Freer's World Tours
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.
Freer at Sannotani, 1907.
Charles Lang Freer, 1890s
Charles Lang Freer's house at
33 Ferry Avenue, Detroit.
First Tour: 1894-1895
Seeking Rest and Pleasure
Charles Lang Freer departed Detroit 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.
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.
Second Tour: 1906-1907
Confronting "Tremendous Changes...in the Fierce Race for Wealth and Power"
More than a decade separated Charles Lang Freer's first trip to Asia (1894 and 1895) from the next four tours (1906 to 1911). In the intervening years, he orchestrated a major corporate merger of thirteen railroad manufacturing companies. Immediately after this, he retired from active business in 1899 to devote himself to collecting full time.
In 1900 he purchased a villa in Capri with his friend, Michigan attorney Thomas Spencer 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, Mann accompanied Freer on his trip to Egypt. Freer would continue on to East Asia and returned to Detroit in July 1907.
After the turn of the twentieth century, high-quality Japanese ceramics were increasingly difficult to acquire in the West, and Freer began to collect Near Eastern wares from Syria, Iraq, and Iran that had recently come onto the Western art market.
In 1902 he purchased his first pieces of Near Eastern Raqqa ware from the Paris-based dealer Dikran Kelekian, and he quickly amassed a large collection.
Third Tour: 1908
"An Eager Student on a Quest to the Holy Land"
Freer's stated aim on his 1908 trip to "the Holy Land" was to gain a greater understanding of works in his Near Eastern ceramics collection. With this in mind, he visited Cairo, Aleppo, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Istanbul, and he purchased forty-six ceramic objects from local dealers.
"My quest to the "Holy Land"? -- "Racca pottery," he wrote to Frank Hecker, his former business partner. "I have invested pretty heavily in this line of "fayence" and I consider it necessary to learn what I can."
In 1902 Freer acquired his first pieces of Raqqa ware, a type of ceramic named for the site in north-central Syria where it had been excavated. (Some of the wares that Freer identified as Raqqa are now understood to have been produced at other sites.) These turquoise- and green-glazed vessels with gritty white bodies and thick alkaline glazes appealed to Freer because of their chromatic correspondences with his extensive holdings of East Asian ceramics and American tonalist paintings.
Over the next fifteen years Freer amassed a significant collection of Syrian and Persian Iranian ceramics, with many purchases made from the Paris-based dealers Dikran Kelekian and Siegfried Bing.
