A Brief History of the Peacock Room

Here we are, 500 feet above the National Mall, standing on the Washington Monument’s observation deck. Facing us at the east end of the Mall is the U.S. Capitol, where the House and Senate meet. Between us and the Capitol are 11 of the Smithsonian Institution’s 19 museums. Looking down the left side of the Mall, you can see the National Museum of African American History and Culture under construction, followed by the National Museum of American History, and the National Museum of Natural History. Down the right side of the Mall, the Freer Gallery, which we are about to visit, is the square, blue-topped building, followed by the Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian Building, known as The Castle, the National Museum of African Art, the Arts and Industries Building, the Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art, which is the circular building, the National Air and Space Museum, and finally the National Museum of the American Indian. All of these museums are free, and open every day but December 25th. Before we leave the Washington Monument, have a look around this 360-degree view of Washington and see if you can find the White House and Lincoln Memorial. Then, let’s head over to the Freer.

The Smithsonian Institution has two museums of Asian art: the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened to the public in 1923, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which welcomed its first visitors in 1987. The two museums, physically connected by an underground passageway, share a common mission. They are dedicated to the study, exhibition, and appreciation of the arts of Asia. In addition, the Freer Gallery contains an important collection of nineteenth-century American art of the Aesthetic movement, punctuated by James McNeill Whistler's Peacock Room, perhaps one of the earliest (and certainly one of the most controversial) art installations on record.

The Peacock Room was originally the dining room in this London mansion at 49 Prince's Gate, home of Whistler’s first important patron, Frederick Leyland from 1874 until his death in 1892. He was a shipping magnate from Liverpool, England.

After Leyland’s death, Gilded Age industrialist and museum founder Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919) purchased the Peacock Room in 1904. It was dismantled, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, and reassembled in an annex built onto Freer’s home in Detroit, Michigan. Freer filled the room’s shelves with more than 250 ceramics he had collected from all over Asia. Photographs of the room made in 1908 provided the basis of the installation you are now viewing, "The Peacock Room Comes to America".

After he purchased the Peacock Room and moved it from London to his mansion in Detroit in 1904, Freer filled the shelves with pots he had acquired from Egypt, Iran, Japan, China, and Korea. The current presentation of works is based on photographs taken in Freer's Detroit residence in 1908.
Much like the room's arrangement in Detroit more than a century ago, this exhibition underscores Freer's belief that "all works of art go together, whatever their period." His faith in cross-cultural aesthetic harmonies achieved its ultimate expression in the Freer Gallery of Art itself, which opened to the public in 1923. Whistler's imaginative Peacock Room, now fittingly located between galleries of Chinese, Korean and American art, embodies the meeting of East and West. Enjoy the Peacock Room as Charles Lang Freer did by making unexpected aesthetic connections between art and decoration, paintings and ceramics, and America and Asia.

We are now joined by Chief curator and curator of Islamic Art, Massumeh Farhad who will tell us about Charles Lang Freer’s interest in Near Eastern ceramics, including Raqqa pottery. Named for the region in Syria where they were believed to have originated, many of these pieces are on view for the first time since the museum opened in 1923.

Take some time to look around the room at the wondrous array of Asian ceramics while Louise Cort, curator of ceramics at the museum, discusses Charles Lang Freer’s ideas about collecting. Believing that "all works of art go together," he acquired—then displayed—a large variety of Asian ceramics in the Peacock Room.

When the Freer Gallery of Art opened to the public in 1923, the museum was so filled with the spirit of its founder, Charles Lang Freer, that one of his friends referred to the building as “Mr. Freer’s Autobiography.”

This “autobiography”—embellished over the last ninety years—is now getting a new enhancement. As we embrace the digital age, we have made our entire collection available online, and the physical building, too, is seeing changes. On January 4, 2016, the Freer Gallery will close its doors for eighteen months while the building undergoes necessary maintenance and the galleries are returned to a look closer to the founding vision of Charles Lang Freer and his architect Charles Platt. We will also upgrade the Meyer Auditorium to improve our ability for telecasting, as we intend to share our performances and lectures worldwide. At the same time, we will work to enhance the visitor experience so that the Freer becomes a museum for twenty-first-century audiences, while maintaining its nearly one hundred-year-old elegance and aesthetic.

In the meantime, enjoy this and other virtual experiences we'll be creating for you, and visit our exhibitions in the adjoining Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

We look forward to welcoming you back in 2017, as the "autobiography" turns a new page.