It perhaps should not come as a surprise to a commissioning body that American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler—with a painter’s credo of “art for art’s sake”—would so splendidly ignore their brief. Case in point: In 1876, Frederick Leyland, a British shipping magnate, had commissioned English architect Thomas Jeckyll to design the dining room of his London town house to showcase his collection of Kangxi blue-and-white porcelain. When Jeckyll fell ill mid-project, Leyland entrusted Whistler, a friend who also painted the room’s centerpiece, The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863–65), to make some light cosmetic changes. The dazzling—though completely off the rails—result, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, can be seen at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, where it has been on view for 100 years.
In honor of the Washington, DC, institution’s centennial this month, AD PRO remembers the Peacock Room’s prickly past (detailed in the March 1993 issue of Architectural Digest), transatlantic journey, recent renovation, and future.
As the only remaining decorative interior by Whistler, the Peacock Room is an aesthetic movement masterpiece that, had Leyland not gone away on business, may have ceased to exist. “I just painted as I went on, without design or sketch—it grew as I painted,” the artist once said, recounted in the archival AD. In fact, he did not hesitate to promote the space, even going so far as to entertain dignitaries there in Leyland’s absence. Though Jeckyll’s lattice shelves and Jacobean-style ceiling remained, the artist covered nearly every surface (including the antique leather hanging on the upper walls) in Prussian blue paint, copper-green glaze, and Dutch metal to emulate gold leaf.
Rightfully perturbed, Leyland returned to find the 20-by-32-foot room vastly more ornate—and costly—than agreed upon. Refusing to pay Whistler’s full fee of 2,000 guineas (equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars today), the artist retaliated by painting two warring peacocks on the south wall, which he titled, Art and Money: or, The Story of the Room. “There’s this overlay of personal animosities, the role of the artist, and Whistler’s interest in Japonisme and the culling of traditions from across Asia—it all comes together in this wonderful over-the-top space,” Diana Greenwold, the museum’s Lunder Curator of American Art, tells AD PRO.
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May 18, 2023 at 12:25AM
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The Colorful Story Behind the Iconic Peacock Room - Architectural Digest
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