Select a tour and travel around the world with Charles Lang Freer. Browse artifacts, correspondence, and photographs, and learn how his tours of Asia affected his aesthetic philosophy and collecting practice.


Period postcards collected by Russell Hamilton, illustrating sites visited by Freer.

Seeing Rest and Pleasure

Charles Lang Freer departed for his first journey to Asia in the fall of 1894, hoping to “free myself from work for a year and seek rest and pleasure in the old world.” He crossed the Atlantic, lingering for a month in Italy before going to France, where he embarked from Marseilles, crossed the Mediterranean, and sailed through the Suez Canal to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). From there, he went to India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. He arrived in Japan in the spring of 1895, just in time for the cherry blossoms.

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En route to East Asia, Freer spent several weeks in Paris with James McNeill Whistler, where they discussed “points of contact” between the painter’s work and the art of Japan. (Freer had begun to acquire Japanese woodblock prints in 1892, the same year he purchased The Balcony, his first oil painting by Whistler.) Some years later, Freer recollected that Whistler told him he had come to believe ukiyo-e prints, which were widely popular among European and American collectors and consumers, were merely the “last gasp of a great tradition.” He urged Freer to travel to Asia and seek out older and rarer examples of painting and pottery to harmonize with his growing collection of works by Whistler.

Freer’s first trip to East Asia did not result in significant purchases of artwork. He traveled as a tourist and returned to Detroit with an idealized memory of Japan that markedly affected his development as a collector. From 1897 to 1902 his collections of East Asian—and especially Japanese—ceramics grew to more than 650 objects. He purchased the ceramics chiefly from the New York branch of Yamanaka and Company and from the Boston-based dealer Matsuki Bunkyo. Other significant purchases came through the Paris-based dealer Siegfried Bing or were acquired at auction from American and British collections.

Itinerary for Freer's First Asian Tour, 1894-1895

  • September 1894 [departs Detroit]
  • New York City
  • Genoa [12 days]
  • Tours major cities in Italy [one month, following Platt's itinerary in Italian Gardens]
  • Paris [2 weeks]
  • Marseilles
  • Alexandria
  • Suez Canal to Indian Ocean
  • Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) [December 13]
  • Anuradhapura, Ceylon [December 25, 1894]
  • Overnight steamer across Gulf of Mannar [January 3, 1895]
  • India:
    • Bombay-Ellora-north to Jodhpur-Delhi-Lahore-Peshawar-Khyber Pass-Agra-Fatehpur Sikri-Benares (Varanasi)-Calcutta-Darjeeling-Calcutta
  • Colombo
  • Singapore
  • Hong Kong
  • Shanghai
  • Nagasaki
  • Kobe
  • Kyoto
  • Hozu
  • Nara
  • Uri
  • Nagoya
  • Nikko
  • Kyoto
  • Kobe
  • Detroit

To follow Freer’s travels in more detail, read through his diary entries for 1894 to 1895.

Testing.

  • Freer to Frank Hecker,
    May 27, 1895

    [excerpt of letter] "Jinriksha travelling beats all other methods!! Think of a human horse who will haul you one mile or fifty per day --- whom you never overdrive and seldom tire, with whom you can eat, drink, smoke, and live with pleasure."

    • On September 15, 1894, Freer departed Detroit by train, and stopped briefly in New York City before setting sail on the Kaiser Wilhelm II on September 22. He returned home almost exactly a year later, on September 12, 1895.


    • Picture Title
    • Picture Title

    After disembarking at Genoa, Freer traveled through Italy, spending considerable time in Tuscany, where he methodically toured the villas and gardens described in a recently published book by the architect Charles Adams Platt. Freer would later commission Platt to design the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington.


    • Gateway Boboli Gardens Charles Platt
    • Terrace Wall Villa Castello Charles Platt
    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      October 17, 1894

      [excerpt of letter] "What a great store house of interest this marvelous Italy!!...To fully appreciate this let one first visit the Academy then the Uffizi, next the Pitti – the Loggia dei Signori – the Bobli garden --- afterwards drive to Castello and spend the day at Villa Castello and Villa della Petraia."

    Before embarking for Asia from Marseilles, Freer spent two weeks in Paris, where he visited Whistler and other America artists, including the painter Thomas Dewing and the sculptor Frederick MacMonies. Whistler had been occupied with printing a new sequence of lithographs, and Freer was pleased to purchase twenty "specially choice impressions" directly from the artist.


