BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Peacock Room

DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Peacock Room:

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Description of Pictures: The Peacock Room Comes to America
September 3, 2022 – Indefinitely
In 1876, shipping magnate Frederick Leyland hired his friend, artist James McNeill Whistler, to redecorate the dining room of his London townhouse. Leyland also used the space to display his prized collection of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. Whistler totally reimagined the space as a “harmony in blue and gold,” covering the doors, ceiling, and walls with peacock-inspired designs. Leyland was far from pleased with the transformation and the artist’s fee. He quarrelled with Whistler, but he kept the room intact.
Collector Charles Lang Freer purchased the room in 1904. He had it taken apart, shipped across the Atlantic, and reassembled in his home in Detroit, Michigan. There, he gradually filled its shelves with ceramics he collected from Syria, Iran, Japan, China, and Korea. Unlike Leyland’s preference for intricately decorated blue-and-white porcelain, Freer favored objects in monochromatic tones with matte, textured surfaces, and he arranged them on the Peacock Room’s shelves largely by color. For Freer, the room embodied his belief that “all works of art go together, whatever their period.” In the Peacock Room, artists and scholars gathered to examine Freer’s ceramics and to seek out unexpected resonances across cultures and eras. The Peacock Room Comes to America invites visitors into this captivating environment to do the same.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIFGPE_220828_07.JPG: Currently undergoing conservation for the first time in thirty years, James McNeill Whistler's masterpiece will reopen with a new installation of ceramics in September 2022. The Peacock Room has undergone two large-scale conservation projects during its time in Washington, DC, first in the 1940s and then in the early 1990s, when a team of ten conservators and scientists performed in-depth scientific analysis and conservation treatment over a four-year period. Their work brought to light significant artistic details that had been obscured by use, pollution, light exposure, environmental changes, and earlier treatments. ...
2. SIFGPE_220828_10.JPG: Currently undergoing conservation for the first time in thirty years, the Peacock Room will reopen with a new installation of ceramics in September 2022.
3. SIFGPE_220828_36.JPG: The Peacock Room is James McNeill Whistler's (1934-1903) most complete masterwork. Whistler applied his Asian-inspired aesthetic to the room's walls, ceiling, fireplace, and shelves, using paint and gilding to transform the space into what he called his Harmony in Blue and Gold. Learn more about the many lives of this room that has enchanted visitors for one hundred years.
4. SIFGPE_220828_39.JPG: The China Cabinet at 49 Prince's Gate, London
5. SIFGPE_220828_53.JPG: A Haven for Artistic Contemplation in Detroit, Michigan
6. SIFGPE_220828_68.JPG: A Classroom for the Nation in Washington, DC
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Description of Subject Matter: The Peacock Room Comes to America
April 9, 2011 – January 3, 2016
For the first time, the Freer Gallery's renowned Peacock Room has been restored to its appearance in 1908, when museum founder Charles Lang Freer used it to organize and display more than 250 ceramics from all over Asia. The first special exhibition in this room since its conservation in 1993, The Peacock Room Comes to America highlights Freer's belief in "points of contact" between American and Asian art and underscores the relationship among the museum's diverse collections.
Originally designed by architect Thomas Jeckyll, the Peacock Room was once the dining room for British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, who wanted a place to showcase his blue-and-white Chinese porcelain collection in his London home. When American artist James McNeill Whistler redecorated the room in 1876 as a "harmony in blue and gold," he too was inspired by the delicate patterns and vivid colors of the pots. Their slick surfaces did not appeal to Freer, however, who favored complex surface texture and subtly toned glazes. When Freer purchased the Peacock Room in 1904 and moved it from London to Detroit, he filled the shelves with pots he had collected from countries as diverse as Egypt, Iran, Japan, China, and Korea. Freer's ceramics are absorbing individually and as part of the full installation, which he thoughtfully designed to form a harmonized whole. After Freer's death (1854-1919), the Peacock Room was installed in the Freer Gallery of Art and is on permanent display.
Wikipedia Description: The Peacock Room
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (better known as The Peacock Room) is James McNeill Whistler's masterpiece of interior decorative mural art. He painted the panelled room in a rich and unified palette of brilliant blue-greens with over-glazing and metallic gold leaf. Painted between 1876–77, it now is considered one of the greatest surviving aesthetic interiors, and best examples of the Anglo-Japanese style.

