James McNeill Whistler is most widely known for his Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, which most folks call Whistler's Mother. But how he decorated the Peacock Room is a much better story. British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland was redoing his new home in 1876, and engaged architect Thomas Jeckyll to design the dining room to highlight his collection of Chinese porcelain and his Whistler original painting. Whistler himself was working on decorating another part of the home. When Leyland went out of town and Jeckyll fell ill, Whistler took over the dining room.
Alone and unsupervised, Whistler began to take a few liberties with the dining room. He covered the entire room, from the ceiling to the walls, with Dutch metal, or imitation gold leaf, over which he painted a lush pattern of peacock feathers. He then gilded Jeckyll’s walnut shelving and embellished the wooden shutters with four magnificently plumed peacocks.
When Leyland returned unexpectedly in October that year, he was stunned to find his dinning room entirely transformed, but it was more than he had asked for. The floral-patterned leather on the walls were completely painted over, and every surface shone with luminous shades of green, gold, and blue. To add fuel to fire, Whistler had been inviting other artists and members of the press into the house to watch him work in the room, without the permission of Leyland. The straw which broke the camel's back was the bill that Whistler presented to Leyland—£2000, a huge sum at that time. Leyland refused to pay.
The fight over the dining room led to bad feelings and -believe it or not- more artwork. Read the story of the Peacock Room, which is now in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries)