Description

Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Published 1971. Wraps, 77 pp.; 26 cm; illustrated with black-and-white plates. In Good Plus condition. Cream pictorial paper wraps, the front cover reproducing calligraphy by Wang T'ing-yun (A.D. 1151-1202), with light bumping and creasing to the edges and corners, mild shelf and edge wear, some foxing and toning along the edges and spine, and mild soiling and scuffing to the covers. Binding tight. Sticker-removal residue to the inside front cover and a small red collector's seal to the front free endpaper. Pages mildly toned but unmarked. The catalog of the 1971 Freer Gallery of Art exhibition honoring Eugene Meyer (1875-1959) and Agnes E. Meyer (1887-1970), longtime friends and benefactors of the gallery, drawn from the Far Eastern art they bequeathed to the Freer. Thirty-two objects are described and illustrated: Chinese archaic ritual jades (Shang and Chou), ancient bronzes, Chinese paintings (Ming handscrolls and hanging scrolls), and Japanese Edo screens. Foreword by Harold P. Stern; introduction by Thomas Lawton and Hin-Cheung Lovell; portraits of the Meyers by Yousuf Karsh. Eugene Meyer was chairman of the Federal Reserve, publisher of The Washington Post, and the first president of the World Bank; Agnes E. Meyer was a journalist and an early American scholar of Chinese painting (author of a 1923 study of the Song master Li Lung-mien) and a close friend of the Freer's founder, Charles Lang Freer. The Meyers were the parents of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, and their gifts to the Freer represented the largest expansion of the gallery's holdings since Freer's founding bequest to the nation in 1919.