The founder of the Freer Gallery of Art, Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919), is best known as a pioneering western collector of Asian art, but when Freer started to buy art he began with contemporary American paintings and works on paper. Most of the major works that Freer acquired during his first 12 years as a collector, 1884–1896, were images of beautiful women by James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851–1938) or Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921).

A lifelong bachelor, Freer was a product of his time, in which upper and middle class women were expected to carry primary responsibility for the education and training for the young, and were generally idealized as being, by nature, more nurturing, more spiritually alive, and more aesthetically sensitive than men. Although it might seem surprising that a bachelor would collect so many representations of beautiful women, Freer seems to have identified himself with the spiritually and aesthetically sensitive subjects of these artworks.

This exhibition will bring together 21 of the most beautiful paintings that Freer ever acquired in order to explore some of the meanings these representations of beautiful women would have had for the artists who created them, for contemporary viewers, and for Freer. In addition to oil paintings by Whistler, the exhibition will feature several major paintings by Thayer and a large selection of exceptionally beautiful but rarely shown oil paintings by Dewing.