History

The Peacock Room was originally designed as a dining room in the townhouse located at 49 Prince's Gate in the neighbourhood of Kensington in London, and owned by the British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland. Leyland engaged the British architect Richard Norman Shaw to remodel and redecorate his home. Shaw entrusted the remodelling of the dining room to Thomas Jeckyll, another British architect experienced in the Anglo-Japanese style. Jeckyll conceived the dining room as a Porsellanzimmer (porcelain room).

He covered the walls with 6th-century wall hangings of Cuir de Cordoue that had been originally brought to England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Aragon. They were painted with her heraldic device, the open pomegranate, and a series of red roses, Tudor roses, to symbolise her union with Henry VIII. They had hung on the walls of a Tudor style house in Norfolk for centuries, before they were bought by Leyland for �1,000. Against these walls, Jekyll constructed an intricate lattice framework of engraved spindled walnut shelves that held Leyland’s collection of Chinese blue and white porcelain, mostly from the Kangxi era of the Qing dynasty.

To the south of the room, a walnut welsh dresser was placed in the centre, just below the large empty leather panel, and flanked on both sides by the framework shelves. On the east side, three tall windows parted the room overlooking a private park, and covered by full-length walnut shutters. To the north a fireplace, over which hung the painting by American painter James McNeill Whistler, Rose and Silver: The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, that served as the focal point of the room. The ceiling was constructed in a pendant panelled Tudor-style, and decorated with eight globed pendant gas light fixtures. To finish the room, Jekyll placed a rug with a red border on the floor.

Jeckyll had nearly completed his decorative scheme when an illness compelled him to abandon the project. Whistler, who was then working on decorations for the entrance hall of Leyland’s house, volunteered to finish Jeckyll's work in the dining room. Concerned that the red roses adorning the leather wall hangings clashed with the colours in The Princess, Whistler suggested retouching the leather with yellow paint, and Leyland agreed to that minor alteration. He also authorised Whistler to embellish the cornice and wainscoting with a "wave pattern" derived from the design in Jeckyll's leaded-glass door, and then went to his home in Liverpool. During Leyland's absence however, Whistler grew bolder with his revisions.

Well, you know, I just painted on. I went on ―without design or sketch― it grew as I painted. And toward the end I reached such a point of perfection ―putting in every touch with such freedom― that when I came round to the corner where I started, why, I had to paint part of it over again, as the difference would have been too marked. And the harmony in blue and gold developing, you know, I forgot everything in my joy in it.
—James McNeill Whistler

Upon returning, Leyland was shocked by the "improvements." Artist and patron quarrelled so violently over the room and the proper compensation for the work that the important relationship for Whistler was terminated. At one point, Whistler gained access to Leyland's home and painted two fighting peacocks meant to represent the artist and his patron, and which he titled "Art and Money: or, The Story of the Room".

Whistler is reported to have said to Leyland, "Ah, I have made you famous. My work will live when you are forgotten. Still, per chance, in the dim ages to come you will be remembered as the proprietor of the Peacock Room."

The dispute between Whistler and Leyland did not end there. In 1879, Whistler was forced to file for bankruptcy, and Leyland was his chief creditor at the time. When the creditors arrived to inventory the artist’s home for liquidation, they were greeted by The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor), a large painted caricature of Leyland portrayed as an anthropomorphic demonic peacock playing a piano, sitting upon Whistler’s house, painted in the same colours featured in the Peacock Room. He referenced the incident again in his book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Adding to the emotional drama was Whistler's fondness for Leyland's wife, Frances, who separated from her husband in 1879. Another result of this drama was Jeckyll who, so shocked by the first sight of his room, returned home and was later found on the floor of his studio covered in gold leaf; he never recovered and died insane three years later.

Having acquired The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, American industrialist and art collector Charles Lang Freer, anonymously purchased the entire room in 1904 from Leyland's heirs, including Leyland's daughter and her husband, the British artist Val Prinsep. Freer then had the contents of the Peacock Room installed in his Detroit mansion. After Freer's death in 1919, the Peacock Room was permanently installed in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The gallery opened to the public in 1923.
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