On a cautionary tale

Ah, here he is, popping up again. Oscar Wilde I mean. It’s strange how he seems to inveigle himself into many of these Musings. I think that he would be very well pleased to find himself so useful! For almost as soon as I entered Darren Waterston’s immersive installation Filthy Lucre – Whistler’s Peacock Room Reimagined at the V&A, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the reimagined room taking the place of the portrait in the attic. It is as if the vitriolic intensity of their quarrel is brought to life in material form. One can almost taste the ferocity of Whistler’s rage, as if his ghost has run amok, bringing all of Leyland’s extensive, expensive ceramics collection crashing to the floor.

This is a cautionary tale of the falling out of a client and his decorator. It all started happily enough, as these things often do, when Frederick Richards Leyland asked James Abbott McNeill Whistler to decorate the hall and stairway of his home at 49 Prince’s Gate in London. He was delighted with the result. Later, when the dining room was almost complete, Leyland contacted Whistler about the colour scheme, preferring something similar to Whistler’s treatment of the hall and stairway to the scheme suggested by his architect Thomas Jeckyll. Whistler was to confine himself to the shutters, door, dado and wainscoting but he had a plan, a grand plan for the room and carried away by his vision, omitted to get Leyland’s approval. Leyland made the cardinal mistake of not being on site to check progress, his architect having withdrawn from the project in ill health. Whistler expected that Leyland would be so delighted with the additional decorative elements in the room that the costs would be nothing to him. He was not, and they weren’t. Leyland flatly refused to pay Whistler’s bill in full. Oh dear. Needless to say, Whistler was not best pleased. Although enraged, he finished the room, venting his spleen by creating his famous fighting peacocks Art (himself) and Money (Leyland), and in the process completely obliterated the work of Jeckyll, a fragile person who died not long afterwards, by coincidence and not consequence I think. Whistler considered his Peacock Room a masterpiece and much too good for the likes of Leyland. He promoted it tirelessly until eventually banned from visiting the house. Relations soured further; lawyers got involved. It did not end well for Whistler.

Leyland was not so displeased with the room that he had did not use it or indeed change its decoration. One visitor was the young Aubrey Beardsley, who so delighted with the peacocks, used a similar motif in his famous The Peacock Skirt print, later reproduced in the programme for Wilde’s Salome. See, Oscar again. Of course it helps that they were all alive, friends and living in London at one and the same time.

Eventually the room was acquired in its entirety by industrialist Charles Lang Freer and transported to America where it resided at his house for a time before finally ending up at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I bet both Whistler and Leyland would have been pleased, undoubtedly for very differing reasons.

Darren Waterston’s reimagined Peacock Room is beautiful, even in its broken, dishevelled, defaced and dilapidated state, and despite the mournful, ghostly soundtrack in the background, the peacocks happily disembowelling each other and the depressively lowered ceiling. The colours of teal and gold, with highlights of red and orange, and the ostentatious display of art are of that moment and also of this moment. One gets a strong impression of the impact of the original; of the rage and wreckage of the broken friendship; of the ever-present tension between art and money; and of the hazards of hiring an undisputedly temperamental artist as your decorator.

Darren Waterston’s immersive installation Filthy Lucre – Whistler’s Peacock Room Reimagined is on show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London until 3 May 2020.