April 9, 2011

April 9, 2011. The Peacock Room Comes to America opens at the Freer Gallery of Art. The exhibition highlights the room’s restoration back to its 1908 appearance, when Charles Lang Freer used it to display over 250 Asian ceramics. The Peacock Room was once the dining room in the London home of Frederick R. Leyland, a wealthy ship owner from Liverpool, England.  It was originally designed by a gifted interior architect Thomas Jeckyll.  In 1876, James McNeill Whistler redecorated the room to be a “harmony in blue and gold.”  The room was purchased by Charles Lang Freer of Detroit in 1904 and eventually installed in the Freer Gallery, which opened to the public in 1923.

Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Archives

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