The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives

The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives’ mission is to collect and preserve unique primary source materials that support the holdings and activities of the Freer and Sackler Galleries and to advance the study of the cultures and artistic traditions of the people of Asia. The Archives also acquires original documentation to further the study of the late 19th and early 20th century American art collected by Charles Lang Freer. Materials in the Archives are rich and diverse, and include the personal and professional papers of preeminent art historians, archaeologists, artists, dealers, and collectors. Forming a treasure trove of raw material for analysis are letters, writings and journals, scrapbooks, clippings, drawings and sketchbooks, financial material, rubbings and squeezes of inscriptions, photographs, oral history interviews, and motion picture film. The collections include over 125,000 images, ranging from rare salt prints of the 1850s to contemporary ilfochromes of the 1990s. Holdings in the Archives amount to nearly 1,000 cubic feet, and are contained in over 140 collections with materials that date from the early nineteenth century to the present.

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