    • Whistler in the studio
    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      November 16, 1894

      [excerpt of letter] "Paris is very gay, and amusing and interesting and instructive. My first visit to the Luxembourg and first sight of the treasures of the Louvre gave me peculiar sensations---in some instances like that of meeting an old and valued friend and finding him more charming than ever --- and in some cases just the opposite emotions..."

    Although Freer had not previously expressed an interest in Indian art, his sojourn there in January of 1895 made a profound impression. "It's tremendously interesting," he wrote to his business partner, Frank Hecker, shortly before moving on to Japan, by way of Singapore and Hong Kong. His description of the social and economic situation in Bombay is tellingly paternalistic.


    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      January 27, 1895

      [excerpt of letter] "This mixture of stately beauty and simple happy lives, of great wealth and extreme poverty, out of which both high and low seem to extract so much contentment and so little care....The masses here although much poorer are immensely happier than in our country."

    Freer's final destination was Japan, where he spent the spring and summer of 1895. His letters, several written in the Japanese fashion, with brush and ink, detail his delight in the beauty of the Japanese countryside and convey, as well, his disappointment at the encroachments of modernity in cities such as Yokohama and Tokyo. Although Freer did not purchase many works of art on this first trip to Japan, he did enjoy meeting a number of Japanese collectors, artists, and scholars.


    • Freer with rickshaw driver
    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      May 27, 1895

      [excerpt of letter] "Jinriksha travelling beats all other methods!! Think of a human horse who will haul you one mile or fifty per day --- whom you never overdrive and seldom tire, with whom you can eat, drink, smoke, and live with pleasure."

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      June 26, 1895

      This will be text caption text, summary, information. It is possible this text may be considerably long in some cases.

    Itinerary for Freer's Second Asian Tour, 1906–1907

    • November 1906 [departs Detroit]
    • New York City [via SS Hamburg]
    • Naples [December 5, 1906, on SS Oceana]
    • Alexandria [December 8]
    • Cairo [two weeks]
    • Luxor
    • Abu Simel
    • Halfa
    • Aswan
    • Nubia
    • Aswan [January 1, 1907]
    • Wadi Halfa
    • Port Said [January 20]
    • Suez Canal-Gulf of Aden
    • Colombo, Ceylon
    • Singapore
    • Batavia [now Jakarta, Indonesia]
    • Central Java [Prambanan (Borobudur temple complexes)]
    • Singapore
    • Saigon
    • Hong Kong [Easter Sunday, 1907]
    • Canton
    • Shanghai
    • Kobe
    • Yokohama [Hara's villa Sannotani overlooking Yokohama Bay]
    • Tokyo
    • Yokohama
    • San Francisco [July 14, 1907]
    • Detroit

    "I am now planning to leave Detroit....and go via Naples direct to Cairo, spend a few weeks in Egypt, then go to Ceylon for a short stay, thence to Java, returning to America either next Spring or Summer"

    --Freer wrote to Whistler's sister-in-law, Rosalind Birnie Philip, September 24, 1906

    Freer left Detroit for his second trip to Asia on November 11, 1906. He stopped briefly in Kingston, New York, to visit family and then embarked from New York on the SS Hamburg, continuing his journey aboard the SS Oceana, which sailed from Naples to Alexandria, Egypt on December 5. More than ten years had passed since his first Asian tour, but his collections had expanded considerably. After overseeing the merger of thirteen railroad car-buliding companies, Freer retired from business to pursue a life of "active idleness," as he described it. In 1900, he bought a villa in Capri with his friend, the archaeologist Thomas S. Jerome. There, he frequently enjoyed the company of his longtime associate and personal physician from Detroit, Dr. Frederick Wharton Mann, who had purchased the house next to Freer's Villa Castello. In 1906, he accompanied Freer on his trip to Egypt.


    • Charles Lang Freer in Capri,

      c.1901, Photographic print

    • Charles Lang Freer's house at
      33 Ferry Avenue, Detroit.

      c. 1910., Photographic print

    • Charles Lang Freer's Diary,
      November, 1906 - December, 1906

      Text excerpt.......

    • Charles Lang Freer's Diary,
      January, 1907 - July, 1907

      Text excerpt.....

    • Postcard

      Detail of inscription, Tomb no. 4, Egypt, Luxor Valley of the Kings. Freer to his valet, Stephen J. Warring, postmarked December 16, 1906.

