Whistler and Peacock Blue

Whistler and Peacock Blue Amanda Kolson Hurley “[I]t grew as I painted. And towards the end I reached such a point of perfection—putting in every touch with such freedom—that when I came round to the corner where I had started, why, I had to paint part of it over again, or the difference would have been too marked. And the harmony of blue and gold developing, you know, I forgot everything in my joy in it!”

—Whistler’s account of painting the Peacock Room, as told to his first biographers, Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell

In the summer and autumn of 1876, visitors to the London home of shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland, at 49 Prince’s Gate in Kensington, stopped short when they came to the dining room. There they were met by the sight of a dandyish man, with a shock of white hair, painting on a ladder in a state of frenzied concentration. His two young assistants moved in and out of the room, carrying pails of paint and sheets of gilt. There was so much gilt that it got into their hair and shimmered on their skin. At one point the artist mounted a scaffold or a sling under the ceiling, and painted it on his back.

Leyland, the owner of the house, was away on business. He knew only that the artist, a close friend, was touching up his new dining room.

The creation story of the Peacock Room is one of the most gossipy, and engrossing, in the history of art. James McNeill Whistler, then 42 and a painter of moderate fame, had been hired

by Leyland to do some light redecorating in the room. It had been designed by architect Thomas Jeckyll, but some parts remained unfinished: the wainscoting, ceiling, shutters, and doors.

Leyland asked Whistler if he could apply gilt (actually copper—Dutch metal) to match the antique gilt leather on the walls. During this initial phase, Whistler and his assistants “laid on the gold.”

Then Whistler was bothered by something. The red flowers on the leather clashed with the pink and red tones of the painting that was to be the room’s centerpiece, his own La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, 1865). Whistler daubed at the leather. But after applying yellow and gold paint, he realized it wasn’t working: too much yellow.

He wrote to Leyland to say he had removed the new paint and would add, now, a pattern of blue waves on the gold ground. This would serve as a decorative border for the leather. Then the room would be complete, a perfect setting for the collection of blue-and-white porcelain it was meant to display.

Fig. 1. La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1865) in the Peacock Room (1876) (Neil Greentree / Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution)

What compelled Whistler to do what he did next is unclear. Was it ego, a mania for the design, an Aesthetic conviction that the room ought to be a total work of art (gesamtkunstwerk)? Or some mix of the three? As he experimented with blue on gold, waves turned into peacock feathers. They spread over the dado and exploded in a magnificent cloud on the ceiling, as if held in a net by the Tudor ribbing. Whistler labored from six in the morning to nine o’clock at night. On the room’s three tall pairs of shutters he painted blue-and-gold peacocks with preternaturally long, splendid trains, a surprise for future dinner guests when the shutters were closed.

Fig. 2. Peacock Room wainscoting (detail) (Amanda Kolson Hurley)

Meanwhile, with his habitual eye for a good PR opportunity, the artist invited friends and grandees to view his work in progress. The Marquis of Westminster and Princess Louise, a daughter of Queen Elizabeth, visited Prince’s Gate in the early autumn. Whistler wrote to his mother in September that such visitors “show real delight in this beautiful room, keep up the buzz of publicity most pleasantly in London Society, and this is well, and I hope good may result.”

The return of Leyland in October was anything but good news for Whistler, however. Leyland arrived home unexpectedly to find Whistler still there, nowhere near finished—despite his frequent assurances to the contrary—and busy gilding the walnut spindle shelving, whose color he found drab. Leyland was annoyed; Whistler “had now blatantly overstepped the terms of the commission,” as Linda Merrill writes.

A quarrel followed, one that has become famous for its bitterness, especially on Whistler’s part.

Stung that his patron was not pleased with his great efforts, Whistler asked for a fee he thought commensurate, two thousand guineas. Leyland replied, understandably, that he could not agree to that sum. “I do not think you should have involved me in such a large expenditure without previously telling me of it,” he wrote. After further negotiations, Whistler agreed to accept half the amount he had requested, one thousand guineas. Leyland sent him a check for one thousand pounds.

Whistler considered it a slap in the face to be paid in pounds, not guineas. Tradesmen were paid in pounds; gentlemen were paid in guineas. The artist’s letters to his estranged patron and friend, with whom he had spent many holidays at the Leyland family’s country estate, became insulting.

