Art: Pleasures of the Iron Butterfly

(2 of 4)

Best of all, the Freer Gallery has the only interior by Whistler that survives: the Peacock Room, 1876-77, done in collaboration with the architect Thomas Jeckyll for the London house of the shipping baron Frederick Leyland. This stupendous decorative work, done in gold, silver and platinum on a turquoise ground—which was itself painted over ancient paneling of cordovan leather, reputedly salvaged from the Spanish Armada—caused a bitter crackup between Leyland and Whistler and provoked a ferocious letter from the patron: "Your vanity has completely blinded you to all the usages of civilized life, and your swaggering self-assertion has made you an unbearable nuisance to everyone who comes in contact with you ... [You have] degenerated into nothing but an artistic Barnum." But the Peacock Room has few if any rivals as the greatest decorated chamber of the late 19th century. All the irritable whiplash elegance of art nouveau is latent in its plutocratic birds. No wonder Freer had to save it and bring it across the Atlantic.

Leyland was not altogether wrong about Whistler. The man was an egomaniac, a fop and a publicity-crazed liar —traits which perhaps should, but actually do not, prevent people from being serious artists. He lived most of his life as a string of fictions and adjustments. Born in Lowell, Mass., the son of a former military engineer whom he hated with Oedipal intensity, Whistler "reconstructed" his childhood to focus on his Southern mother. "I shall be born when and where I want," he piped in his high, waspish voice, "and I do not choose to be born in Lowell." Instead he became a self-made tidewater gentleman, a Southern cavalier who left it to others to figure out why when the Civil War came he did not fight in it. His military career consisted of a few years at West Point, from which he was expelled for academic incompetence.

Though a virulent racist, Whistler did not confine his obloquies to blacks and Jews. He was litigious, a penchant that contributed to his bankruptcy when he sued John Ruskin for libel, won token damages of a farthing but had to pay heavy legal costs, losing his house, his studio contents and his famous collection of blue-and-white porcelain. "There's a combative artist named Whistler," ran a limerick by his Pre-Raphaelite friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

Who is, like his own

hog's-hair a bristler:

A tube of white lead And a punch on the head

Offer varied attractions

to Whistler.

He was fixated on his mother and did not marry until he was 54 and she was dead. His mannerisms were effeminate, and when excited he pranced about like a peahen on hot bricks. "Whistler," Degas once cried as the American sailed into a Paris restaurant, "you've forgotten your muff!" At 60 he had become a darting little creature of surfaces, more like a basilisk than the butterfly he used as his emblem. It took one dandy to see into another, and the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of A Rebours, picked out the practical, fussy American perched within the Whistlerian shell: "W. is always eating pickled cucumbers and butter. He is nice — almost simple in his highfalutin manner . . . there is something of a meticulous old maid about him."