DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: The Power to See Beauty: Let Us Now Open Wide Our Eyes Video:
Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific people (or other things) in the pictures which I haven't labeled, please identify them for the world. Or fill in any other descriptions you can. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
Slide Show: Want to see the pictures as a slide show?
[Slideshow]
Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
POW2CV_200307_001.JPG: Let Us Now Open Wide Our Eyes
Freer and the Power to See Beauty
You can see the slideshow on http://www.douglasfiliak.com/
POW2CV_200307_011.JPG: I. Seeking
POW2CV_200307_015.JPG: So far as business goes, I am worn out, noise and confusion wear heavily upon me.
POW2CV_200307_046.JPG: Spiritual meaning... is entirely beyond my understanding I should have to live many lives to grasp it.
POW2CV_200307_048.JPG: Nature sustains and leads us on.
POW2CV_200307_064.JPG: II. Gathering
POW2CV_200307_067.JPG: From Egypt to the temples of Ceylon and Java and thence to the treasure houses of China and Japan
POW2CV_200307_069.JPG: ... an experience of indescribable delight
POW2CV_200307_110.JPG: Its grip upon me constantly increases, it makes me almost feverish -- an influence from the souls of these stone saints
POW2CV_200307_111.JPG: The fascination of being alone is ever present -- the spirit of asceticism everywhere
POW2CV_200307_113.JPG: III. Seeing
POW2CV_200307_116.JPG: Shadowy recollections of unknown places, glimpses of faraway coasts and strange horizons leave a mysterious something... the basis of what we call the imagination
POW2CV_200307_119.JPG: For those who have the power to see beauty, all works of art go together
POW2CV_200307_156.JPG: IV. Giving
POW2CV_200307_162.JPG: Observers in general should be given ample opportunity to enjoy their emotional reactions without expert opinions
POW2CV_200307_164.JPG: Let light in some places come from above and some low down, as in Japanese houses
POW2CV_200307_211.JPG: Let us now open wide our eyes
POW2CV_200307_220.JPG: Charles Lang Freer 1854-1919
All quotations are taken from letters and journals found in the Charles Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives.
Gift of the estate of Charles Lang Freer.
Limiting Text: You can turn off all of this text by clicking this link:
[Thumbnails Only]
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Description of Subject Matter: The Power to See Beauty: Charles Lang Freer
October 14, 2017 – Indefinitely
Who has “the power to see beauty”? How much do you need to know to appreciate a work of art from another culture or historical era? Our museum founder Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919) asked himself these fundamental questions as he prepared to transfer his personal collection of Asian antiquities and American tonalist paintings to a new public museum on the National Mall.
Even though Freer left school after the eighth grade, he became a wealthy industrialist and world traveler. He had easy access to scholars, critics, and sophisticated advisors and appreciated “expert opinions.” Though he was never concerned with specific social, economic, and political circumstances affecting artistic production, he was keenly interested in how chronology, authenticity, quality, and cross-cultural interchange affected stylistic developments over the centuries.
Yet, Freer never renounced his conviction that a direct, emotional response was the highest form of aesthetic pleasure—and the most democratic, available to anyone willing to take the time to look closely. He believed quiet contemplation and intelligent (though often ahistorical and unexpected) comparisons of works of art would “induce concentration” and give all visitors “the power to see beauty.”
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
2020 photos: Well, that was a year, wasn't it? The COVID-19 pandemic cut off most events here in DC after March 11.
Trump's handling of the pandemic was a series of disastrous missteps and lies, encouraging his minions to not wear masks and dramatically increasing infections and deaths here. As the chant goes -- Hey, hey, POTUS-A; how many folks did you kill today? The BLM protests started in June, made all the worse by the child president's inability to have any empathy for anyone other than himself. Then of course he tried to steal the election in November. What a year!
The farthest distance I traveled after that was about 40 miles. I only visited sites in four states -- Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and DC. That was the least amount of travel I had done since 1995.
Number of photos taken this year: about 246,000, the fewest number of photos I had taken in any year since 2007.