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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After Leyland died, the home’s new owner sold the room in its entirety to another friend and patron of Whistler, Charles Lang Freer. In 1904, Freer had the room dismantled, shipped, and reassembled in his Detroit home, where he’d filled the lattice shelves with international ceramics—both he and Whistler were significant porcelain collectors. Upon his death in 1919, Freer bestowed 9,500 works of art, including the Peacock Room, to form the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened its doors in 1923 as the first art museum on the National Mall. The gallery later combined with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (the Smithsonian’s second museum of Asian art) to form what is now the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, which uniquely stands as one of the world’s most important collections of Asian art and works by Whistler.
During September 2022, the museum reopened the Peacock Room, with the shutters and floor grates were freshly restored and shelves that had been reinstalled to better reflect how Freer lived within the space. “His collection is night and day from Leyland’s intricately decorated blue-and-white porcelain. These ceramics are largely matte tones, often with distressed surfaces, or archaeological objects with iridescent sheens,” says Greenwold, adding that her predecessor’s team had painstakingly matched up the ceramics from archival photographs of Freer’s home to his works in the museum collection to make the display as authentic as possible. “Freer used the space for contemplation and artistic study of these objects.”
This month, the interior becomes a key component of the museum’s new festival celebrating Asian American arts and culture during AAPI Heritage Month. As for the future, Greenwold looks forward to thinking more critically about “questions of appropriation and Orientalism and the means by which Whistler borrowed motifs, tropes, and forms from across Asian collections,” she says, referencing a suite of paintings in the museum’s collection where Angle female subjects are in spaces replete with Asian objects.
In addition to bringing more diverse voices into the Peacock Room, Greenwold is also exploring how augmented reality could “unearth and untangle some of these really interesting personal relationships and global conversations of the late 19th century.” Even after 100 years, Whistler’s magnum opus remains ripe for reinvestigation.
