When James McNeill Whistler put the final, defiant flourishes upon two golden peacocks on art collector Frederick Leyland’s dining room wall, it was an act that would lead to the end of a long and lucrative friendship, and the rupture of Whistler’s success as a painter.
The story of that dining room—called the Peacock Room and considered one of Whistler’s masterpieces—has long been rife with mythology about the drama surrounding its creation and denouement. The room was the subject of much gossip among Victorian society at the time, and its story has been frequently layered-upon and exaggerated over the 147 years since its completion.
The 19th-century dining room, which was originally in Leyland’s London townhouse, has resided at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art since the museum’s doors opened in 1923. Its ornate magnificence, with its bold Prussian blue walls, dazzling gilded shelves full of Asian ceramics and three towering interior shutters adorned with golden peacocks, astonishes visitors—even those who do not know the backstory.
A new exhibition at the museum aims to highlight the relationship between Whistler, the Post-Impressionist American artist, and Leyland, a British shipping magnate, friend and patron of Whistler. The exhibition, “Ruffled Feathers: Creating Whistler’s Peacock Room,” is on display through January 2027. The title is a reference to the subjects portrayed on the walls and shutters, and the fracturing of Whistler and Leyland’s friendship.
That break is literally portrayed in a mural on the south wall titled Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room. It was painted before Whistler was “banished completely from the room,” says Diana Greenwold, curator of American art at the museum. But it’s “at a moment when the relationship has clearly disintegrated,” she says.
In the mural of two male peacocks, the one on the right has his tail on broad display. The ruff on his neck stands up, coins are strewn about his feet and seem to be flying around his body, while a small, cut-glass eye casts a harsh glance toward the other bird. Meanwhile, the peacock on the left appears almost submissive, his tail trailing downward, a white tuft feather sticking out of his head. He has a larger eye, perhaps signifying a wider vision.
Whistler meant—and all of society understood—the angry peacock to be Leyland, and the more subdued bird to be himself. “Whistler does not pull punches at this point,” says Greenwold. The painter was a celebrity and understood that any press is good press, she says. The story of the room “is making it into the papers, and the notoriety is, in fact, adding to his fame,” she continues.
So, what led to the high-profile falling out?
In 1876, when the dining room’s previous designer stopped work due to illness, Leyland asked Whistler, whose work he had been funding and collecting, to step in and make some finishing additions. Whistler, then in his 40s, was a successful midcareer artist but was not known for his interiors. Leyland trusted him, however.
Whistler was so confident of his vision that he created the room he wanted, including adding flashy gold leaf overlays onto the shelves and in patterns on the walls. He thought it would be a “gorgeous surprise,” despite having an inkling that it might not be to Leyland’s taste.
“He should have known,” says Linda Merrill, a Whistler scholar, art historian at Emory University and a former curator at the National Museum of Asian Art. “He used so much gold in that room that Leyland thought that it was garish and gaudy. And Leyland was a self-made man and was very sensitive about being seen as nouveau riche.”
As Whistler was wrapping up, he asked for the modern-day equivalent of over $200,000.
Leyland was having none of it. In a letter to the artist, Leyland wrote, “You have degenerated into nothing but an artistic Barnum. A con artist!” He paid Whistler half the sum and told him to never come back.
Whistler, for his part, wrote, “It is positively sickening to think that I should have labored to build up that exquisite Peacock Room for such a man to live in.”
The artist was deeply hurt, says Merrill. “He thought that Leyland was one of the few people who really appreciated his art,” she says.
Indeed, in 1867, nearly a decade prior, Leyland had commissioned Whistler to paint a massive canvas destined to be hung on the dining room’s south wall. Yet when the dining room project began, Whistler still had not completed it. Instead, after Leyland insulted him, Whistler decorated the room with the two peacocks.
The peacock mural was “the final insult,” because the space was meant to have a beautiful, emblematic Whistler composition, says Greenwold. Instead, Leyland ends up with “this mural depicting the dissolution of the relationship,” she says.
In a last act of insolence, Whistler painted over several panels of decorative embossed Spanish leather that Leyland had placed on the walls. “That was a pretty audacious thing to do,” says Merrill.
The Peacock Room episode was not out of left field for the Massachusetts-born Whistler, she says.
“He thumbed his nose at the English,” says Merrill. “His sense was, if they didn’t understand him, it was that they just weren’t smart enough, or they weren’t highly attuned aesthetically to his art,” she says. Whistler’s attitude—and his reputation for being irascible and belligerent—meant that he was frequently at odds with other artists, art critics and writers, Merrill says.
