Legacies of Taste: Mounting East Asian Paintings at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art.

The American industrialist Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919) amassed an outstanding collection of Asian, Near Eastern, and contemporary American art that he bequeathed to the Smithsonian Institution in 1906, together with plans for a museum to house his collection, the Freer Gallery of Art. Deeply influenced by the innovative American artist and Japoniste James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Freer envisioned the museum as a holistic setting for his collection, harmonizing aesthetics from both East and West. Freer's meticulous attention to design and detail extended to the mountings for his large collection of Chinese and Japanese paintings. His plans included hiring scroll mounters from Japan to remount over 350 of the paintings onto panels, choosing antique textiles to suit his taste, a taste inspired by antiquarian trends. Together with archival records and textile sample books, an album of photographs and other mementos from the Miura family of mounters recently acquired by the museum elucidates this remarkable achievement and the historical context of Japanese scroll mounting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]