The Peacock Room was once the dining room in the London home of Frederick Leyland, a wealthy shipowner. Originally designed by architect Thomas Jekyll, who asked James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) for advice on what color to paint the shutters and doors, Whistler ended up transforming the entire room, much to the surprise of the room’s owner.
Whistler enhanced the space with golden peacocks and painted every inch of the ceiling and walls in order to create a setting for Leyland to display his ceramic collection as well as Whistler’s painting, The Princess from the Land of Porcelain. Leyland was not pleased with Whistler’s fee nor the room’s transformation, but he kept it intact. Whistler never saw the Peacock Room again. It was purchased by Charles Lang Freer in 1904 and installed in the Freer Gallery of Art after his death, where the Peacock Room is on permanent display.
One afternoon a month, the museum opens the shutters of the Peacock Room so it can be seen in a whole new light. When the shutters are open, the room glows in tones of blue, green, and gold. Details, colors, and textures are revealed in the sunlight, and a special filtering film on the windows minimizes fading.
To learn more about the Peacock Room’s dynamic history, visit the Story of the Beautiful, a major online resource at www.asia.si.edu, which was created by the Freer Gallery of Art in the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., and Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.
Note: Imagine a room so special that it was dismantled, packed into 27 crates, and floated across the ocean! That is what happened in 1904, when Charles Lang Freer had it shipped to his home in Detroit, Michigan, and reassembled there.