"Even without knowing the backstory, there’s a sort of heaviness to the room" — The Peacock Room.

The artist Darren Waterston is talking about a truly fabulous room made by James McNeill Whistler. You can see Whistler's Room and — right next to it, — Waterston's homage to it, which is called "Filthy Lucre" (at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.). Look at how incredibly cool both of these spaces are:



The backstory:

A wealthy Englishman named Frederick R. Leyland asked his friend Whistler what color he should paint his dining room, which contained one of the artist’s paintings. Whistler volunteered to retouch the walls and add some decorative waves to the wood paneling. Leyland left town on business and Whistler went wild, gilding the ceiling and painting golden peacocks on the shutters. When the artist presented Leyland with the bill: 2,000 guineas (about $200,000 today), the businessman balked, and eventually paid half.

Incensed, Whistler finished the project by painting two peacocks poised for a fight: One of the birds represents Leyland and has silver coins scattered around his feet....

The client wasn't happy, the artist was only getting paid half, so the artist painted even more, the best part, the part with the birds? That sounds a little screwy. Is that the real story? I don't know if Waterston believes all that or not, but his alternate Peacock Room has the whole place falling apart. "I didn’t want it to look like some particular traumatic event took place, like an earthquake.... I wanted it to feel much more dreamy, like a surrealist painting." Beautiful!