PUBLIC FAVORITES

DETROIT'S Charles Freer made millions building railroad cars (Peninsular Car Works), retired at 44 to collect art on a grand scale. He bought some 9,000 objects, built a Washington museum to house them, and willed the whole collection to the Government. In the 32 years since its opening, the Freer Gallery has delighted millions of visitors. Its Chinese painting collection has only one rival outside of China (Boston's Museum of Fine Arts), and includes hundreds of masterpieces on a plane with the Sung Dynasty ink drawing at left.

But if Collector Freer (who died in 1919) had a hawk eye for Oriental art, his eye for American painting suffered a Victorian squint. Today Freer officials blush a bit at the gallery's American collection and turn purple when forced to admit that the public favorite at the Freer is Abbott Thayer's Virgin (opposite).

Actually, Thayer (1849-1921) was a better painter than modern critics are likely to allow. Critic James Flexner, for example, dismisses Thayer as a "workman" who "worked out a delicate and bloodless version of femininity which, draped or even undraped, was more pleasing to refined purchasers than the hardy realism of Homer and Eakins."

Thayer's Virgin does look wrapped in taffy, the composition is static and the whole atmosphere is fuzzed with sweetness. But the picture's virtues more than offset its defects. It is magnificently drawn, subtly radiant in color, and a straightforward expression of the artist's reverence for girlhood and love of children. It can speak, gently, to the heart. Such works as Thayer's have been unjustly eclipsed in a critical age that winces at any expression of pure and lofty sentiments. Luckily, laymen are not so biased.

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