National Museum of Asian Art

The National Museum of Asian Art consists of two connected buildings on the National Mall. You can identify the older portion, the Freer Gallery of Art, by its Italianate architecture and a central courtyard that once hosted live peacocks. This structure opened in nineteen twenty-three as the first art museum within the Smithsonian Institution. It was established by Charles Lang Freer, a retired railroad tycoon from Detroit who spent decades assembling a massive collection of Asian art and American paintings after an influential meeting with the artist James McNeill Whistler in eighteen ninety.