Let’s try an experiment. Have a look at Abbott Handerson Thayer’s oil painting, Head (1888-1889), pictured on the right. Free associate, writing down the first ten words that come to mind. Ready? Go!

Let’s compare notes. I got: depressed, gloomy, cold, dark, sad, scared, shadowy, lurk, dreary, and black. If one or more of your ten words was beautiful, pretty, cheery, sunny, or ecstatic, it is probably worth applying for an internship at the Freer Gallery.

But for the rest of us, the current show Pretty Women: Freer and the Ideal of Feminine Beauty is downright confounding. The women who appear in the paintings are more scary than pretty.

The gallery was founded by railroad car maker, Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919), who donated his tremendous collection to the American people. But as Carl Hartman reports, Freer’s donation carried one condition: “The Freer Gallery of Art must neither lend nor borrow items, as many museums actively do.” With a no-lend-no-borrow policy, the museum has to constantly recycle from its collection, which makes it hard to compete with other museums’ sexier traveling shows. So when sexy doesn’t work, tacky is all that is left.

The 21-painting show is not a total disaster. Of the six paintings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and 15 paintings by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Dwight William Tryon (all 19th century, American painters), a handful are worth seeing.

Thayer’s A Virgin, which hangs over a staircase outside the exhibit, is a large painting that shows a woman holding hands with two children as they trek through a field. A breeze from off-stage right blows their clothing, which is a mixture of toned-down, muddy browns, greens, yellows, and grays. Behind the figures, a baby blue sky peeks through cumulus clouds. The clouds could easily be interpreted as the virgin’s wings, which would lend the painting a religious aura, although the title of A Virgin rather than The Virgin seems to preclude Mary as a candidate for the central figure. And she seems more like a model walking down a runway than the mother of Christ.

Though Thayer’s virgin is not ugly, his Portrait of the Artist's Eldest Daughter (1893-1894) depicts a face only a father could love. The portrait is stuck somewhere between Thora Birch as Jane Burnham in American Beauty and Christina Ricci as Wednesday of The Addams Family Movie.

Whistler’s Arrangement in White and Black (ca. 1876)—which shows a woman in a long white dress and hat, with a black scarf around her neck—has a porcelain China doll look to it. The doe-eyed woman’s cheeks and lips are a deep red, and she might have attracted viewers’ interest if she emerged from the black shadows that threaten to engulf her. Taking her hands off her hips to lighten her angry, grandmotherly pose would do wonders for her posture. Clearly the woman didn’t impress Whistler, the formalist, with her beauty either, as he titled her in inanimate terms that reduce her to white and black.

The museum stresses the angle of Freer’s bachelor status. There is something endearing in the Puritanical bachelor gazing at paintings of women to compensate for lapses in his sex-life. The Freer says the work might have provided him with “a comfortably distanced vision of feminine beauty.” But the more interesting story here might be the museum’s attempt—within Freer’s loan policy that precludes a more multicultural exploration of beauty—to show how Freer the voyeur conceived of beauty. The exhibit’s answer? Upper class, Caucasian, stuffy women, who dress poorly and are more likely to evoke funeral attendees than Aphrodite.

The Freer Gallery of Art is located at Jefferson Drive at 12th Street, SW and is open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. everyday. Admission is free. Pretty Women runs through September 17.