Peacock Room

ABSTRACT: THE ART WORLD about James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room. In 1876-77, James McNeill Whistler altered the décor of the London dining room of his patron Frederick Leyland, a Liverpool shipowner who used the room’s shelves to display his vast collection of blue-and-white Chinese porcelains. The result was one of the most intoxicating decorative ensembles in the world: “Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room,” which, since 1923, has been the star attraction of the Freer Gallery, a museum rich in Asian and Islamic art, in Washington, D.C. Charles Lang Freer, an American railroad-car manufacturer, bought the room, after Leyland’s death, from a London dealer, in 1904, and had it installed at his home, in Detroit. Upon Freer’s death, in 1919, his will endowed the Freer Gallery, which opened, four years later, as the first of the Smithsonian art museums. Last week, the Freer débuted a temporary reinstallation of the Peacock Room, by the curator Lee Glazer, which re-create its look in photographs from 1908— adorned not with porcelains but with two hundred and fifty-four of Freer’s own Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Middle Eastern earthenware and stoneware ceramics, which he left the museum. The effect is wonderful. Leyland and his wife, Frances, championed Whistler in England. The gifted architect Thomas Jeckyll had lined the Peacock Room with latticed walnut shelving to accommodate Leyland’s porcelains. Where Jeckyll had envisioned a sun-dappled Chinese pavilion, Whistler contrived a chamber of the night. It realizes a synesthetic fusion of dazzling spectacle and intimate touch. Whistler was quite as modern as his friends among the French Impressionists, though he took a different tack from their common sources in the vehement realism of Courbet and the Spanish revivalism and dandyish urbanity of Manet. Whistler missed the express train to modernism when he moved from Paris to London, in the eighteen-sixties, and set up as a bad-boy darling of high society. But, for a great spell that peaked in the Peacock Room, he achieved a unity of avant-garde spirit and civil decorum. The amazing keynote of the room, given its crowding with visual incident, is simplicity.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2011/04/18/110418craw_artworld_schjeldahl#ixzz1JcM2rnlc