Charles Lang Freer

In the summer of 1902 Whistler travelled to Holland with Charles Lang Freer, the Detroit railway-car manufacturer who had become his most devoted American patron. Whistler had a heart attack on that trip, and back in London his doctors put him on bed rest. He painted Freer anyway, insisting his friend sit in a brown jacket the artist chose himself. Freer had not wanted to be painted. He reported to his business partner Frank Hecker, with some amusement, that Whistler was making him look like a pope. The sittings ended when Whistler died in July 1903, and the small wood panel was left unfinished. Freer was by then already arranging to give his collection to the American nation, and the gallery that opened in Washington in 1923 under his name holds this as the only painted portrait of the man who founded it.