If you’re into the DC art scene you most likely have heard of the Peacock Room. It is a marvelous work of interior decoration that is decades –or, dare I say, centuries – ahead of its time. Unfortunately, its creator – similar to other artists – was not appreciated, understood, or seen for the talent that he was.
James Whistler, an American artist who learned art from the French and took residence in Britain, created the Peacock Room in 1876-1877. Almost three decades later the room was purchased by art collector, Charles Lang Freer, in its entirety. Well – except the porcelains.
When Whistler first presented his masterpiece to the man who had commissioned it, he had all the shelves filled with blue and white porcelains. Now, after over a century has passed, the Freer Gallery offers a glimpse of the Peacock Room as it initially appeared.
If you decide to visit this exquisite display, be sure to also walk through the adjacent exhibition where a collection of small, refined and restrained watercolors in soft shades are presented. Once you do, you may find it hard to believe that these have been created by the same hands as those who made the Peacock Room.
The two exhibits are opposites; One, bold and glorious, the other – as Whistler described – a series of “delightful little things”. When combined, however, they create a narrative about the tumultuous life of an artist and add to the experience of the visitor.
First, they represent Freer’s interest in Whistler’s work. In fact, over the years he collected over 9,000 of Whistler’s pieces. And it was James Whistler who introduced Freer to Asian visual art and sparked his interest that lead to the enormous collection of Asian art at the Freer Gallery.
Second, the exhibits narrate the journey of James Whistler’s career, with the Peacock Room as the peak of his life as an artist, followed by his evolution as a watercolor painter.
I had a chat with Lee Glazer, who, until recently, was the Curator of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, at the press preview of the newly adorned Peacock Room.
Lee emphasized that a narrative exists, which links Whistler’s Peacock Room to his interest in watercolor. If you like to know the story, read on as Lee tells the story that I share with you:
The place of the Peacock Room in American history is as a kind of icon of over-the-top aestheticism. When Whistler re-decorated the room as what he called “The Harmony in Blue and Gold”, he literally covered every surface of the room with blue and gold patterns inspired by peacock feathers.
The room started off its life as a dining room in Victorian London and was later purchased by the founder of Freer Gallery, Charles Lang Freer, and ultimately transported to the Freer museum on the National Mall. According to Lee, only once the Peacock Room became an object in a museum did its identity become calcified and iconic as a moment in Whistler’s storied, and somewhat controversial, career as an American ex-patriot painter in London.
What had never been understood about the room was the role that blue and white porcelain played as a source of Whistler’s inspiration. That was because Charles Freer didn’t collect blue and white porcelain. He had very different taste in ceramics and this exhibition represents the first time in more than a century that visitors have the opportunity to see the room’s shelves filled with blue and white porcelain. About half the pieces are historic blue and white from the museum’s collections. The other half are new commissions made in China specifically for this exhibition.
It is very difficult to think about what this immersive, over-the-top space has to do with those very reticent, tiny, and fragile-looking watercolors. However, there’s a narrative or biographical arc that links the creation of the Peacock Room to Whistler’s turn to watercolor. Whistler invested great hope in the Peacock Room. He thought it would make his name as a painter of the decorative interior and secure him a reliable source of income.
Unfortunately the owner of the room, Frederick Leyland didn’t like the work and refused to pay Whistler the full price that he asked. A huge falling out ensued and Whistler underwent several years of professional and financial misfortune. In fact, he always said that after the Peacock Room he never had any luck. He went bankrupt in 1879 and picked up watercolor shortly thereafter as a way of creating works relatively quickly, which would also be portable and perhaps appeal to a wider array of collectors and art lovers.
But it would be a mistake to see the watercolors just as a crass money-making endeavor. For Whistler, they were very much linked to his overall aesthetic philosophy that had to do with moving away from narrative, intensely worked, and highly finished surfaces that had a realistic verisimilitude about them and also told a story or preached a moral lesson.
These were the things that were valued by the conventional Victorian art world. Interestingly it was Chinese porcelain and the exotic patterns and figures painted on them that provided him that escape hatch from Victorian conventionality.
The lessons he learned in painting the Peacock Room and the contemporaneous large-scale royal nocturnes then carried over to his work in watercolor, which, when compared with other watercolors of the same period, is just incredibly spare, nearly abstract, and seemingly done in an unmediated, very fresh and unworked way, functioning as notes of color in their own right that float free of any narrative significance. In fact, just as he called the Peacock Room “Harmony in Blue and Gold,” he also titled his watercolors with musical names, such as “Arrangement in Green and Brown,” and “Harmony in Pink and Purple.”
What Whistler achieves with watercolor also related back to the lessons learned in the Peacock Room. Whistler, I think, saw his watercolors as part of a total oeuvre. None of his watercolor works were an isolated piece. Rather, they represented the collective expression of his ideas about color, harmony, and design. So, that idea of an aesthetic totality literalized in the Peacock Room then carries over into his understanding of the watercolors. When he displayed his watercolors in his own time, he oversaw the exhibition installations, made sure that the wall color, the furniture, and everything else was in harmony with the watercolors because he thought about the entirety of the exhibit as a manifestation of his whole aesthetic vision.
The Peacock Room is, of course, a permanent part of the Freer Gallery. But his watercolors will only be on display at the museum until October 6, 2019.