Page 172 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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peaceful surroundings and the poetic mood in the painting, “A great scholar, with his

hands behind him, is standing on the terrace, and, while admiring the appearance of

Spring, he seems to be composing a poem.” (Kwen 1916, Cat. no.25) Loo might have

well expected that the mountain lodge and scholar/poet would strike a deep chord in

Freer, who was described by Loo as “a pure and righteous learned philosopher of the 20

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th century in the new World” who lived in a “true Sung hermitage”.
Loo’s dealing in ancient objects, especially jades and bronzes, two major categories in

Loo’s collection, capitalized on the Westerner’s imagination of a remote, mysterious, and

even magical past of China. The RISD director E. L. Rowe commented that Loo’s gift to

the museum, a Neolithic pot, betrayed a sense of mystery. Rowe stated, “Neolithic

pottery is always interesting,…offer evidence about peoples and civilization long since

hid in the darkness of the remote past,…” (Rowe 1934, 26) The Art News review of

Loo’s 1950 Exhibition of Chinese Archaic Jades noted, “From the shadowy beginning of

China’s history come these astonishingly sophisticated jades of the Shang(1766-1122

B.C.) and Chou (1122-255 B.C.)…The properties of jade itself-its translucence, its

extraordinary hardness and luster and even its resonance-made it symbolical of celestial

and cosmic ideas which were perhaps the survival of some prehistoric cult of the sun, and

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to it for centuries were attributed magic virtues.” This mythical interpretation of

Chinese archaic jade was particularly significant for Freer in a time of personal crises. In

his later years, Freer acquired a large number of jades from C. T. Loo and other dealers

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C. T. Loo to C.L. Freer, October 19, 1916, CLF-FGA. Loo referred to Freer’s
residence.
362 “Jade from the Dawn of History,” Art News, January, 1950.