The story
The Freer opened on the National Mall in 1923 as the first Smithsonian museum built for art, the gift of Charles Lang Freer, a Detroit railroad-car manufacturer who had made a fortune and spent it on two things: Asian art and the American painter James McNeill Whistler.
Its showpiece is a whole room. The Peacock Room was a London dining room Whistler painted in 1876 and 1877 in blue and gold peacocks, feuding spectacularly with the owner over the fee as he covered even the costly leather walls. Freer bought the entire room, shipped it to Washington, and it is installed here intact.
Around it sits one of the country's finest collections of Chinese, Japanese and Korean art, along with the largest gathering of Whistler's work anywhere. By Freer's own rule, nothing in the collection may leave the building.
