The Peacock room. A cultural biography - Linda Merrill

- uitgave: Yale University Press, 1998, 406 p.
- hardcover, gebonden, stofwikkel
- in goede staat (omslag met gebruikssporen (geschard achteraan)); boekblok boven met beginnende roestvorming (zie foto)
- boek weegt 2,5 kg
- the magnificent Peacock Room, decorated by James McNeill Whistler in 1876-77 for wealthy London shipowner Frederick Leyland, quickly became one of the most controversial, celebrated, and scandalous rooms in the world. Now on permanent display at the Freer Gallery of Art, the Peacock Room is widely held to be the most important nineteenth-century interior in an American museum.
In this gorgeously illustrated book, Linda Merrill tells the full story of the London dining room that was created to provide a setting for Leyland's extensive collection of Chinese porcelain, the legendary quarrel between Whistler and his patron, and the subsequent critical and popular reception of the room through its museum installation in 1923. The author examines the Peacock Room in its various manifestations as dining room, porcelain cabinet, success de scandale, Victorian relic, and museum exhibit. She includes engaging accounts of dinner parties in the Peacock Room; correspondence concerning Whistler’s ‘piratical plot’ to produce photographs of the room years after his eviction; London newspaper articles lamenting the loss of the room to an American millionaire in 1904; records of its installation in Charles Lang Freer’s house in Detroit; and many other details of the dramatic history of the Peacock Room.