    • Postcard (recto)

      Detail of inscription, Tomb no. 4, Egypt, Luxor Valley of the Kings. Freer to his valet, Stephen J. Warring, postmarked December 16, 1906.

    • Postcard

      title / caption / cre

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      January 3, 1907

      [excerpt] "The slow ascent of this grand old river...the stopping at the grand old temples en route, meeting the natives and dreaming of the gods long since dead, places Detroit a long way off."

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      January 3, 1907
      (transcription)
    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      January 11, 1907

      [excerpt] "Upper Egypt delights me. . . . Here fashion and silly gowns are laid aside, tradition, history and early civilization are respected. One forgets the confusion of busier places and. . . happiness is with me. . ."

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      January 11, 1907
      (transcription)
    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      February 3, 1907

      [excerpt] "I felt most keenly a desire to step as rapidly as possible from Egyptian art, in its home, to Japanese art, in its home. This will enable me to compare under best conditions possible the best art of the two countries, and learn more accurately their difference, their qualities, their harmonies and discords."

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      February 3, 1907
      (transcription)

    Freer sailed from Port Said on January 21, 1907 on the North German Lloyd liner the Princess Alice through the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden en route to Ceylon. Writing from Ceylon to his business partner, Frank Hecker, he described his "trip up country" to see Buddhist cave temples and "buried cities" at Matale, Dambulla, Anuradhapura, Mihintale, Polonnaruwa, and Sigiriya. He contrasted this "a rare experience" to the city of Colombo, which had undergone significant modernization since Freer's previous visit some twelve years before.

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      February 15, 1907

      [excerpt] "Ceylon has changed tremendously since my first visit---the forests are rapidly disappearing and plantations taking their place. Colombo has more than trebled and everything, as in Cairo, is booming. Hotels jammed full, steamers crowded etc. etc."

    Freer arrived in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the capital of the Dutch East Indies in early March 1907. He was excited to see Buddhist and Hindu temples at Prambanan and Borobudur, which he had read about in the Reverend George M. Reith's 1897 book A Padre in Partibus: Being Notes and Impressions of a Brief Holiday Tour through Java, the Eastern Archipelago and Siam. After a day spent studying ninth-century Buddhist sculpture at the great Borobudur temple complex, he watched the sunset from atop the stupa. It was, Freer wrote in his diary, the "most beautiful view of my life."


    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      March 21, 1907

      [excerpt] "As you know, I came principally to study the early Hindu and Buddhistic ruins and I hoped to see all on the island. . . .There is nothing like health and plenty of interesting study!"

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      March 21, 1907
      (transcription)

    After arriving in Hong Kong on Easter Sunday of 1907, Freer purchased a number of ceramics from local dealers. His shopping for pottery continued while on a short visit to Canto. It was during this trip to China that Freer acquired many examples of blue-glaze Jun ware that he would later arrange on the south wall of the Peacock Room, just below Whistler's allegorical mural of two fighting peacocks.

    • Planter impressed with character i (one)

      Stoneware with Jun glaze
      HxW: 25.6 x 27.2 cm
      China

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      April 11, 1907

      [excerpt] "I visited many Chinese homes in Canton and old Shanghai in my search for Chinese pottery, and the richness and beauty of their artistic possessions made a deep impression. I secured a number of fine specimens----"

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      April 11, 1907
      (transcription)

    On Freer's second trip to Japan, he was a well-known collector, and he travelled with letters of introduction from the noted scholar Ernest Fenollosa, giving him access to important private collections, including those belonging to Hara Tomitarō, a prominent banker and silk merchant with whom Freer formed an enduring friendship, and Masuda Takashi, whom Freer described as "the richest collector of Japan." During his two months in Japan, Freer made trips to Kobe, Yokohama, Kyoto, and Tokyo. He returned to Detroit, by way of San Francisco, on July 19, 1907.

    • Freer at Sannotani, 1907.

      Freer is in the back row, second from right; his host, Hara Tomitaro is third from right. In the front row are members of Hara's family household, as well as Miss Margaret Watson, a Detroit friend of Freer's who traveled with him in Japan.

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      April 23, 1907

      [excerpt] "At the urgent invitation of Mr. Hara, a prominent banker, manufacturer and collector, I came directly from Kioto to a superb country house overlooking Mississippi Bay in which his collection is stored --- called "San no tani," which he has turned over for my use for as long as I remain in Japan."

