When Chase Robinson, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, lectures at the Detroit Institute of Arts on June 7, his topic is sure to draw a few quizzical looks. Entitled “Detroit and Charles Lang Freer’s Vision for a National Museum,” the discussion centers on an overlooked Motor City masterpiece, its owner, and his influence on the nation, says William Colburn, director of the Freer House, Wayne State University in the city’s Cultural Center.
“It’s a Detroit story that’s untold,” he says of the house and the little-known facts behind the railroad magnate’s gift to the Smithsonian and the nation. Over the past 15 years as the house’s director, Colburn has aimed to bring that story to light.
“This street is just loaded with history and is unlike any other in the city,” Colburn says of the house’s location on East Ferry Street in the shadow of the DIA. Dating back to the late 19th5 century, the street still includes the best surviving examples of Victorian architecture in Detroit, according to Colburn. Beyond the residences of Charles Lang Freer — whom Colburn calls “a major cultural force” in Detroit at the time — and his friend, business partner Frank J. Hecker, who owned an adjacent house on Ferry and Woodward Avenue, the street is also home to important landmarks of Jewish, African American, and other cultural history.
Shingle-Style Simplicity
Built in 1892, Freer’s house was designed by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre Jr. Considered to be Michigan’s most significant remaining example of shingle-style architecture, the house’s design was a collaboration between Freer and architect Eyre. Noted American artists Dwight W. Tryon, Thomas W. Dewing, and Abbott H. Thayer, and Maria Oakey Dewing created original paintings and decorative paint treatments for the house interior. In The Charles L. Freer Residence: The Original Freer Gallery of Art, author Thomas Brunk writes, “Freer orchestrated a union of the highly refined aesthetic paintings and interiors with Eyre’s consummate simplicity of design and love of natural materials to create a home where Freer found refuge from the ugliness of his industrial life as a railroad freight car manufacturer. For Freer art was not an extravagance, but a necessity.”
The Original Freer Gallery of Art
Freer’s early interest in art can be traced to the Detroit Art Loan Exhibition of 1883, which featured works owned by business associates. He made his first recorded art purchase the following year and was later introduced to the etchings of James McNeill Whistler, which would have an important influence on his life and work. His original focus, according to Colburn, was on European prints, but shifted to contemporary American art, and later traditional Asian and Middle Eastern art, reflecting his growing global network and worldly interests…