Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum
The Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum – formerly The Smith Institute – has played a very special part in the history of Stirling since its foundation in 1874. Established by the bequest of artist Thomas Stuart Smith (1815–1869) on land supplied by the Burgh of Stirling, it is an historic public-private partnership which has continued to the present day. It was founded as a gallery of mainly contemporary art, with museum and library reading room ‘for the benefit of the inhabitants of Stirling, Dunblane and Kinbuck’.
Freer Gallery of Art
Care of the collections began before the museum came into existence as Charles Lang Freer, the founder of the Freer Gallery of Art, hired Japanese painting restorers to care for his works and to prepare them for their eventual home as part of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1932, the Freer Gallery of Art hired a full-time Japanese restorer and established what was to become the East Asian Painting Conservation Studio. This facility remains one of the few in the United States that specializes in the conservation of Asian paintings. The Technical Laboratory was established in 1951 when chemist Rutherford J. Gettens moved from the Fogg Museum at Harvard University to the Freer. The laboratory was the first Smithsonian facility devoted to the use of scientific methods for the study of works of art. Over the years, the work of the Technical Laboratory expanded to include objects, paper, and exhibits conservation. The Technical Laboratory and the East Asian Painting Conservation Studio merged in 1990 to create the Department of Conservation and Scientific Research for both the Freer and Sackler Galleries.