“The work just created, alone remains the fact—and that it happened in the house of this one or that one is merely the anecdote,” Whistler wrote, savagely predicting, “in some future dull Vassari [sic] you may also go down to posterity, like the man who paid Corregio [sic] in pennies!”

The breach was final. Whistler and Leyland never reconciled, although Whistler was allowed to complete his scheme for the room, without hope of further payment. Around the same time, Thomas Jeckyll, the room’s original designer, had a mental breakdown and was committed to an asylum. The legend that Whistler drove him mad with his changes to the room isn’t true.

Jeckyll was manic depressive; the illness ran in his family. *** After the falling out, Whistler was seized by a desire to make the room unequivocally his own— and to get the better of Leyland. He returned to the project with new zeal. In November 1876, he painted a mural of sparring peacocks on the room’s south wall, an allegory of the conflict between art and commerce (and between himself and Leyland, more pointedly). The mural is important: Whistler made his dispute with Leyland part of the room’s very fabric, inscribing their bad feelings on the wall for posterity.

Fig. 3. The Peacock Room today, looking toward the south wall (Neil Greentree / Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution)

Less remarked upon but equally important, Whistler made blue a vital part of the composition at this stage. He painted the leather walls blue, a snub to Leyland and no doubt a relief for himself,

as well, given all the trouble the leather had caused him. It is surprising that blue became a dominant color so late. After all, Whistler called the room Harmony in Blue and Gold.

The blue Whistler used is described variously as Prussian blue or Antwerp blue. Discovered by accident by a Berlin colormaker in the early 18th century, Prussian blue was the first synthetic pigment and the first real rival to ultramarine, which was derived at great expense from lapis lazuli. At about a tenth of the cost of ultramarine, Prussian blue soon became a popular alternative, although some criticized its lack of brilliancy in comparison. Monet used it, and later on so did Picasso, “for whom its slightly grayish-green tone better suited his melancholy purpose during the Blue Period than the bright tones of cobalt or ultramarine,” writes Philip Ball in Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. Antwerp blue was a variant of Prussian blue mixed with white, and there were greens in which Prussian blue was mixed with gamboge (a gum resin used as a yellow pigment).

Conservationists who analyzed the Peacock Room in 1985 identified the blue as “based on Prussian blue.” They also noted the prevalence throughout the room of “a white, used as a ground and in admixture...essentially lead white and calcium carbonate.” The intensity of Prussian blue, as the authors of the Pigment Compendium observe, “meant that other pigments were frequently added or the pigment adulterated.”

Fig. 4. Nocturne (1875-1880), Philadelphia Museum of Art “Dark,” “deep” and “intense” are common descriptors of pure Prussian blue. Whistler’s paint here likely included admixtures that gave the color a more muted quality, with gray and green

tones. The blue on the walls of the Peacock Room is similar to the blues of the Nocturnes, especially one painted in the same period that now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Fig. 4). There are dark hints of it, too, in Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875), a work Ruskin famously denounced as “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,” prompting a libel suit from Whistler. (Whistler won, but he was awarded no damages, and the legal costs pushed him into bankruptcy in 1879. His main creditor was Frederick Leyland.)

Fig. 5. Hexadecimal color #003153, or digital Prussian blue (colorhexa.com.)

As he developed the peacock motif for the room, Whistler studied the birds. His son, Charlie Hanson, recalled trips to London Zoo to observe them. But the most interesting thing about the blue of the Peacock Room is how little resemblance it bears to any hue on an actual peacock. The body of the male Indian peacock (Pavo cristatus) is a deep, vibrant blue, more like cobalt. Its plumage is iridescent. On the tail feathers, the “eyes” are cobalt ringed with turquoise, a color quite different from the matte teal on the walls. The less common green peacock has a greener, scalier breast, but its blue accents are similar to the blues of the Indian species.

Fig. 6. An male Indian peacock (cincinnatizoo.com)

Whistler did pick up the emerald of the peacock’s wispy tail feathers and the rich blue of its breast. We see them in the shimmering green-gold on the shutter surrounds, the doors, and the ceiling, and in the dark blue outlines of peacock eyes on the ceiling and the panels of the wainscoting.

The blue ground in the wainscoting panels is almost imperceptibly brighter than the paint on the wall above (see Fig. 1). The colors appear at first to match, but a slight discrepancy is visible when the room’s shutters are opened. It may be due to the different materials Whistler was painting (walnut versus leather). It may have been intentional, or not.

