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ABSTRACT
This article presents a network analysis of the actors and places associated with Charles Lang Freer’s collecting of Egyptian, ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art between 1907 and 1909, and highlights key developments in the formation of the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art. The authors lay out their research process and findings with two primary goals: to reveal previously unexplored aspects of Freer’s collecting practices, and to demonstrate the value of network analysis for highlighting the personal relationships which often underlie museum collections.
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to the Network Analysis ± Digital Art History Advanced Workshop, supported by the Getty Foundation, for providing us with a community, training, and endless advice from our co-participants and especially the leadership: Alison Langmead, Anne Helmreich, Scott B. Weingart, Shack Hackney, and John Ladd. We also thank our colleagues and former colleagues at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art: Antonietta Catanzariti, Sonia Coman-Ernstoff, Massumeh Farhad, Lisa Fthenakis, Lee Glazer, Nancy Hacskaylo and Simon Rettig.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Some of the major publications that deal with the historiography of Islamic art are: S. Vernoit, ed., Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850–1950 (London, 2000); L. Komaroff, ed., ‘Exhibiting the Middle East: Collections and Perceptions of Islamic Art,’ dedicated volume of Ars Orientalis, 30 (2000); S. S. Blair and J. M. Bloom, ‘The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field,’ The Art Bulletin, 85.1 (March 2003), 152–84; M. Carey and M. Graves, guest eds., Islamic Art Historiography special issue for the Journal of Art Historiography, 6 (June 2012); B. Junod, G. Khalil, S. Weber and G. Wolf, eds., Islamic Art and the Museum (London, 2012); Y. Kadoi and I. Szántó, eds., The Shaping of Persian Art: Collections and Interpretations of the Art of Islamic Iran and Central Asia (UK, 2013); Y. Kadoi, ed., Arthur Upham Pope and A New Survey of Persian Art (Leiden, 2016); B. Flood and G. Necipoğlu, ‘Frameworks of Islamic Art and Architectural History: Concepts, Approaches, and Historiographies,’ in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, First Edition, ed. F. B. Flood and G. Necipoğlu (Hoboken, 2017), pp. 2–56.
2 Network analysis has been applied to other museum collections, see for example, Frances Larson, Alison Petch, and David Zeitlyn, ‘Social Networks and the Creation of the Pitt Rivers Museum,’ Journal of Material Culture, 12.3 (November 1, 2007), 211–3; M. Achim, From Idols to Antiquity. Forging the National Museum of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017); J. Owen, ‘The Collections of Sir John Lubbock: The First Lord Avebury (1834–1913): ‘An Open Book?’,’ Journal of Material Culture, 4.3, 283–302. Our project differed in its use of a multimodal network of individuals, locations, and collection areas and the resulting data visualisations were a key part of our analysis, discussed further below.
3 For Freer’s biography, see Lee Glazer and Amelia Meyer, Charles Lang Freer: A Cosmopolitan Life (Washington, 2017) and Linda Merrill and Thomas Lawton, Freer: A Legacy of Art (Washington, 1993).
4 Freer has received a certain amount of scholarly attention, but the published sources that are the most relevant to our project are these: Glazer and Meyer (note 3), Ann Gunter, A Collector’s Journey, Charles Lang Freer and Egypt (Washington, 2002), Daisy Yiyou Wang, ‘Charles Lang Freer and the Collecting of Chinese Buddhist Art in Early-twentieth-century America,’ Journal of the History of Collections, 28 (2016), and The Story of the Beautiful, a digital project resulting from a research collaboration between the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Wayne State University’s Library System, launched in 2013.
5 The term Raqqa ware describes a large category of medieval Islamic ceramics associated with the Syrian town of Raqqa. They were newly discovered c.1901 and in the first decades of the twentieth century were avidly acquired by American and European collectors, spurred on in their efforts by the skilful marketing of antiquities dealers. Freer was particularly drawn to the iridescent glazes of many of the pieces, brought about by surface deterioration during centuries of burial. Since Raqqa ware first attracted the notice of scholars and collectors, efforts to determine the precise characteristics and place of production of the pottery has generated a great deal of scholarly attention. For more see Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Raqqa Revisited, The Ceramics of Ayyubid Syria (New York, 2006).
