Photograph, 'The Peacock Room', photographed by Lemere, 1892

View of the dining room - the Peacock Room, at 49 Princes Gate. The walls are lined with shelves in the Anglo-Japanese style containing porcelain jars and dishes. Dining table and chairs in the centre of the room. Over the fireplace hangs J.M. Whistler's 'La Princesse du Pays de Porcelaine'(1863-4). The fireplace contains two firedogs, in the form of sunflowers, designed by Thomas Jeckyll. Ceiling lights integral with the ceiling vaulting.

Frederick Leyland, a steamship owner and collector, being keen to display his collection of blue and white porcelain, engaged the architect and designer Thomas Jeckyll in 1876 to line his dining room with shelves in the Anglo-Japanese taste, backed by seventeenth century embossed and gilded leather. Over the fireplace, with its Jeckyll sunflower fire dogs, hung J. M. Whistler's 'La Princesse du Pays de Porcelaine'(1863-4). Whistler considered the colour scheme to be unsympathetic to his painting and in 1876 and 1877 he was allowed to 'touch-up' the leather. In Leyland's absence Whistler completely repainted the room with peacock motifs in the Japanese taste, naming it, like a painting, 'Harmony in blue and gold: The Peacock Room'. The room, now in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC, became famous both as the ultimate expression of the Aesthetic Movement and for the quarrel it caused between patron and artist.
[Stephen Astley, British Design at Home, p.68]

240-1926