two years earlier.

The d'Arenberg Basin was bought 36 years after the bequest and tells a thinner story still

The d'Arenberg Basin was acquired in 1955 as F1955.10 using the Charles Lang Freer Endowment, the fund set up by his own bequest. It was made for the Ayyubid sultan al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub between 1247 and 1249, and later stood in the Brussels collection of the Dukes of Arenberg, who lent it to exhibitions in Paris in 1903 and Munich in 1910.

From the Munich show to the Gallery's purchase the record documents no owner and no dealer for 45 years. A European coat of arms engraved on the base is probably eighteenth century, and the Gallery's own 1975 catalogue says it is not the Arenberg arms.

Why an endowment bought what the collector could not have

Freer proposed to President Theodore Roosevelt that he give the nation his collection, a building and an endowment for acquiring fine examples of Oriental, Egyptian and Near Eastern art, according to Wikipedia's account of the founding. That endowment is the reason the Gallery could buy in 1941 and 1955 under his name.

The same account says the terms of the gift allow only the permanent collection to be shown in the Gallery and none of it to be exhibited elsewhere. The consequence for research is concrete: the exhibition history of a Freer object is a history of Washington only, and the loan registers that help date other objects' movements are silent on these.

The Kevorkian link runs outside Washington. Cleveland's twelve-sided ewer with sphinxes was bought from Kevorkian in 1945 on the J. H. Wade Fund, four years after the Freer's canteen.