Charles Lang Freer Buys The Peacock Room
Detail. The Peacock Room, The Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Once the dining room in the London home of Frederick R. Leyland, who commissioned James McNeill Whistler (1834 - 1903) to paint the room, which Whistler did, transforming the space with gold and peacocks. Purchased by the Detroit industrialist and Oriental art collector Charles Lang Freer in 1904 and installed after his death (1919) in the Freer Gallery, and one of the few reasons I would go to Washington, D.C.
[ http://ww.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/peacock.htm# ]
It's one of those serendipitous moments in 1904 when so many elements seem to coalesce and beg to be interpreted, hinting at something more than the sum of the parts. East meets West, new world and old world, America in England and back again, Freer the maker of railroad cars and Leyland the shipping magnate, and Whistler between them, so it's all about movement, change, transportation, getting somewhere. You can almost see this pile of crates rocking in the hold, a room in pieces being shipped across the Atlantic, the work of a dead American artist's achievement in Europe which was in turn inspired by Japanese art -- by a foreign way of seeing by a foreigner seeing -- a kind of round-the-world rethinking of beauty, displaced people dismantling and relocating meaning ... shades of the Golden Bowl, fragments...
It's like taking the world apart and putting it back together again.
And okay, I'm queer for the Aesthetic Movement.
But it's all connected. I swear it is.
We were in a cab headed downtown Montreal to the Jazz Festival (Skye, of Morcheeba fame, was performing at Club Soda), and whatever we were talking about, T. mentioned the children's book writer Alexander Key of "Escape to Witch Mountain" fame, which is perhaps best remembered as a film starring Hayley Mills.
I looked him up when I got home. Alexander Key (1904 - 1979).
No, it's not exactly Foucault's Pendulum. But isn't it a little more than coincidence?
Now We're on my turf! Leyland had purchased the painting by Whistler of the redhead in the white dress. Leland was leaving the country (to America?) for an extended period. W. suggested that it would be nice, while L. was away, if he made a few minor changes to the decor of the room, just to enhance the viewing of his painting. L. said OK. I suspect there was no discussion of peacocks because upon his return, L. was furious ~ loathed the room & promptly sold it (including painting) to Freer the year after W. died. I saw it for the first time quite by chance. I was in D.C. on a work related visit to the newly opened Sackler Galleries. Well it was one of those days in D.C. ~ malarial heat & humidity, 104 degrees on the Mall, so I ducked into the Freer to see the Japanese screens, but mostly to escape the heat. I'd seen photos of the room but never visited it in person. It is indeed, one of the few reasons to visit Washington ~ the other is the garden at Dumbarton Oaks.