Freer Purchases Hanna Collection

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Summary

Charles Lang Freer purchases a collection of 130 Indian paintings and manuscripts from Colonel Henry Bathhurst Hanna (1839-1914), who collected them while serving in the British Army in India. Freer pays £3100 (about $15,000 at the time) for the collection, which includes Mughal art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as later works. The purchase represents one of Freer's first major acquisitions of Indian art.

Subject

  • Freer, Charles Lang 1854-1919
  • Hanna, Colonel H. B

Category

Chronology of Smithsonian History

Notes

  • In 1906 Charles Lang Freer donates his art collection to the Smithsonian Institution, and it later becomes the Freer Gallery of Art.
  • Lawton, Thomas and Linda Merrill. Freer: A Legacy of Art. Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993, p. 122-128.

Contact information

Institutional History Division, Smithsonian Institution Archives, 600 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, D.C. 20024-2520, SIHistory@si.edu

Date

October 1907

Topic

  • Art
  • British Army
  • Collectors and collecting
  • Manuscripts
  • Art, Asian
  • Indian art
  • Painting

Place

India

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