At any rate, Whistler chose to put his own murky teal on the walls, not a color found on the peacock itself. Even in October 1876, before he painted the walls, his friend the architect E.W. Godwin praised his balancing of colors to achieve “an iridescent effect without the use of the real colours of the natural plumage.” Godwin understood that naturalism was not Whistler’s goal.

Others did not, including, ironically, Oscar Wilde, who described the room this way: “Everything is of the colours in peacock’s feathers … the whole room, when lighted up, seems like a great peacock tail spread out.” Wilde seems not to have grasped what Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray would have: Whistler hoped his artistry in the Peacock Room would not emulate, but surpass nature. *** Early reactions to the Peacock Room were so positive, on the whole, that Whistler was said to carry the press clippings around in his pocket. Even so, his choice of blue brought criticism. The artist Thomas Armstrong complained it was unsympathetic to the porcelain on the room’s shelves—that the mid-blue of the walls and the deep blue of the china clashed. “[T]he cobalt blue of the pots suffered terribly from juxtaposition with Whistler’s paint, made of Prussian or Antwerp blue,” he later wrote.

The Whistler scholar Linda Merrill insists the closeness was intentional—Whistler wanted to strike a “minor chord of color” through a combination of like tones. As she points out, he tested the combination in a portrait of 1875 (the year before he received the Peacock Room commission), in which a Chinese blue-and-white vase stands against a Prussian-blue background.

Fig. 7. The Peacock Room with blue-and-white porcelain (Freer Gallery of Art / Smithsonian Institution)

Whether the “minor chord” had the desired effect is debatable. Over the decades, many critics remained unconvinced that the wall color suited blue-and-white porcelain. In 2011, curators at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where the Peacock Room is now on display, removed the blue-and-white pots and replaced them with ceramics that had belonged to Charles Lang Freer, the museum’s namesake and the owner of the Peacock Room in the early 20th century.

Freer’s taste ran to rougher, simpler Asian ceramics with earth-toned or pastel glazes, like Near Eastern Raqqa ware and Korean celadon. Arguably these pieces complement Whistler’s scheme of decoration—and vice versa—much better than Leyland’s Kangxi porcelain ever did.

Against a backdrop the color of a winter sea, the light blue, green, and peach ceramics gleam.

When Frederick Leyland died in 1892, his Prince’s Gate house was sold. The new owner learned that the Peacock Room could be taken apart and rebuilt elsewhere, and listed it for sale. In 1904, it was purchased by Freer, an American railway tycoon and patron of Whistler.

Meanwhile, the term “peacock blue” entered the lexicon. A search of Google Books (in English) for the phrase turns up virtually nothing until the late 1870s, when there is a sudden spike. It could not have been Whistler’s doing alone: peacocks were a favorite subject in Japanese art, and artists of the Aesthetic movement were mad for everything Japanese. So Whistler’s friend Godwin designed a wallpaper with peacock-head medallions, and William Morris designed peacock-and-dragon curtains.

In 1883, Punch ran a satirical song of a “Fading-out Aesthete” with the refrain, “The Peacock blue is a sacred sheen!” But it doesn’t offer any hints as to what that blue is, exactly—the bird’s color, Whistler’s, or something else? The American journal The Decorator and Furnisher suggested in 1884 that dining rooms be painted “a quiet peacock blue—a little cobalt blue, chrome green, raw umber and white.” Such a mix of blue, green, brown and white seems near Whistler’s color. In Oscar Wilde’s story “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889), Wilde describes the man in the portrait as wearing a black-velvet doublet that “show[s] up so pleasantly” against a “peacock-blue background.” Here we can infer that the blue is not so dark that black wouldn’t “show up” in contrast to it.

Fig. 8. Google Ngram graph for “peacock blue,” September 2015

By 1890, then, the meaning of “peacock blue” seemed to be settling on the color of the Peacock Room’s walls. The reign of the peacock continued through the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods. In the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, however, we see a decisive turn away from the gloomy Whistlerian teal toward the peacock’s own bolder, shinier colors.

