'An artist is
not paid for his labor but for his vision'
~James Abbott McNeill Whistler
It was
an American who gave Europe its greatest lesson in simplicity: James Abbott
McNeill Whistler. With a flourish of his
elegant walking stick, he swept away Victorian bric-a-brac, the products of
industrial art, and introduced a simplicity which owed its inspiration to
Japan. He loved the folding screens of
the Coromandel coast, Directoire furniture, and blue and white Chinese
porcelain. Peacock feathers in vases
were a concession to the taste of the man who was first his disciple, then his
enemy – Oscar Wilde.
All the
same, Whistler learned a lot in England: the simplicity of William Morris
furniture and the subtle use of tones in his wall paper. He introduced white-painted paneling and
curtains that hung straight down. He was
the first to know how to hang paintings properly, choosing simple frames. His friends, the architect Godwin, designed
furniture for his Chelsea house which was imitated twenty years later by the “art
nouveau” decorators Voysey and Mackintosh.
In the same way the peacock, Whistler’s favorite bird, would spread its
sinuous, ocellated feathers across the posters of Alphonse Mucha.
In
America the Whistler style had more success than true “art nouveau.” It was well adapted to the puritanism which
led many extremely rich Americans to decorate their homes with remarkable
simplicity. He was imitated, too, by
collectors of Oriental art, of whom there were a large number in New
England. Whistler was the first to
encourage Beardsley, but he had only contempt for the opulent painting of
Sargent, who chose a fashionable baroque style to flatter his aristocratic models. Like all men of refined taste, he had a
difficult character which he displayed in his “Gentle Art of Making Enemies.”
...and children
feature prominently in Whistler’s Chelsea street scenes.
The Chelsea
Arts Club, est 1891 by Whistler, Sickert and others in search of something less
starchy than the Arts Club in Piccadilly.
Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, designed by James
McNeill Whistler, today found at the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian.
The Peacock Room was once the dining room in the London home
of Frederick R. Leyland, a wealthy shipowner from Liverpool, England. It was
originally designed by a gifted interior architect named Thomas Jeckyll. To
display Leyland's prized collection of Chinese porcelain to best advantage,
Jeckyll constructed a lattice of intricately carved shelving and hung antique
gilded leather on the walls. A painting by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
called La Princesse du pays de la
porcelaine — or The Princess from the Land of Porcelain — occupied a place
of honor above the fireplace.
Jeckyll had nearly completed his commission when he consulted
Whistler — who was then working on decorations for the entrance hall of
Leyland's house — about the color to paint the dining room shutters and doors.
Concerned that the red roses on the leather hangings clashed with the colors in
The Princess, Whistler volunteered to retouch the walls with traces of yellow.
Leyland permitted Whistler to make that minor alteration and also to adorn the
wainscoting and cornice with a "wave pattern" derived from the design
on the leaded glass of the pantry door. Assuming the decoration of the room to
be virtually complete, Leyland went back to his business in Liverpool.
In his patron's absence, Whistler was inspired to make bolder
revisions. He covered the ceiling with Dutch metal, or imitation gold leaf,
over which he painted a lush pattern of peacock feathers. He then gilded Jeckyll's
walnut shelving and embellished the wooden shutters with four magnificently
plumed peacocks.
Whistler wrote to Leyland that the dining room was
"really alive with beauty — brilliant and gorgeous while at the same time
delicate and refined to the last degree," boasting that the changes he had
made were past imagining. "I assure you," he said, "you can have
no more idea of the ensemble in its perfection gathered from what you last saw
on the walls than you could have of a complete opera judging from a third
finger exercise!" He urged Leyland not to return to London yet, since he
did not want the room to be seen before every detail was perfect.
Yet Whistler entertained visitors and amused the press in the
lavishly decorated room, never thinking to ask permission of the owner of the
house. His audacious behavior, coupled with a dispute over payment for the
project, provoked a bitter quarrel between the painter and his patron. Leyland
would not consent to pay the two thousand guineas that Whistler wanted: "I
do not think you should have involved me in such a large expenditure without
previously telling me of it," he wrote to the artist. Eventually Leyland
agreed to half that amount, but he further insulted Whistler by writing his
check in pounds, the currency of trade, when payment to artists and
professionals was customarily made in guineas. A pound is worth twenty
shillings and a guinea twenty-one, so the already offensive sum was also
smaller than expected.
Perhaps in retaliation, Whistler took the liberty of coating
Leyland's valuable leather with Prussian-blue paint and depicting a pair of
peacocks aggressively confronting each other on the wall opposite The Princess.
He used two shades of gold for the design and highlighted telling details in
silver. Scattered at the feet of the angry bird are the coins (silver
shillings) that Leyland refused to pay; the silver feathers on the peacock's
throat allude to the ruffled shirts that Leyland always wore. The poor and
affronted peacock has a silver crest feather that resembles the lock of white
hair that curled above Whistler's forehead. To make sure that Leyland
understood his point, Whistler called the mural of the fighting peacocks
"Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room." He obtained a blue rug to
complete the scheme and titled the room Harmony in Blue and Gold. After
concluding his work in March 1877, the artist never saw the Peacock Room again.
Despite the controversy surrounding its creation, Leyland
kept his dining room as Whistler had left it and continued filling the shelves
with porcelain until his death in 1892. Twelve years later the Peacock Room was
removed from the Leyland house and exhibited in a London art gallery. Having
recently acquired The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, Charles Lang Freer
(1854-1919), who later founded the Freer Gallery of Art, purchased the Peacock
Room in 1904. The room was again taken apart, and reinstalled in an addition to
Freer's house in Detroit, where it was used for the display of his own
collection of ceramics. Freer recognized the importance of the Peacock Room in
understanding Whistler's style, and he also believed it to exemplify the spirit
of universal beauty that informed his philosophy of collecting and united his
holdings of Asian and American art.
