Good Friday afternoon, everyone:

A simple story of a refurbished architectural masterpiece with a Detroit connection.

From 1876 to 1904, the “Peacock Room” designed by architect Thomas Jeckyll and American painter James McNeill Whistler served as the dining room of the London house of English steamship and shipping industrialist Frederick Leyland.

The room was named for the elaborate peacock motives found not just at the head of the room, but throughout. Interestingly, the battles between Whistler and Leyland became something of a shorthand for the tensions that emerge when art meets commerce, with Whistler fighting with Leyland over artistic license (he was meticulously careful, extending his expression even to the placement of the objects on the shelves) and payment.

After Leyland’s death in 1892, the room was purchased by the American tycoon Charles Lang Freer, who was thought it would provide a perfect exhibition space for his extensive art collection, which was housed in his grand 1872 house in Detroit – a house still standing across from the Inn on Ferry Street. Freer had the room deconstructed, shipped to Detroit, and reconstructed.

The room remained in Detroit from 1904 until Freer’s death in 1919; Freer bequeathed it – as well as his substantial art collection - to the Smithsonian Institution, forming the basis for the Freer Gallery within the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. It was accordingly once again deconstructed in 1923, shipped, and reconstructed at the Smithsonian, where it remains today.

The Smithsonian recently undertook an extensive cleaning, conservation, and renovation of the room, reopening it to the public just a short while ago.

A friend who was visiting the gallery sent me a note asking if I knew about either the room’s Detroit lineage or its refurbishing. I knew the former, but not the latter. But I thought it would be fun to share both.

Some more intimate views of the freshened space:

A shame that it’s no longer part of the Freer mansion. Speaking of architectural interiors of note, though . . .  maybe a future note on the Guardian, Fisher, Fox, Penobscot, and/or other Detroit architectural icons.

Rip

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