future generations. These objects include European period furniture, Flemish or French tapestries, British paintings, contemporary portraits, Japanese decorative arts, and antiquities.  The Andersons also collected objects that they admired for more personal reasons, including world religions particularly Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and American Indian religions and American history, especially military events of the American Revolution and the Civil War and the political history that the Andersons witnessed.  The museum collections also include works of art and artifacts related to the Anderson family that have been donated since the establishment of the museum in 1939.

                                        Flemish Tapestries

Two rare sets of Flemish tapestries grace the walls of the Olmsted gallery, dining room, and French drawing room on the second floor.  The Andersons purchased these sets, the Diana series and the Arbor or Gambarra series, from American collector and Massachusetts Avenue neighbor Charles M. Ffoulke in the first decade of the 20th century.  These rich fabrics were woven in silk and wool  around 1600 in the Brussels workshop of Jacques Guebels  and Jan Raes.  The Andersons also owned a third tapestry series depicting the biblical battle of David and Goliath hung along the upper walls of the two-story ballroom at Anderson House that they donated to the Washington National Cathedral and can be seen today in St. Mary's Chapel.

Asian Art

The Andersons collected a variety of Asian sculptures, paintings, metalwork, ivory and stone carvings, screens, lacquerware, ceramics, and carpets from India and Nepal as well as Japan and China.  Several of the objects in the collections were imperial gifts from the emperor and empress of Japan to the Andersons upon his retirement from the diplomatic corps in 1913.

Paintings
Revered portraits artists of 18th-century Britain as well as some of the most sought after painters of the Andersons' era dominate their collection of paintings.  Oil portraits of English

nobility by Thomas Lawrence, Henry Raeburn, and Joshua Reynolds line the walls of the aptly named English drawing room on the second floor of Anderson House.  Contemporary portraits of the Andersons that they commissioned by Cecilia Beaux, Philip de László, DeWitt M. Lockman, and José Villegas are scattered through the rest of the house.  Perhaps the most dramatic painting in the collection is The Triumph of the Dogaressa Maria Foscari, a monumental canvas by José Villegas that, while painted in the 1880s and 1890, celebrates an event that took place in Venice in 1423.