Museums - Freer Gallery & Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Changing exhibitions of Asian art drawn from major collections in the United States and abroad highlight the varied artistic traditions of Asia, from ancient times to the present. The museum’s growing permanent collection includes art from China, South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, ancient and Islamic Iran, and Japan. The Smithsonian Asian Museum consists of two components. The gallery was founded by Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919), a railroad-car manufacturer from Detroit who gave the United States his collections and funds for a building to house them. The Italian Renaissance–style gallery, constructed in granite and marble, was designed by American architect Charles Platt. When the gallery opened to the public in 1923, it was the first Smithsonian Museum for fine arts. In subsequent years, the collections have grown through gifts and purchases to nearly triple the size of Freer’s bequest.
The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery opened in 1987 to house a gift of some 1,000 works of Asian art from Dr. Arthur M. Sackler (1913–1987), a research physician and medical publisher from New York City. Among the highlights of his gift were early Chinese bronzes and jades, Chinese paintings and lacquerware, ancient Near Eastern ceramics and metalware, and sculpture from South and Southeast Asia. Sackler also donated $4 million toward construction of the gallery. It is connected to the Freer by an underground exhibition space.