Mr. Freer bought the room exactly as 
it was and had it brought to America 
and reconstructed in his own house in 
Detroit. When the present writer saw 
it there, after having seen the “ Prin- 
cesse ” many years before at the Colum¬ 
bian Exposition, the sobriety and quiet¬ 
ness of the color were impressive. In 
memory the “ Princesse ” had blazed 
with poppy red and gold and silver. It 
had seemed daring and immensely viva¬ 
cious in handling; but in its place among 
the golden peacocks, under artificial 
light, it became the keynote of a tender 
and subdued harmony. The vermilion 
sash and the rich red of the lips are th'* 
high notes of color, the rest are pah 
purples and grays and creamy flesh 
tones, very beautiful and manifestly im¬ 
possible to combine with Spanish leather 
and heavy woodwork. 
The student, letting his mind rest 
upon this lovely picture created with the 
lightest brush in the world, will find 
himself able to follow the evocation of 
the Peacock Room and enter into the 
.rapt mood of the painter, “forgetting 
everything ” in the joy it gave him. 
To create such a setting for one of his 
pictures was an adventure not to be re¬ 
peated in a lifetime, but there are in¬ 
numerable references in the “ Life ” that 
show him as eager about such settings 
as about the objects enshrined. A pa¬ 
thetic little picture is given of his send¬ 
ing some of his beautiful silver to an ex¬ 
hibition of old silver that opened not 
long oefore his death and when he was 
too weak to attend it. The Pennells 
went, and when they returned to report, 
to him, he plied them with questions. He 
had ref used to let the pieces be shown as 
others were, on red velvet, but had sent 
his own white linen and some of his rare 
blue and white, insisting that the silver 
be shown with these in a case by itself. 
“ How did the white, the beautiful nap¬ 
kins, look?” he asked. “Didn’t the 
! slight hint of blue in the rare old Japa¬ 
nese stand and the few perfect plates 
tell? Didn’t the other cases seem vulgar 
in comparison ? And didn’t the simplic¬ 
ity-e-f my -silver, evidently for use. and 
cared for, make the rest look like mu¬ 
seum specimens?’’ Thus to the very 
end it was important to him that art 
should be artistically, shown, whether it 
were the portrait of a “ Princesse ’’ or a 
spoon of perfect proportions. 
lo minds free from the domination of 
aesthetic instincts there is an element 
of childishness in so much concern for 
the arrangement of inanimate objects. 
The- outlet it provides for genius seems 
trivial and unworthy, but the glory of 
genius is that nothing upon which it 
can spend itself with joy does seem un¬ 
worthy. When some one said to Rubens, 
then on one of his political missions’ 
his Catholic Majesty’s Ambassador 
amuses himself sometimes with paint¬ 
ing,’’ the artist replied, “I sometimes 
amuse myself with being an Ambassa¬ 
dor.” It was an answer Whistler might 
have made, and he illustrated its spirit 
when he refused to place his works of 
art among vulgar and inappropriate sur¬ 
roundings. 
This sense of the appropriate, carried 
as far as Whistler carried it, is much 
more than simple good taste in the sense 
ordinarily given to the word. It is the 
feeling of the importance of right rela¬ 
tions that is expressed in the evolution 
of the word morality from “ mores.” This* 
passion for the right relations was the 
essence of his art, and is, of course, in¬ 
dispensable in all decoration for which 
greatness of character is claimed. What 
an illustration—beyond the stupidness of 
words—we should have had of this if the 
plan of getting Whistler to decorate one 
of the rooms in the Boston Public Libra¬ 
ry could have been carried out! It would 
have been another peacock room, as , 
Whistler got so far as to make a sketch 
for it with a peacock ten feet high as 
the motive of the design. However, the 
Peacock Room of the Leyland House we 
have, and our debt to Mr. Freer is in¬ 
calculable. 
