Page 10 - Bonhams Passkon and Philanthropy MET Mjuseum March 2024 Asia Week
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Freer, Berthold Laufer and A.W. Bahr shared an interest
in early jades at a time when little was known of Neolithic
China's jade outside the work of Wu Dacheng (1835-1902),
whose 1889 illustrated work titled Guyu tukao contained
line drawings of known jade types and information on their
function based upon classical texts. While both Laufer and
Freer made extensive trips to China between 1901 and
1911 and there met collectors and dealers such as C.T.
Loo, Yamanaka Sadajiro, Huang Jun, and Duanfang, there
was no archaeological basis on which to date the examples
they saw and purchased. Freer shared his interest, current
knowledge and passion with his friend, Samuel T. Peters,
then a distinguished collector of Chinese Imperial porcelain.
Peters formed his own large collection of jade based on the
current standards of connoisseurship and knowledge of the
day and donated it to the Met in three stages (1911, 1913
and 1916). The 1911 and 1913 donations were purchased
from Yamanaka, who had established a branch of his business
in New York in 1895. Peters’ October 22, 1921 New York
Charles Lang Freer, 1916; photograph by Times obituary records his gifts as “a collection probably
Edward Steichen, FIS Archives, A1993.05 unsurpassed anywhere.” Total of over three-hundred and thirty
pieces from these three donations are included in this auction.
While the majority of the objects offered for sale come from
two sources, the other distinguished figures whose donations
complete the corpus of this group include giants in the history
of American industry and philanthropy who contributed their
knowledge, energy, passion and wealth during and after their
lifetime to the Metropolitan Museum. All twenty-three donors
are profiled in the following pages.
Selected Bibliography:
Warren Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1992
Kathleen McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art.
1830-1930, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, The China Collectors:
American’s Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures, St. Martin’s
Press, 2015
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Gary Tinterow, Susan Allyson Stein,
Gretchen Wold and Julia Meech. Splendid Legacy. The Havemeyer
Collection,
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993
Yijing Wang, Tales of Stone: Collecting Archaic Chinese Jades in
the U.S., 1901-1950, A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts, Arizona State University,
Berthold Laufer May 2014
8 | BONHAMS
