Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Space is the work of James McNeill Whistler art mural decorative interior, located at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He painted a paneled room in a rich, brilliant blue-green palette and blended with gold-plated gold leaf. Painted between 1876-77, it is now considered one of the greatest living aesthetic interiors, and the best example of the Anglo-Japanese style.
Video The Peacock Room
Histori
The Peacock Room was originally designed as a dining room in a townhouse located in 49 Prince's Gate in London's Kensington neighborhood, and owned by the British dispatching king Frederick Richards Leyland. Leyland involves the British architect Richard Norman Shaw to remodel and redecorate his home. Shaw entrusted the dining room renovation to Thomas Jeckyll , another British architect with experience in Anglo-Japanese style. Jeckyll contains the dining room as Porsellanzimmer (porcelain chamber).
He covered the walls with a sixth-century wall decoration of Cuir de Cordoue originally brought to England as part of Catherine's dowry from Aragon. They were painted with heraldic devices, open pomegranates, and a series of red roses, Tudor roses, to symbolize his union with Henry VIII. They hung on the walls of Tudor-style homes in Norfolk for centuries, before they were bought by Leyland for £ 1,000. Against these walls, Jekyll built an elaborate grille framework of engraved walnut wooden shelves, which housed a collection of Chinese blue and white porcelain, Leyland, mostly from the Qing Dynasty Kangxi era.
To the south of the room, the welsh walnut closet is placed in the center, just below a large empty leather panel, and flanked on both sides by frame shelves. On the east side, three tall windows split the room facing the private garden, and covered by long full-length canary leaves. In the north a fireplace, above it hung a painting by American painter James McNeill Whistler, Rose and Silver: The Princess of the Porcelain Country , which serves as the focal point of the room. The ceiling is built in a panel-lined Tudor style, and is decorated with eight pendant gas fixtures. To finish the room, Jekyll puts the carpet with a red border on the floor.
Jeckyll almost completed his decorative scheme when a disease forced him to leave the project. Whistler, who was then working on the decor for the entrance hall of Leyland's home, volunteered to finish Jeckyll's work in the dining room. Concerned that the red roses adorning the wall hanging with the color of The Princess, Whistler suggests retouching the skin with yellow paint, and Leyland agrees to the small change. He also authorized Whistler to beautify cornices and wainscoting with a "wave pattern" derived from the design on Jeckyll's leaded glass door, and then went to his home in Liverpool. However, during Leyland's absence, Whistler is getting bolder with his revision.
Well, you know, I just painted. I went on a no-or sketch design-it grew as I painted. And towards the end I reach such a point of perfection - in every touch with that freedom - that when I come to the corner where I start, why, I have to paint the top again, because the difference will become too marked. And the harmony in the development of blue and gold, you know, I forgot everything in my joy in it.
Upon his return, Leyland was surprised by "repairs." Artists and patrons quarreled so loudly above the room and decent compensation for the work that the important relationship for Whistler terminated. At one point, Whistler gained access to Leyland's home and painted two fighting peacocks intended to represent the artist and his patron, and which he titled Art and Money: or The Story of the Room > .
Whistler was reported to have told Leyland, "Ah, I have made you famous, and my job will come to life when you are forgotten, still, per occasion, in the dark days to come you will be remembered as the owner of the Peacock Space."
The dispute between Whistler and Leyland does not end there. In 1879, Whistler was forced to file bankruptcy, and Leyland was his principal creditor at the time. When the creditors arrive to inventoriate the artist's home for liquidation, they are greeted by The Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor), a great painting caricature of Leyland described as a devil's peacock anthropomorphic playing the piano, sitting on top of Whistler's house, painted in the same color displayed in the Peacock Room. He referred to the incident again in his book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies . Adding to the emotional drama is Whistler's passion for Leyland's wife, Frances, who split from her husband in 1879. Another result of this drama is Jeckyll who, so shocked by his first view of his room, returns home and later found on the floor of his studio covered with gold leaf; he never recovered and died crazy three years later.
After acquiring the Princess of Porcelain Land, American art and industry collector Charles Lang Freer anonymously purchased the entire room in 1904 from the heirs of Leyland, including the daughter of Leyland and her husband, British artist Val Prinsep. Freer then has the contents of Peacock Room installed in his mansion in Detroit. After Freer's death in 1919, the Peacock Room was permanently installed at the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The gallery opened to the public in 1923.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments