The Frank Barrows Freyer Collection

black and white photo of a woman in front of a painting

the Virgin Mary surrounded by saints and cherubs

In 1969, the Denver Art Museum received a significant gift of painting, sculpture, and furniture from the family of Maria Engracia Critcher Freyer. Mrs. Freyer, as she was often known, had amassed one of the premier collections of art from colonial Cuzco in the United States during the 1920s and proceeded to display it at museums across the country for more than four decades.

Born in 1888, Maria Engracia Critcher was a San Francisco socialite of Spanish descent. Only a few months into her debut season of 1907–08, she met and married Frank Barrows Freyer, a dashing navy captain from Georgia who became immediately smitten with the “most popular debutante of winter.” After several years in Guam, with Mrs. Freyer as its de facto first lady, the couple decamped to Lima in 1920, where Captain Freyer was tasked with helping reform the Peruvian Navy. While there, Mrs. Freyer occupied herself primarily with humanitarian efforts to improve the condition of animals, children, and the incarcerated. One project of which she was particularly proud was the construction of drinking troughs for pack mules along the road from the port of Callao into the city of Lima. This charity work would eventually win her recognition from the Peruvian government, as she was awarded the Order of the Sun in 1927, the first American woman to do so.

It was near the end of her three-year stay in Peru that Mrs. Freyer began her collecting in earnest. While on a trip to Cuzco with her husband and children in 1922, she became fascinated by the paintings she saw on display, with their saturated colors and abundant appliqué of gold (known as brocateado). During her visit to the city, she deliberately bought only from private collections rather than from Cuzco’s monastic and religious institutions, and she stored her purchases in an unused cell in the city’s jail. In addition to the many religious paintings she bought, she also acquired fine examples of colonial furniture and decorative objects: a spectacular eighteenth-century gilt wood bed, various mahogany rococo settees, lap desks, rawhide trunks, silver objects, and small-scale sculpture. In one possibly apocryphal episode, she was said to have seen an onion seller sitting on a colorful bundle in one of the city’s marketplaces. She purchased some onions and began to ask the vendor about her curious seat—only to discover that it was a folded-up image of the Adoration of the Magi.

With her return to Lima impending, Mrs. Freyer intrepidly cut the paintings from their stretchers, greased them with almond oil, and rolled them tightly for shipping. Because of her good relationship with the Peruvian president, Augusto Leguía, she was able to acquire permission to export the works legally, which she did upon her return to the US in 1923.

After settling back in the United States, Mrs. Freyer began to loan the collection to museums, first in California to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art (which later split into the city’s art and natural history museums). She then displayed it for several years in the Dupont Circle home she shared with her family in Washington, DC, where she installed red brocade wallpaper to make the gold frames and dark wood furniture pop. In these early years in DC, she frequently lectured on the collection, both in her home and as an invited guest at various conferences and arts clubs.

bedroom in the Freyer residence with paintings on the wall

the settee in a room in the Freyer residence

From the 1930s to her death in 1969, the collection was frequently on view at museums across the country, from New York to Ohio to Florida to Colorado, where Mrs. Freyer and her husband settled in the late 1930s due to Captain Freyer’s failing health. They purchased a late-19th-century mansion in Denver at 933 Pennsylvania St., with an attached gallery where she was able to display the collection and share it with the public during visiting hours.

After her death, Mrs. Freyer’s three children made the decision to donate the bulk of the collection to the Denver Art Museum, and additional pieces have been given to the museum since this initial gift. The collection of Andean masterworks was the first major gift from colonial Latin America and forms one of the cornerstones of the Latin American art department’s collection. Several of her works feature in Painting in the Andes, 1680–1780 on level 4 of the Martin Building.