Fig. 9. Vase with leaf design (c. 1910), L.C. Tiffany (Johnson Museum of Art)

Fig. 10. Landscape with peacock and peonies (c. 1900-1910), Tiffany Studios (Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art)

Tiffany seems to have unmoored “peacock blue,” in America at least, from the shade that Whistler and his fellow Aesthetics popularized. Tiffany glass, not Whistler’s room, was the likely inspiration for what may be the best-known peacock-themed interior in the United States, Elvis Presley’s living room at Graceland.

Fig. 11. Graceland (Elvis Presley Enterprises/PA)

Fluctuation is evident in the mid-20th century. The 1956 Ford Thunderbird in Peacock Blue was a bright aqua, but the previous year, the house-and-home experts at Popular Mechanics magazine recommended a color palette with a more subdued and familiar tone of Peacock.

Fig. 12. 1956 Ford Thunderbird in Peacock Blue (collectorcarmarket.com)

Fig. 13. Popular Mechanics, October 1955

Today the shades billed as “peacock blue” have settled down again, for the most part. They may look like the walls of the Peacock Room or its brighter wainscoting—or a deep Prussian blue inflected with green. What they don’t, or rarely, bring to mind is a living peacock. Pantone’s Peacock Blue and Deep Peacock Blue (Figs. 14 and 15) have likely helped fix the modern meaning, although searches of Ebay still bring up a smattering of cobalt-colored items.

Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, says peacock blue was a relatively early entry in the Pantone catalog, and the point of reference was the bird’s plumage, not Whistler. A peacock’s feathers are iridescent, “so there are some variabilities,” she points out. That is true, but the range of “iris” colors on the feathers runs from acid green to azure to turquoise, and not, as far as I can see, teal. In any case, Eiseman praises the color as “a balanced and subtle shade, one that blends well with many other colors” and has admirable longevity amid trends that come and go.

Whether they skew more to turquoise or teal, the newer colors lack the gray that gave Whistler’s color its ineffable quality of sea and smoke. Inside the Peacock Room, depending on the light, his blue can conjure the Thames, the canals of Venice. Even Pantone can’t quite capture that richness.

Figs. 14 and 15. Pantone 16-4728, Peacock Blue; Pantone 17-5029, Deep Peacock Blue (right)

Can Whistler be said to have invented peacock blue? He wasn’t the first to use the color, or even associate it with a peacock, but he made the association stick. The Peacock Room is a touchstone for architects and designers, especially in America; the room is one of the best surviving examples of an Aesthetic interior and is the most visited exhibit at the Freer Gallery. It was an inspired move on Whistler’s part, as Godwin realized, to let the sheen of the gold stand in for the iridescence of the peacock’s plumage and tone down the contrasting blue. A shimmering blue would have competed with the gold, making the room oppressive. (Some people find it oppressive even so.)

Whistler transmuted the colors of nature—the peacock’s cobalt head, the emerald tendrils of its feathers, the electric turquoise that surrounds its “eyes”—into an elusive mix of blue, green, and gray. He distilled the visual qualities of the peacock into a hue that appears nowhere on the bird itself, but indisputably means “peacock,” one hundred and forty years later.

My sincere thanks to Lee Glazer of the Freer Gallery and Leatrice Eiseman of the Pantone Color Institute for their assistance with this article.

Sources Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval. James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995.

Philip Ball. Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002.

“Colors Tips for Your House.” Popular Mechanics, Vol. 104, No. 4 (October 1955), p. 145 (Accessed via Google Books) “Harmonizing Colors.” The Decorator and Furnisher, Vol. 4, No. 2 (May 1884), p. 54. (Accessed via JSTOR) Nicholas Eastaugh, Valentine Walsh, Tracey Chaplin and Ruth Siddall. Pigment Compendium.

Oxford: Elsevier, 2008. (Accessed via Google Books) Lee Glazer. The Peacock Room Comes to America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2012.

Linda Merrill. The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

“Sage Green.” Punch, Or the London Charivari, Vol. 84 (March 31, 1883), p. 156. (Accessed via Google Books) John Walker. James Abbott McNeill Whistler. New York : H.N. Abrams; Washington, D.C. : National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1987.

Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr W.H.” Portland, Maine: Thomas B Mosher, 1904. (Accessed via Google Books) John Winter and Elisabeth West FitzHugh, “Some Technical Notes on Whistler’s ‘Peacock Room,’” Studies in Conservation, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Nov. 1985), pp. 149-154.