Tag: Washington DC

Washington DC is one of my favorite playgrounds for visiting museums, the National Gallery of Art, the Freer Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian just the tip of the iceberg.

During a trip to the capital, I came face-to-face with a marvel of decorative interiors in James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room, installed in all its glory in the Freer Gallery of Art. Considering one of his best-known works is his homage to piety in Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother), better known as Whistler’s Mother, you might be surprised he could produce something so splashy. Truth is, the illusion that he was bleak to the battlements of his being couldn’t be farther from the truth and I offer the Peacock Room as proof.

He fancied himself a dandy, often dressing the part, and art historians contend that he was instrumental in freeing painting from decades of unquestioned predictability. Snippets of the skirmish between Whistler and the room’s owner (Frederick Leyland) can be found in Whistler’s letters. They are a treasure trove of grandiloquence that illuminate how enormous Whistler’s ego was. We can thank this character trait that kept him from ever backing down for the Peacock Room, one of the most remarkable examples of a highly stylized interior executed by an artist that I’ve ever seen (with a fine architect’s “bones” as a foundation for it, of course). I’m thankful institutions like the Freer in Washington DC exist to make treasures like this available to the public.