And he didn’t hold on to friendships for long, in part “because he was really touchy, especially about his art,” she says.
And yet, Whistler and Leyland had built a close friendship for well over a decade. Whistler’s 1865 painting The Princess From the Land of Porcelain, a towering portrait of a white woman in a kimono holding a fan, was already hanging in Leyland’s dining room. It was the starting point for the new design. Whistler had previously painted panels along the entry stairway of the London townhouse, one of which is on display in the exhibition.
In 1873, Whistler completed a brooding portrait of Leyland in the manner of painter Diego Velázquez, equating the Englishman with a Spanish monarch. That portrait and Whistler’s sketches of Leyland’s wife, Frances, and daughters Florence and Elinor are also on view.
“There was actually a very close and intimate relationship between the artist and the patron, and indeed, the patron’s entire family,” says Lee Glazer, another former curator at the museum and a senior curator at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland. Whistler and his mother were frequent guests at the Leyland country house in Liverpool, says Glazer.
Glazer notes that Leyland “couldn’t have been completely ignorant to what was going on, because Whistler was writing descriptive letters to him.” Leyland also periodically came back to London, so he would have seen the progress.
Even though some of what Whistler did was outside the bounds of Leyland’s expectations, much of the Peacock Room was in keeping with a Victorian-era fad, “Chinamania.” Whistler was an avid follower. He had been collecting Japanese woodblock prints, textiles and other objects from Japan, and also was an enthusiastic collector of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain. Whistler urged Leyland to also collect the Chinese ceramics, and the dining room was designed in part to display Leyland’s collection.
When the Peacock Room and the friendship came crashing down, Whistler was perhaps more famous, but not richer. He had been paid half of what he thought he deserved, and because it was a private residence, he could not put the work on display to garner new commissions, nor re-sell it, notes Merrill.
“He was never successful financially,” says Merrill. He mostly lived off the sales of his etchings, which were widely appreciated as among the greatest since Rembrandt, she says. He was trying to make his reputation as a painter.
Soon after the Peacock Room debacle, Whistler tried to interest the public in his new-style paintings of landscapes around the Thames River at night. The dark, more abstract “nocturnes,” as he called them, were not well received. Prominent critic John Ruskin assessed Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, as “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
The ever-sensitive Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, seeking £1,000 (around $125,000 today). Ultimately, Whistler won in 1878, but he was only awarded a farthing, just a quarter of a penny, says Merrill.
Whistler also was ordered to pay half the court costs, which bankrupted him. He lost his newly built house, sold all his possessions and went to Venice for more than a year to make etchings, supported by a commission. “When he came back, he essentially had to start over, and it took him a long time to get back on his feet and for people to take him seriously,” Merrill says.
Eventually Whistler regained acceptance, even doing more interior decorations, but none of them aside from the Peacock Room survive, says Merrill. In 1892, a retrospective in London recognized his importance, she says.
Leyland died the same year, having done nothing about the Peacock Room. “He sat in that room at the head of his table looking at that vicious portrait of himself as an avaricious peacock with ruffled feathers, until he died,” says Glazer. “So, he must have secretly understood the value of Whistler’s work.”
The room continued to have a life of its own.
After Leyland’s death, the townhouse’s next owner looked to sell the dining room. Charles Lang Freer, a Detroit-based industrialist who was a collector and Whistler’s friend, knew he should own it, but he “dragged his feet quite a while,” says Merrill. “But he recognized that it was the existing interior decoration by Whistler, and that it was important in the story of Whistler's career.” He bought it in 1904, the year after Whistler died, and had it shipped to Detroit.
“He didn’t really like it, and he always called it ‘the blue room,’” she says. “He never called it the Peacock Room, because that was too sensational.”
Freer used the room to display his own ceramics that he collected from Syria, Iran, Japan, China and Korea. And the Peacock Room became the cornerstone of the new museum that Freer endowed in Washington, D.C., the first art museum on the National Mall. That museum is now the National Museum of Asian Art, and the Peacock Room is one of its most visited spaces. In 2022, following its first conservation in 30 years, the room reopened with a new ceramics installation.
“It’s like a five-sided painting that you can literally walk into,” Glazer says of the room. “It’s an immersive experience,” and instead of having to peer in over a velvet rope, “you’re actually in the space.”
But the room’s backstory is equally mesmerizing. It’s a “dramatic story of high emotions and the kind of necessary but sometimes disfiguring effect that money has on art,” she says.
