James McNeill Whistler
(American, 1834–1903).
The Peacock Room
1876—77.
James McNeill Whistler
(American, 1834-1903).
The Princess from
the Land of Porcelain
La Princesse du pays
de la porcelaine, 1863-64,
Oil on canvas,
199.9 x 116.1 cm. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1903.91
James McNeill Whistler
(American, 1834–1903)
Arrangement in Grey
and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother 1871 |
The Peacock Room was
once the dining room in the London home of Frederick R. Leyland, a wealthy
shipowner from Liverpool, England. It was originally designed by a gifted
interior architect named Thomas Jeckyll. To display Leyland's prized collection
of Chinese porcelain to best advantage, Jeckyll constructed a lattice of
intricately carved shelving and hung antique gilded leather on the walls.
A painting by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) called La Princesse du
pays de la porcelaine — or The Princess from the Land of Porcelain — occupied
a place of honor above the fireplace.
In his patron's absence,
Whistler was inspired to make bolder revisions. He covered the ceiling
with Dutch metal, or imitation gold leaf, over which he painted a lush
pattern of peacock feathers. He then gilded Jeckyll's walnut shelving and
embellished the wooden shutters with four magnificently plumed peacocks.
Whistler wrote to Leyland
that the dining room was "really alive with beauty — brilliant and gorgeous
while at the same time delicate and refined to the last degree," boasting
that the changes he had made were past imagining. "I assure you," he said,
"you can have no more idea of the ensemble in its perfection gathered from
what you last saw on the walls than you could have of a complete opera
judging from a third finger exercise!" He urged Leyland not to return to
London yet, since he did not want the room to be seen before every detail
was perfect.
Yet Whistler entertained
visitors and amused the press in the lavishly decorated room, never thinking
to ask permission of the owner of the house. His audacious behavior, coupled
with a dispute over payment for the project, provoked a bitter quarrel
between the painter and his patron. Leyland would not consent to pay the
two thousand guineas that Whistler wanted: "I do not think you should have
involved me in such a large expenditure without previously telling me of
it," he wrote to the artist. Eventually Leyland agreed to half that amount,
but he further insulted Whistler by writing his check in pounds, the currency
of trade, when payment to artists and professionals was customarily made
in guineas. A pound is worth twenty shillings and a guinea twenty-one,
so the already offensive sum was also smaller than expected.
Jeckyll had nearly
completed his commission when he consulted Whistler — who was then working
on decorations for the entrance hall of Leyland's house — about the color
to paint the dining room shutters and doors. Concerned that the red roses
on the leather hangings clashed with the colors in The Princess, Whistler
volunteered to retouch the walls with traces of yellow. Leyland permitted
Whistler to make that minor alteration and also to adorn the wainscoting
and cornice with a "wave pattern" derived from the design on the leaded
glass of the pantry door. Assuming the decoration of the room to be virtually
complete, Leyland went back to his business in Liverpool.
Perhaps in retaliation,
Whistler took the liberty of coating Leyland's valuable leather with Prussian-blue
paint and depicting a pair of peacocks aggressively confronting each other
on the wall opposite The Princess. He used two shades of gold for the design
and highlighted telling details in silver. Scattered at the feet of the
angry bird are the coins (silver shillings) that Leyland refused to pay;
the silver feathers on the peacock's throat allude to the ruffled shirts
that Leyland always wore. The poor and affronted peacock has a silver crest
feather that resembles the lock of white hair that curled above Whistler's
forehead. To make sure that Leyland understood his point, Whistler called
the mural of the fighting peacocks "Art and Money; or, The Story of the
Room." He obtained a blue rug to complete the scheme and titled the room
Harmony in Blue and Gold. After concluding his work in March 1877, the
artist never saw the Peacock Room again.
Despite the controversy
surrounding its creation, Leyland kept his dining room as Whistler had
left it and continued filling the shelves with porcelain until his death
in 1892. Twelve years later the Peacock Room was removed from the Leyland
house and exhibited in a London art gallery. Having recently acquired The
Princess from the Land of Porcelain, Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), who
later founded the Freer Gallery of Art, purchased the Peacock Room in 1904.
The room was again taken apart, and reinstalled in an addition to Freer's
house in Detroit, where it was used for the display of his own collection
of ceramics. Freer recognized the importance of the Peacock Room in understanding
Whistler's style, and he also believed it to exemplify the spirit of universal
beauty that informed his philosophy of collecting and united his holdings
of Asian and American art.
After Freer's death
in 1919, the Peacock Room was transported to Washington, D.C. and installed
in the new Freer Gallery of Art. By then, having been dismantled, moved,
and reassembled three times, the room's physical structure had become highly
unstable. Between 1947 and 1950 two Boston restorers, John and Richard
Finlayson, carried out an extensive renovation: they remounted the wall
hangings with wax on a new plywood framework, repaired the damaged ceiling,
restored the cracked and buckled leather, and retouched or repainted many
surfaces of the room. The Finlaysons seemed to have concentrated their
efforts on the painted panels and disregarded the surrounding framework
of wainscoting, even though Whistler himself had lavished attention on
every inch of the decoration. Largely as a result of their selective restoration,
the artist's subtle harmonies fell sadly out of tune.
Fortunately, Whistler's
intricate patterns of color design were successfully retrieved during a
recent conservation project. Using cleaning systems designed specifically
for the task, a team of conservators gradually removed an accumulation
of darkened varnish, dirt, and overpaint, leaving the original surfaces
of the room untouched. The wooden wainscoting was revealed to be not murkey
brown but greenish gold. And the dark, lusterless ceiling became vibrant
with feather patterns spun across a shimmering golden ground. Once the
conservation was complete, the dominant inspiration for the color scheme
became clearly apparent: the coppery golds and brilliant blues and greens
of Whistler's decoration resemble the iridescent markings of peacock feathers.
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/peacock/default.htm |
