The Mountain

Since 1913, the architect Charles Adams Platt worked closely with Charles Lang Freer in designing the Freer Gallery of Art.  It was Platt who brought the building to completion after Freer's death in 1919.

The Mountain is of interest as a painting created by an architect.  Its stony palette reminds the viewer that Platt was highly sensitive to the subtle colors of stone. In a letter to Freer in 1917, Platt wrote enthsiastically of the pink Milford granite being used for the exterior walls of the Freer Gallery of Art: "The stone is now up to the level of the main floor and looks 'out of sight.'  The granite is beautiful, and the varying texture of the different stones is making a very effective whole." The painting's symmetrical composition evokes a temple-like structure with a triangular pediment resting on columnar trees breached by a door-like entrance indicated by the curving road.

In addition to conveying the sense of architecture, The Mountain has a distinctly oriental flavor.  Like certain Chinese landscapes, the painting is a nearly monochromatic, generalized view of a mountain landscape, embodying the impersonal forces of the universe. Like Chinese landscapes, Platt's work is the product of accumulated observation, here possibly of the area around Cornish, New Hampshire.

Freer had loaned Platt an unidentified Chinese landscape to aid the architect in designing exhibition spaces for Chinese art in the new Freer Gallery. The architect returned that painting early in 1918. In June of the same year, Freer presented Platt with an album of prints taken from a scroll attributed to the Chinese artist Li Kung-lin (1049-1106).  Freer acquired The Mountain from Platt in October 1918, shortly before the architect left to pass the winter in Italy.