[6][13][14] A newspaper art critic visited Pennell's class in spring 1924 and reported that "Karl Free, in a delicately drawn composition, amusingly caricatures palm trees.

Edward Alden Jewell, art critic of The New York Times, visited the show and wrote positively of Free's painting: "There is magic in the lane that runs between dense rows of trees and in the Rising Storm.

She wrote:[26] (As a counterpoint, in 1991 some of Free's circus paintings were included in a show called Under the Big Top at the Heckscher Museum on Long Island; a critic from The New York Times described them as "stiff, crowded compositions [that] fail to communicate the verve of the three-ring extravaganza.

"[33] A cast-aluminum "white metal" eagle designed by Free, once prominently displayed above the front door of Whitney Museum's original Eighth Street location, was uncovered in 2015.

[35] It had been installed in approximately 1931[36] when the architects gave the building a "coating of salmon-colored stucco and a modernistic entranceway [of] severe white marble columns [that] support a giant entablature, itself topped by an eagle.

[40]) Bruce Buttfield primarily designed the interiors of the original Whitney building, but Free was one of four artists said to have contributed additional "decorative detail" of the space.

[34] Online passenger manifests and library catalog entries describing Free's sketchbooks indicate that he traveled back and forth to Europe several times in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

[42] In a 1970 memoir piece published in American Heritage magazine,[43] Edward Laning recalled that in 1934, with the Great Depression well upon them: (Whitney Museum director Juliana Force was also regional chairman of the Public Works of Art Project.

[32] Rebels on Eighth Street, the major published history of the museum's early years, calls this "an act of vision on the part of More and Free…because they…were much more at home with representational art.

[49] Both of Free's United States post office murals with Native American subjects have been challenged as ethnographically incorrect and offensive; both remain in situ as historically significant exemplars of New Deal-era public artworks.

They are much harder to express in visual or plastic symbols.Sometime between 1936 and 1938 (artists had a two-year window within which to produce their commissions[54]), the U.S. Department of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts hired Karl R. Free to paint two murals, Arrival of the Mail at New Amsterdam and French Huguenots in Florida, at what was then the headquarters of the United States Postal Service (now the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building) in Washington, D.C.[12] The oil-on-canvas[55] murals, which are 7 ft (2.1 m) tall by 13.5 ft (4.1 m) wide, are located on the seventh floor of the south wing of the building, in a space currently occupied by the Environmental Protection Agency and closed to the general public except during pre-arranged guided tours.

[50][56] Free was among six painters (the others being Alfred Crimi, George Harding, Ward Lockwood, Frank Mechau, and William C. Palmer) selected to fill 11 remaining mural spaces in the second part of a competition to adorn the Post Office and Justice buildings.

[50] Free used a "1591 engraving by Theodorus de Bry of a sketch by Jacques Le Moyne" and a set of "1585–86 watercolors by John White that depict the [Algonquian-speaking people] of present-day North Carolina" as his visual models, resulting in a "picture that blends his cultural perceptions of the 1930s with the sixteenth-century source material.

"[58] At the time of their unveiling in February 1938, the "Art Notes" column of The Washington Star wrote of the murals, "These works resemble in general character paintings by Howard Pyle and C. Y. Turner made in the last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th.

[62] In 2007, the General Services Administration, which is responsible for the management of federal buildings in the United States, agreed to install a movable screen in front of Dangers of the Mail, that would "incorporate revised interpretative materials to address the history of the art and the controversy associated with the mural."

A "comprehensive interpretive program" was also developed for all 22 murals in the building, including all of those with Native American subject matter: Mechau's Dangers of the Mail and Pony Express, Ward Lockwood's Opening of the Southwest and Consolidation of the West, William C. Palmer's Covered Wagon Attacked by Indians, and Free's French Huguenots in Florida.

Post office muralists hired by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts were encouraged to represent "local industry, scenery, pursuits or history."

In this case, nearby Princeton University is represented by the 1756 landmark Nassau Hall and "a clutch of Trumbull founding fathers" who graduated from the colonial College of New Jersey.

"[55] (Contemporary observers admire the 1932 Charles Klauder-designed Classical Revival building for its vaulted ceiling, Art Deco brass chandeliers, and extensive wood paneling.

[76] A literary historian notes that tropical Caribbean imagery of the Columbian engraving was "the last significant appropriation of the palm tree for national iconography in the publications of the early republic.

She suggests that by the time work was underway on Columbia Under the Palm, the leaders of the Section (Edward Bruce, Edward Rowan, and Forbes Watson) felt that the piece was substandard but that they were helpless to restrain him:[57] The first published report of controversy about the mural's content appeared less than a year later, in the university's student newspaper The Daily Princetonian on May 14, 1940:[68] ("Father of the Constitution" James Madison and "Poet of the Revolution" Philip Freneau graduated in 1771 from the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University; Revolutionary War officer and Virginia politician Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee III graduated in 1773.

[64][77] By the late 1990s, writers in local newspapers were describing Columbia Under the Palm as, alternately, the "charming, if unlikely, get-together of Founding Fathers, Greek Gods, and several angels"[71] or, a picture "unabashed in its racism and assertions of white superiority.

"[78] In 2000, as the mural's content was being challenged by students and community members, Village Voice writer Jyoti Thottam (since 2022, opinion-page editor of The New York Times) described it as "an ornate mishmash with neo-Classical pretensions.

"[51] According to the Courier News of Bridgewater, New Jersey, in a 2004 report about ongoing public objection to the artwork, "The admittedly tacky painting depicts a trio of somber, ornately attired European men being led forward by an Apollonian figure and heralded by trumpeting angels.

The European men stand surrounded by the trappings of classical learning, while the natives half hide within lush jungle fronds…He even inscribed beneath the painting four lines of vapid doggerel, also open to racist interpretations, which has further incensed some observers.

[14] According to an oral-history interview with long-time Whitney curator Lloyd Goodrich, it was around this time, after Europe was embroiled but before the United States joined the shooting war, that Free was laid off from the museum staff.