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It is a rare instance when an art connoisseur actually knows the women depicted in the pictures in his collection. But the Detroit railroad car builder Charles Lang Freer (Fig. 4) was just such a collector, familiar with the models whose lovely images he placed on his walls. The answer to why this lifelong bachelor surrounded himself with such paintings by James McNeill Whistler, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing lies in the love of transcendent beauty that he shared with the artists. Womanhood was the most common subject for artists at the turn of the twentieth century and feminine beauty was the symbol of American culture, but Freer approached the women ...