This exhibition celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of Charles Lang Freer's gift of his collection and museum to the United States features a selection of 31 paintings, calligraphy, wood sculpture, lacquer, and ceramics from Freer's Japanese art collection.

For two decades from 1887, when Freer bought his first Japanese painting, his interest in Japanese art grew deeper, as he sought to increase his knowledge of Japanese and Asian art and to understand the aesthetic harmonies between art of different historical periods and cultures. Although he was encouraged in these interests by his friends, the artist James McNeill Whistler, and the scholar Ernest Fenollosa, Freer relied on his own judgment and consciously resisted the decorative porcelain and gold lacquerware popular among Western collectors. Instead, he focused on painting, ceramics, Buddhist sculpture, and lacquerware from earlier periods, forming a collection of some 1100 Japanese works of art dating from the eighth through the nineteenth centuries.

Highlights of this exhibition include a Heian period (794–1185 Buddhist sculpture, a thirteenth-century Buddhist narrative handscroll, Miracles of the Bodhisattva Jizō, Moonlight Revelry at Dozō Sagami, by Kitagawa Utamaro, Fisherman and Woodcutter by Katsushika Hokusai, calligraphy by Hon'ami Kōetsu, paintings by Ogata Kōrin and ceramics by his brother, Kenzan.