6 Gunter, pp. 25–26.
7 The Museum System (TMS) is the collection management system used by the National Museum of Asian Art.
8 We categorised diaries activities as eight interaction types: Acquisition (of art), Business (personal business), Collection Visit (private collections), Correspondence (record of letters and telegrams), Museum Visit (museums), Site Visit (archaeological sites), Social, and Travel (travel acquaintances only). For network analysis these were reduced to: Acquisition, Collection Visit (all visits), Social.
9 15% of Freer’s diary entries for activities in Detroit were not included in the research dataset because while they showed the importance of his social activities in his hometown, they were duplicative of many other entries and were deemed not essential for the research focus. Detroit entries which were included were those at his social clubs, meetings with political contacts, and visits from artists and dealers central to his collection activities. Activities in East Asia were similarly excluded because they were outside the research focus, unless one of the entities was associated with the research focus collection areas.
10 Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 1–23; Mercedes Volait, ‘Expanding Trades in Late Ottoman Cairo and Damascus,’ in Antique Dealing and Creative Reuse in Cairo and Damascus, 1850–1890 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 54–89; Gunter, pp. 22–23, 27–29, 54–57.
11 Gunter states that Freer made only a few purchases from the Cairo dealers after 1909 and they were done through the intermediaries. One reason for this was a ‘new and more stringent antiquities law’ which came into effect in 1912. Moreover, the difficulties Freer encountered in exporting his acquisitions from Egypt in his 1907 trip, Gunter claims, must have also played a role (pp. 113–115). Another important contributing factor could also be Freer’s attention diverging to China and Chinese art. In 1909, Freer spent 6 weeks in China and as Wang states Freer ‘became convinced that China – particularly Beijing – was the most important treasure-house of art that he had ever encountered.’ Wang, pp. 401–416.
12 As was common practice in this period, Freer would have had letters of introduction to key people in the places he visited. He writes in a letter to Colonel Hecker, ‘P.S. I know you will be glad to know that I have a letter of introduction to the best private collector in the Turkish Empire – at Constantinople.’ July 27, 1908.
13 These calculations are based on information readily available on collections websites. We are grateful to Ashley Dimmig for her help confirming the Walters information.
14 See Marianna Shreve Simpson, ‘‘A Gallant Era’: Henry Walters, Islamic Art, and the Kelekian Connection,’ Ars Orientalis, 30 (2000), 91–112.; Jessica Hallett and Maida Chavek, ‘The Gift of Ubiquity: Armenian Art Dealers and their Networks,’ in The Rise of Islamic Art 1869–1939, ed. Penelope Curtis et al. (Lisbon, 2019), pp. 55–66.
15 Luiza De Camargo, ‘Content and Character: Dikran Kelekian and Eastern Decorative Arts Objects in America’ (MA thesis, Smithsonian Associations the Corcoran College of Art and Design, 2012) and Alison Field Ventura, ‘The Khan of American Collecting: How Dikran Kelekian Created a Market for Islamic Art’ (MA thesis, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Parson The New School for Design, 2010).
16 Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, ‘Collecting the ‘Orient’ at the Met: Early Tastemakers in America,’ Ars Orientalis, 30 (2000), 69–89.
17 Kelekian’s wide-ranging network connected him to Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, American architect and framer Stanford White, as well as to major art institutions in the US including the American Art Association. For example, on Dec. 10, 1908, Freer dined with Kelekian, as well as American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and Asian art dealer Yamanaka from Yamamaka & Co., see Freer’s 1908 diary, FSA.A.01_03.1908.028, National Museum of Asian Art Archives.
18 Ventura, p. 28. Also Gunter, p. 29, mentions the close circle that formed among the Havemeyer couple with Mary Cassatt and Dikran Kelekian, who supplied them with Syrian and Persian glazed wares.
19 Freer diaries (5 February, 1909, Bauer and Folsom).
20 Osman Hamdi Bey (Constantinople 30 December 1842–24 February 1910) was an Ottoman administrator, intellectual, art expert and also a prominent and pioneering painter. He was also an accomplished archaeologist and is regarded as the pioneer of the museum curator’s profession in Turkey. He was the founder of Istanbul Archaeology Museums and of Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi in Turkish), known today as the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts.
21 Ferruh Gerçek, Türk Müzeciliği (Ankara, 1999).
22 Freer referred to these individuals as Miss or Mrs.
23 Submitted to Wayne University in 2021.
24 Rosalind Birnie Philip (14 November 1873–6 February 1953) was the sister-in-law of James McNeill Whistler. After the death of her sister Beatrice in 1896 Rosalind acted as secretary to Whistler and was appointed Whistler’s sole beneficiary and the executrix in his will. Rosalind’s sister Ethel also served as secretary (and as a model) to Whistler before marrying Charles Whibley to become Ethel Whibley.
