Freer Gallery of Art

Whistler's Peacock Room, a London dining room lavishly painted in blue and gold and later moved across the Atlantic, is the best-known treasure of the Freer Gallery of Art. The Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer acquired it, and he gave his collection to the Smithsonian, which opened this gallery on the National Mall in 1923 as its first museum devoted to fine art.

Freer collected two things side by side: art from across Asia and work by American artists of his own time. Visitors find Chinese bronzes and jades, Japanese screens and scrolls, Korean ceramics, and paintings and manuscripts from South Asia and the Islamic world. The American galleries centre on James McNeill Whistler, alongside painters such as Thomas Dewing and Abbott Thayer. Under the terms of Freer's gift, works from his collection are not lent to other museums.

The granite building by Charles A. Platt is arranged around an open courtyard. An underground passage links it to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and together the two form the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art.