Museum founder Charles Lang Freer’s taste for Japanese art grew out of his affection for American tonalist paintings. This intimate exhibition illuminates this connection by juxtaposing landscapes by American artist Thomas Dewing (1851–1938) with Japanese works that Freer acquired in the late 1890s, just after his first tour of Asia. Freer’s idealized notions of “old Japan” paralleled the nostalgic, pastoral aestheticism of Dewing’s atmospheric landscapes. Dewing often acted as Freer’s buying agent at the New York branch of Yamanaka and Company, helping his patron select Japanese prints, hanging scrolls, and screens that both reflected and affected his own artistic production. On view are such Edo-period works as Moon over a Moor alongside Dewing’s paintings, including the exhibition’s namesake, The Four Sylvan Sounds.
Detail, The Four Sylvan Sounds (The Hermit Thrush and the Sound of Running Water); Thomas Dewing (1851–1938); United States, 1896–97; Oil on wood panels; Gift of Charles Lang Freer; F1906.72–73