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.