Expatriate American Painter Caught Between East and West

Whistler’s “Peacock Room” a Reason to See His Paintings and His Era

Washington D.C.—In popular lore, the Victorian American artist James McNeill Whistler, who worked in England, is known for the side-view painting of his seated mother, a work we call “Whistler’s Mother” (1871). Whistler also had a room, the so-called “Peacock Room,” a dining room he decorated with paint. We are just now being reminded of that feat: let us call it “Whistler’s Room.”

            The Freer Gallery of Art, located on the Washington Mall, has been home to the Peacock Room since 1923, making the gallery (the first art division of the Smithsonian Institution) an international attraction. Beginning in April, the Freer has presented the Peacock Room in a new light, re-arranging the large collection of Asian pottery that has always festooned the room’s many shelves.

            In London around 1877, when Whistler painted the room in what he called a “harmony in blue and gold,” the owner, British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, had decorated it with blue-and-white Chinese porcelain. Later, Freer-the-American, out of friendship for Whistler (who just died, in 1903), bought the London room and had it shipped (in 27 crates) to be re-assembled at his Detroit mansion. At this point, Freer decorated the shelves with his own growing collection of varied Asian pots and dishes.

            The new Freer Gallery exhibit, “The Peacock Room Comes of America,” has put Freer’s exact pottery arrangement back on the shelves to draw new public interest—to see the room “with fresh eyes.” says the curator. The exhibit also refocuses us on Whistler, a rare and colorful American artist of note when Europe reigned supreme in the arts.

            After Mr. Freer and Whistler met, Freer became a friend and devoted collector of Whistler’s art works. Hence, the Freer Gallery—otherwise considered a leading home to classic Asian art—is also the largest repository of Whistler’s art (1,300 painting, drawings, and prints). He is the expatriate American caught in the growing aura of Asia. As the gallery says, the Peacock Room is perfectly located between a permanent Whistler painting exhibit and rooms devoted to Chinese art and sculpture.

            Whistler, a kind of art prodigy reared in Europe and attending its art schools, ended up in London at a time when Japanese prints and Chinese porcelain were gaining popularity. Whistler contributed to this artistic interest. Not only did his paintings show the flat decorative quality of the Japanese art (and his portraits and genre scenes show westerners in exotic Asian costumes), but he collected and cataloged porcelain. As a London wag said in 1876, there was a “rage for everything blue and white.” As the Freer exhibition notes, this was also called “Chinamania” (and the exhibit room titled “Whistler and the Victorian Craze for Blue-and-White” explains why).

            Now, back to the original Peacock Room.

            In Victorian London, shipping magnate Leyland, who had bought Whistler’s paintings, one day asked him to update his dining room. This led to Whistler’s using a peacock design, painted decoratively in a stark two-tone blue and gold (the “blue” is actually blue-green to the eye). When a dispute over payment for the work arose, Whistler famously limned two gold peacocks fighting on the wall panel; Leyland was the big aggressive one, with coins all around, and Whistler the more defenseless, cowering bird.

            Today, Whistler is known for his mother, the Peacock Room, and his role in appreciating Asian design. He has other legacies. He was perhaps the first of a type, the American bohemian artist in Europe, and he played that flamboyant role to the hilt in London, fortunately with wealthy patrons to assist.

            His night-time paintings—which used a range of close dark tones—foreshadowed a kind of “tonal” painting. He called them “moonlights,” but patron Leyland called them “nocturns”—and the name stuck. In this, Whistler pre-dated by decades the tonal minimalists, such as Clyfford Stills (who simply puts two dark blues on a large canvas). Whistler's portrait paintings also mimicked the “lanky” elongated human figures on Chinese vases, which he did before Picasso hit upon elongation (probably mimicking El Greco).

            Before the nocturns, Whistler began to call his painting “arrangements” or “harmonies” of color; hence the quite literal painting of his mother is titled, “Arrangement in Gray and Black.” When the British art critic John Ruskin lambasted Whistler nocturns as an insult to the public, the thin-skinned Whistler sued him for libel, a rare art dispute gone to court (where, in 1877, Whistler won).

            As the critics tell us, however, Whistler’s painting styles did not spawn any new art movements. The Impressionists were doing that at the time in France. He was a beacon of the “art for art’s sake” idea and, again, a rare notable American abroad. Plus, he gave us an icon—“Whistler’s Mother”—the only American painting, famous among Americans, to have never left the possession of France.