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      April 23, 1907
      (transcription)
    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      May 4, 1907

      [excerpt] "Japan is undergoing tremendous changes and in the fierce race for wealth and power, its traditions and aesthetic ideals are being trampled in a mire hideous beyond description."

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      May 4, 1907
      (transcription)

    Itinerary for Freer's Third Asian Tour, 1908

    • Detroit
    • New York City
    • Naples
    • Capri
    • Naples
    • Port Said [May 14, 1908–Mediterranean terminus of Suez Canal]
    • Cairo
    • Alexandria
    • Jerusalem
    • Beirut
    • Damascus
    • Baalbek
    • Aleppo
    • Rhodes
    • Smyrna [then through the Dardanelles to...]
    • Constantinople
    • Athens
    • Corinth
    • Patras
    • Olympia
    • Corfu
    • Trieste
    • Vienna
    • Budapest [boards the Orient Express to...]
    • Paris
    • New York City [August 26]
    • Detroit

    After spending much of the winter at home in Detroit, Freer departed in the spring for a trip to West Asia. "My quest to the ‘Holy Land'— Racca Pottery," he explained to Frank Hecker. He embarked from Boston, where he took the opportunity to meet with the dealer Matsuki Bunkyo and Okakura Kakuzō, a scholar of Japanese art who was a key advisor to the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner and the author of The Book of Tea.


    • Charles L. Freer's house at 33 Ferry Avenue in Snow, Detroit,
      ca. 1900 Photographic print
    • Charles Lang Freer, 1909

    In Cairo, Freer met with Ali Arabi, the dealer from whom he had purchased the ancient biblical manuscripts the year before. Learning more about the origins of these manuscripts was a major motivation for the trip to Egypt. He also confessed to Frank Hecker that he had come to enjoy bargaining with local dealers, and he made a number of acquisitions, including bronze figures, carved limestone reliefs, and amulets made of faience, metal, stone, and glass.

    • Fragment: a woman's head in relief

      Egypt, Dynasty 26 (664-525 B.C.E.).
      Limestone; 14.9 x 14.1 x 2.1 cm

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      May 20, 1908

      [excerpt] "It seems more than agreeably strange to find plans dreamed beside last winter's hearth, working successfully under this gray dust-enveloped desert moon."

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      May 20, 1908
      (transcription)

    Freer spent the first few days of June in Jerusalem, visiting the major religious sites in the old city. From there he travelled to Beirut and then to Syria, where he visited Damascus, Baalbek, and Aleppo, which he found to be "a charming surprise---a beautiful ancient city." Part of its appeal was its proximity to Raqqa, the city where so many of Freer's ceramics were believed to have been produced. In Aleppo, which he described as "the store house" from which his Western-based dealers had "drawn their supplies," Freer purchased several pieces of pottery from street vendors.

    • Jar

      Purchased from a street vendor in Aleppo. Syrian, 12th-13th century. Stone-paste painted under glaze; 31.9 x 24.4 cm; F1908.113

    • Letter to Hecker,
      June 11 1908

      [excerpt] "The field is rich, and, generally speaking, almost unknown. I feel that I am here early enough to perhaps obtain something as important in aesthetic art as the biblical mss. of last year's acquirement."

    • Letter to Hecker,
      June 11 1908
      (transcription)
    • Freer to J. M. Kennedy,
      June 19, 1908

      [excerpt] "I am in the best of hands here and in direct contact with the original discoverers of the arts of Racca. There's more than pottery---and all is beautiful!"

    Freer concluded his trip to West Asia by way of Europe. He departed from Constantinople on July 5, 1908, and stopped at a number of cities in Greece. By August 1 he was in Vienna, boarding the Orient Express to Paris. On September 6, he returned home to Ferry Avenue in Detroit. Between 1909 and 1911, Freer would make two more tours of Asia. By 1912, his health was seriously failing, and his days as a globetrotting connoisseur came to an end. The last years of his life, spent largely in New York City, were spent culling and organizing his collections and planning their display at the museum in Washington. Freer died in 1919. The Freer Gallery of Art, the first art museum of the Smithsonian Institution, opened to the public some three years later, in 1923.

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      August 18, 1908

      [excerpt] "My stay here has been delightful. . . .[and] helped me in my efforts to understand beauty in a wider way"

    • Freer to Frank Hecker,
      August 18, 1908
      (transcription)