The Peacock Room at 150: Lecture and Reception

Join the Freer Research Center as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of James McNeill Whistler’s most complete Aesthetic-era interior, the Peacock Room. Hear from noted Whistler scholar and former National Museum of Asian Art curator Linda Merrill about the context of the room’s creation. She also discusses some of the art-historical misinterpretations that prevailed before the comprehensive conservation campaign of the 1990s. The program will be followed by a celebratory reception in the courtyard.

The Peacock Room is as awe inspiring for its rich detail as it is notorious for the rupture the project caused between the artist and his patron. Whistler designed the space for shipping magnate Frederick Leyland between 1876 and 1877. Leyland expected a few modest alterations to his new dining room, where he intended to display his collection of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. The room Whistler ultimately completed, mostly without his patron’s consent, was a lavish space covered floor to ceiling in depictions of peacocks and designs inspired by their plumage in shades of blue, green, and gold. Learn more about the Peacock Room: https://asia.si.edu/explore-art-culture/interactives/peacock-room/.

Dr. Merrill is the author of several books on Whistler, including The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (1998) and our recent co-publication, The Performance of Art: Whistler, Wilde & the “Ten O’Clock” Lecture: https://asia.si.edu/research/publications/the-performance-of-art-whistler-wilde-the-ten-oclock-lecture/, which will be available for purchase.

Linda Merrill, teaching professor in art history at Emory University, was curator of American art at the Freer Gallery of Art (now the National Museum of Asian Art) from 1985 to 1998, when she became the first Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Dr. Merrill has published several books on Whistler and his contemporaries, including An Ideal Country: Paintings by Dwight William Tyron in the Freer Gallery of Art (1990), A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (1992), Freer: A Legacy of Art (1993) with Thomas Lawton, With Kindest Regards: The Correspondence of Charles Lang Freer and James McNeill Whistler, 1890-1903 (1995), and The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (1998). She organized the exhibition After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting for the High Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2003 and recently co-curated with Ruth Allen an exhibition for Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, Recasting Antiquity: Whistler, Tanagra, and the Female Form (2024). Dr. Merrill received her BA in English from Smith College and her PhD in the history of art from the University of London, where she studied on a Marshall Scholarship. She has taught American art at Emory since 2013.

Image: James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903); Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (detail); United States, 1876-1877; oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, mosaic tile, glass, and wood; National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Collection, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.61: https://asia.si.edu/explore-art-culture/collections/search/edanmdm:fsg_F1904.61/