The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine)

This painting, which hangs over the mantel in the Peacock Room, was part of a series of costume pictures undertaken by Whistler in the mid-1860s in which western models appear in Asian dress, surrounded by Chinese and Japanese objects from Whistler's own collections. He modeled the princess on Christina Spartali, a young woman of Greek descent who is dressed in a kimono and surrounded by luxurious objects that suggest an imaginary "land of porcelain." Not intended as a portrait, the painting instead demonstrated a new ideal of beauty, one derived from Japanese ukiyo-e prints and the elongated figures painted on Chinese porcelain. Whistler never visited Asia, and his appropriation of eastern objects was intended to evoke the temporal and spatial distance of a far off realm.

Several years before the Peacock Room was ever conceived, Frederick Leyland bought this painting from Whistler. After purchasing a new house in 1875, Leyland hung it over the mantelpiece in the dining room. He intended to transform the space into a porcelainzimmer, an opulent room lined with shelves to hold prized pieces from his extensive collection of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. Whistler suggested some changes to the color scheme of the room which would, he told Leyland, better harmonize with the palette of the Princesse. The final result, of course, was Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. After Leyland's death in 1892, the Princesse was purchased by the Glasgow collector William Burrell, who subsequently sold it to Charles Lang Freer in 1903, the year of Whistler's death.