You’re invited to the Peacock Room, a stunning Victorian London dining room turned immersive work of art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian ArtThe Peacock Room Comes to America details the unique history of a dining room so masterfully decorated, it crossed oceans to become an art collector’s piece. The room is a study in opulence, offering a 360-degree showstopping view. This book features splendid illustrations and close-up shots of the room’s most intricate details, from its gilded walnut latticework to the Tudor-style ceiling painted with a lush pattern of peacock feathers. The paneled room is painted in rich blue-green colors with white-over glazing and metallic gold leaf and distinctive incorporations of the peacock motif. While renowned for its beauty, the room is also famous for the story of its making, marked by betrayal and feuding, embodied by a mural of fighting peacocks painted in secret by artist James McNeill Whistler after he’d been fired from the project.
The room is considered one of the best surviving aesthetic interiors of the Anglo-Japanese style and displays more than 250 stunning ceramics from across Asia ranging from prehistoric times to the early twentieth century.
The Peacock Room Comes to America introduces readers to these distinctive pottery pieces with historical and artistic context.
The book includes:
- 60 color images
- 20 archival images of the room’s conservation and transformations
- Short profiles on Raqqa ware, Jun ware, Korean celadons, Chinese funeral jars, and the room’s focal painting The Princess from the Land of Porcelain by James McNeill Whistler
- Chronology of the room and the acquisition of its individual art pieces
This book explores the Peacock Room’s long and fascinating journey from London to Detroit to Washington, DC.
The Peacock Room Comes to America captures the harmony and whimsy of a room that is not merely a gallery, but an artwork of its own.
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