25 Our research for this project has uncovered fascinating material about Freer’s engagement with photography, but a full examination of this is outside the bounds of this article and awaits more attention.
26 Any study of this kind is bound by the examples that have come down to us in various archives and collections. The majority of Freer’s papers, including photographs, are in the archives of the National Museum of Asian Art, but it seems likely that in the case of the photographs, not everything was forwarded to Washington following Freer’s death in 1919. In addition to the photographs in the Freer archives, examples of the photographs taken by Coburn and Steichen are also held in the George Eastman House, in each case, bequeathed to the museum by the photographer. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a number of Coburn’s photographs of objects in Freer’s collection.
27 ‘To those in Cairo I can thoroughly recommend either M. Lekégian or M. Dittrich, photographer to the Court. The latter has a wonderful collection of portraits, admirably done, of all the more important persons. His rooms are a real museum of all the celebrities, masculine and feminine, whom Cairo has known in the last five-and-twenty years.’ A. B. de Guerville, New Egypt (London, 1906), pp. xv.
28 The history of photography in nineteenth and early twentieth century Aleppo has also been much less studied than that of Egypt.
29 See Edwards, Elizabeth and Christopher Morton, eds. Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information (London, 2015), particularly Casey Riley, ‘Self-Assembled: Isabella Stewart Gardener’s Photographic Albums and the Development of Her Museum, 1902–1924’ in that volume.
30 See for example Freer’s correspondence with Vincent Marcopoli, quoted above, concerning their use of photographs as a means of determining additions to Freer’s collection.
31 The Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, developed a colour photography process called autochrome, which involved coating a glass plate with microscopically small grains of potato starch in three colours. These together with a silver halide emulsion allowed the creation of a colour image on the glass plate. This remained the main way of producing colour images until the 1930s.
32 Coburn’s autochromes are housed primarily in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
33 See for example Glazer and Meyer, p. 79, 81.
34 Network analysis continues to engage museum-based researchers. For example, it forms the basis of an ongoing study that was also part of the NA+DAH initiative, based on the stock books of London art dealers Thos. Agnew and Sons, who sold paintings to a number of major US and British museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The project is a collaboration between the National Gallery, London, and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and investigates the relationship between the circulation of works of art and their archival information, and how these relationships can be explored and enhanced using digital analysis.
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Notes on contributors
Nancy Micklewright
Nancy Micklewright was most recently a visiting senior fellow at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, working on Ottoman fashion for her next book. Her edited volume, Mohamed Zakariya, The Life and Times of a 21st-century Calligrapher, appeared in 2022. Through 2019 she was head of the Department of Public and Scholarly Engagement at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA). A former university professor and senior programme officer at the Getty Foundation, she is the author of two earlier books and numerous articles on aspects of visual culture in the Ottoman Empire.
Sana Mirza
Sana Mirza is Head of Scholarly Programs and Publications at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. Her research interests include Islamic manuscripts, artistic interchange in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and digital art history. Sana received her PhD in Islamic art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2021. Her dissertation focused on Qur’anic manuscripts from the city of Harar in Eastern Ethiopia produced between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. She co-edited, with Simon Rettig, The Word Illuminated: Form and Function of Qur’anic Manuscripts, 7th–17th centuries (Smithsonian Scholarly Press, 2023).
Zeynep Simavi
Zeynep Simavi is the Istanbul branch director of the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT). Previously, she was NMAA’s programme specialist for scholarly programmes and publications. Her research interests include the formation of Islamic art as an academic discipline and the histories of collections and exhibitions in the United States. She received her PhD degree in art history from Istanbul Technical University with a dissertation focusing on the curators, collectors, and major exhibitions of Turkish art in the twentieth-century United States.
Jeffrey Smith
Jeffrey Smith is the Registrar for Collections Information in the NMAA’s Collections Department. As both a registrar and the system administrator for the collections database, he is responsible for all aspects of the collections information used within the museum and shared externally. Since joining NMAA in 2004, he has been focused on standardising and enhancing collections and thesaurus data to improve The Museum System (TMS) and to make possible new features for its online offerings. He has shared his experience with managing data for online catalogues, provenance, and network analysis in presentations given in the United States, Europe, and Israel.