Charles L. Freer and John A. Pope: Establishing the Freer Gallery’s Chinese Ceramic Collection

Gallery-founder, Charles Lang Freer (1854—1919), and the Gallery’s third director, John Alexander Pope (1906 –1982), were guiding luminaries who established a strong, multidimensional character for the Chinese ceramic collection at the Freer Gallery of Art. Freer and Pope hailed from markedly different backgrounds and developed distinct aesthetic preferences, as well as different tactics for collecting in the specific art market each encountered. This talk is an introduction to Freer and Pope in regard to the complementary views and approaches to collecting Chinese ceramics that they developed, which taken together, positioned the Freer Gallery of Art as an international center for the display and study of Chinese ceramics.