Freer Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., is a government museum famous for its collections of Asian art. These include paintings, sculpture, bronzes, ceramics, glass, jade, lacquer, and metalwork from the Near and Far East. The gallery has important Biblical manuscripts in Greek, Aramaic, and Armenian. It also has many works by James Whistler and other American painters of the late 1800’s.
The library at the Freer Gallery of Art has a particularly important collection of works on Chinese and Japanese art. The museum staff carries on research in the arts and cultures represented in the collections. The Smithsonian Institution administers the building and endowment fund. Charles Lang Freer, a Detroit industrialist, gave his collections and an endowment to the Smithsonian by deed of gift executed in 1906.
