July 19, 2024
When James McNeill Whistler put the final, defiant flourishes upon two golden peacocks on art collector Frederick Leyland’s dining room wall, it was an act that would lead to the end of a long and lucrative friendship, and the rupture of Whistler’s success as a painter.
The story of that dining room—called the Peacock Room and considered one of Whistler’s masterpieces—has long been rife with mythology about the drama surrounding its creation and denouement. The room was the subject of much gossip among Victorian society at the time, and its story has been frequently layered-upon and exaggerated over the 147 years since its completion.
Read more here at Smithsonian.com.