The Peacock Room According to Freer

“Comparison is the first habit of the real student.  What more is needed by the real searcher after truth and beauty? “ – Charles Lang Freer to John Gellatly,  5 April 1904.

 Now we have a rare chance to engage with Freer in that search as the Freer Gallery presents The Peacock Room Comes to America, the installation of a Whistler masterpiece as the collector envisioned it.   Compare these two versions, one with the familiar dramatic blue and white Chinese porcelain accents, and the other decorated with a harmony of earth tones.

“..objects of art covering various periods of production, all of which are harmonious and allied in many ways” is how Freer described his collections to Rosalind Birnie Philip in a letter 24 January 1905.

“In the wide play of experimenting with absolute beauty, he struck again and again, without consciousness of imitation, and often in complete ignorance, the characteristic beauties of the most remote masters, both Western and Eastern.”   

This rather uncharitable assessment of Freer's taste was given in 1907 by Ernest Fenollosa, a man who had profited greatly over the years as a trusted advisor to the collector.  The facile Fenollosa, as an American professor in Toyko,  advised his Japanese hosts to conserve their cultural heritage, while using his position to amass a large collection of Japanese art which he then sold to eager American bidders

In contrast, Freer tended to find the best in those he met in the art world, witness his benign assessment of the egotistical artist James McNeill Whistler. 

 “Mr. Whistler’s true self, his real ideals, his natural instincts, his charity and his personal achievements are known to a few intimates only.  And this is how he wished,”  Freer wrote to Howard Marshfield in 1903.

To be sure, Freer had taken his measure of Whistler based on a relationship that stretched back a dozen years, and what counted for Freer was not the difficult personality but the fineness of the work. " Whistler’s things, in bigness of feeling, strength of line, use of space and general aesthetic accomplishment, hold their own with the very best,” Freer wrote to a friend three years after Whistler's death.   Freer (1854-1919) was a  millionaire by the time he was thirty, thanks to his railroad car company.  Collecting art was a means to reduce the stress of being a businessman in the Gilded Age for the introverted Freer.   Events set in motion before Freer and Whistler met had the potential for a three-act drama.

Act I - Frederick Leyland had been Whistler’s first important patron until the British businessman returned from a trip in 1876 to discover that the artist had rendered his London dining room unrecognizable.   Leyland already owned an early Whistler painting, La princesse du pays de la porcelaine, that became Whistler’s pretext for the creation of the decorative extravaganza that is the Peacock Room.  The two men quarreled over payment for the project and their relationship came to a bitter end.

Whistler’s portrait of Mrs. Francis Leyland, commissioned in 1871 is an exquisite work, in contrast with the portrait of Christina Spartelli, a much rougher work, that hangs above the mantle in the Peacock Room.  But it, too, caused a controversy when Dante Gabriel Rossetti gave his verdict:  "I cannot see that it is at all a likeness."   I suspect that this exquisite, stylized work would have been more to Freer's taste than the one he got.

Act II - Freer used the pretext of their common nationality to approach Whistler on his first trip to London in 1890.  In the years that followed Freer acquired more than 750 of Whistler’s works.   In Freer’s conception of the aesthetic unity of his collection, Whistler held the place of honor for his synthesis of East and West.

Act III - By the time Freer purchased the Peacock Room in May of 1902, Whistler was dead and the Leylands no longer owned Prince’s Gate, London.  So audacious was his move that it was rumored that J.P. Morgan was the American mogul who had scored the coup.  The reality was more prosaic as the Peacock Room took up temporary residence in Detroit home while he planned the final disposition of his collection.

The Peacock Room has been written about numerous times before.  I hope this whets the appetite for an online experience coming soon.

You can register for the Freer Gallery's online colloquium The Peacock Room Comes To America May 11, 2011, from 8-9:30 P.M., Eastern Daylight Time.

Images:
All photographs from the Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Works of art:
Parthian jar, 1st - 3rd century.
Chinese tomb jar, 1st - 3rd century.
Chinese cup with dragon handles, Ming Dynasty,14th -17th century.


James McNeill Whistler - Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, c. 1871-1874, Frick Collection, NYC.
Egyptian amethyst quartz bottle, c. 2675-2130 BCE.
Pewabic Pottery bowl, possibly Mary Chase Stratton Perry, designer, 1918.
Chinese jar with deer and Leingzhi fungus, Qing Dynasty, 19th century.
Japanese Tamba ware jar,Meiji Period,  late 19th century.
Japanese Seto ware cup, 19th century.