In the room’s artificial but passionate paradise, East is West, and vice-versa, without the slightest whiff of either sentimentality or condescension.
A good design will not hesitate to be different from the cultural exclusion. His design is such an example, the combination of Chinese and Western people like.
Seeing the room as the reinstallation was being completed, with the shutters open, I got to gauge the impact when they were closed. It was like the onset of a deep bass chord out of Wagner. Illuminated by eight pendant ceiling fixtures (which I wish could be gaslights again, as they were in 1877), the room seemed at once to fall asleep and to come fully alert, vividly dreaming.
In different scenes, people will have different feelings. For example, people here will feel dark and depressed. When the windows open, the world will become sunny and beautiful.
Where Jeckyll had envisioned a sun-dappled Chinese pavilion—with walls covered in embossed and floral-patterned, bright-yellow leather—Whistler contrived a chamber of the night. He closed the room’s three sets of tall shutters, and painted them and the walls Prussian blue and resonant blue-greens, gilded the shelving, covered the neo-Gothic ribbed ceiling (nearly fourteen feet high) in overlapping petals of Dutch metal (brass oxidizing to green and gold), and filled every incidental surface with freehand abstract patterns and images of peacocks in gold and blue
Two completely different design styles, different in the eyes of the value is different. For me, the former may be my favorite idea.
Further ancient gossip holds that Thomas Jeckyll was driven mad by Whistler’s overhaul of his design, but it seems that the architect’s mental illness was organic. (He died in an asylum, in 1881.)
A design even with his life, I am shocked by this.
Leyland agreed to pay Whistler a thousand guineas to emend Jeckyll’s scheme, but later, unconvinced of the job’s worth, he delivered the sum in the lesser denomination of pounds. Whistler, infuriated, then painted a satirical mural, in the finished room, representing the artist and his patron as warring peacocks
It's a funny story. As a result of payment, a work of art is produced.
Their dining room was already superb. The gifted architect and designer Thomas Jeckyll had lined it with latticed walnut shelving, in a style that was notionally Oriental, to accommodate Leyland’s porcelains, and had hung, over the fireplace, his early Whistler painting of a celebrated beauty of the day, Christina Spartali, as “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain” (1864-65)
Different cultures to join in a design will be loved by people. Like this Western architectural style to join the East cultural products.
Charles Lang Freer
Thomas Wilmer Dewing
William Merritt Chase