After More Than Eight Decades, These Exquisite Whistler Watercolors Make Their Public Debut

In 1923, when the Freer Gallery of Art became the first art museum to open on the National Mall in Washington, D.C, one room was devoted to the watercolors of the American artist James McNeill Whistler . The museum held one of the largest collections of such works in the world. The delicate works in gold wooden frames, despite being highly sensitive to light, were on view for about a decade before they were removed. But time had taken its toll on the works.

The artworks in the Freer collection cannot be loaned to other museums because of restrictions dictated by the founder's will, so for more than 80 years, Whistler’s delicate watercolor gems were rarely seen. After much scholarship and conservation, the current exhibition, “Whistler in Watercolor,” brings the works once again to the public eye.

The delicacy and subtlety of the Whistler watercolors are in contrast to a bigger, splashier new Whistler exhibition at the Freer— “The Peacock Room in Blue and White,” in which the famous room-sized work is newly decorated as it was originally in the 1870s, with the blue and white Chinese ceramics of the original patron Frederick Leyland in London.

“The two exhibitions reflect the genuinely transformative friendship that took place between two men,” says the museum’s director Chase F. Robinson .

When Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer first met Whistler in his London home in 1890 to look into collecting more of his art, the painter had been including watercolors in his repertoire for a decade.

“This was a period in Whistler’s career when he urgently needed to reinvent himself, both financially and professionally,” says Lee Glazer , the Freer|Sackler’s former curator of American Art, who is now director of the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College.

This was not a good period for Whistler. In 1878, he had lost a libel suit against the art critic John Ruskin , a year after losing his patron Frederick Leyland over a financial dispute regarding the very Peacock Room now in the Freer. By 1879, Whistler had declared bankruptcy.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler studied in Paris and eventually moved to London. He learned watercolor technique as a boy and occasionally used it for preparatory studies early in his career, Glazer says. “But despite the tremendous popularity of watercolor in the British art world, and Whistler’s ultimate desire for success within that art world, he never seriously embraced watercolor until the 1880s.”

“Whistler rediscovered watercolor,” Glazer says, “during a sojourn in Venice between 1879 and 1880 and upon his return to London he created in his next step a prodigious number of these seemingly effortless works, depicting all manner of subjects.”

In his own writings, Whistler described his watercolors of figures, landscapes, interiors and nocturnes as “dainty,” “beautiful” and “portable.” He called them “delightful little things” and “amazing little beauties” but also “a wonderful game”—a scheme to bolster sales alongside similarly muted oil paintings and pastels in what Glazer calls “very carefully orchestrated solo exhibitions in both London and New York between 1884 and 1889.”

The watercolors, she says, “were intended to expand his market base to include what he described as rich Americans, shopping for art. But they were also, for the artist, a new way to demonstrate certain deeply held avant-garde aesthetic principals regarding finish, the value of artistic labor and verisimilitude.”

They were also a handy way to further his complicated and controversial ideas of art, conveying emotion through tone and color, through a more accessible medium.

Despite their big ambition, Glazer notes that the watercolors are “quite tiny. They’re itty bitty. None of them are bigger than a sheet of typing paper, and many of them are no bigger than an index card.”

But framed in the same kind of gold frame he used for his paintings and with no further matting to distinguish them as lesser than oils—he meant for them to have greater presence than mere sketches.

He tried variations of his nighttime “nocturnes” in watercolor, and lent his light touch to waterscapes such as The Ocean Wave and Blue and Silver-Chippy Channel .

There are landscapes, too, as the green-field dominated Green and Silver—Beaulieu, Touraine and the waterfront scenes of St. Ives: Cornwall and Southend Pier .

But his vivid portrait of Molly Finch is comparable to the oils he was commissioned to do. Further, reflected infrared images taken in the Freer’s lab shows how it had been reworked like an oil, reducing the width of the subject’s violet skirt.

And while there was some restoration as well as a study of the watercolors, some of their colors simply didn’t survive their long exhibition decades earlier. The only evidence of the “blazing yellow background” on Milly Finch described when it was first unveiled, was tucked in the edges hidden by the frame from light.

Light, of course, is also an issue in displaying The Peacock Room, whose shutters are flung open just once a month, on the third Thursday, to help preserve what Glazer calls “not only the most valuable piece of art in the Smithsonian collection, but also the most popular work of art in the Freer Gallery.”

Whistler’s interior mural, whose full title is Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room , was completed when Leyland, the owner was out of town, to pair his portrait The Princess from the Land of Porcelain with a giant decorative peacock on the opposite wall. It was also intended to better show off Leyland’s collection of blue and white Kangxi-era (1662-1722) ceramics that were at the time the rage of Victorian England.

By the time Charles Lang Freer saw the room in 1904, a year after Whistler’s death, the room with its painted ceiling and walls and its lattice of golden shelves had been emptied of the blue and white porcelains, which had been long since dispersed in estate sales following Leyland’s death in 1892. As big a collector of Whistler as Freer was, he wasn’t sure he wanted the room at all.

Glazer says Freer was “uncertain how an extravagant dining room fit into his growing collection of Asian antiquities and what at the time were cutting-edge contemporary American paintings.” (It had been Whistler who had nudged Freer into the world of Asian art).

In the end, Freer did buy the Peacock Room and installed it in his Detroit mansion, filling the 187 shelf nooks with his own collection of Asian ceramics. And when Freer’s vast collection was donated to the nation for the Smithsonian’s first art museum following his death in 1919, the gift included the Peacock Room, which was a hit from the moment of the museum’s first opening in 1923.

In Washington, the Peacock Room reflected Freer’s tastes and vision, with the monochrome glazes of Asian ceramics tucked into the shelves rather than Leyland’s blue and white Kangxi, which was at the turn of the 20th century was considered “something of an old fashioned Victorian taste,” Glazer says.

Taking a cue from period photographs of Leyland’s room, the London incarnation of the room was recreated with authentic 17th and 18th century Chinese vessels in the museum’s collection, along with some 120 newly commissioned pieces made in Jingdezhen, China. Rather than reproductions, the commissioned pieces reflect the continuity of the 1,500-year old tradition of making and decorating porcelain in that region.

The pieces from the museum collection are on the east and north walls of the room; the newly commissioned pieces in the Kangxi style are on the west and south walls.

As a result, Robinson says viewers can now see “for the first time in more than 100 years the way the room appeared after Whistler painted the dining room.”

Taken together, Whistler in Watercolor and The Peacock Room in Blue and White help define the eye of the museum’s founder, with viewers able to join what Robinson calls “a collector’s journey.”

“Whistler in Watercolor” continues through October 6, 2019 at the Freer Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. “The Peacock Room in Blue and White” will be an ongoing exhibition.

The Gardens Around the National Mall Are Growing Giant Nests and Fanciful Tunnels

For decades, the millions of annual visitors to the Smithsonian have enjoyed the meticulously tended flowers and plants around the various buildings without realizing that the Smithsonian Gardens has been an accredited museum as well since 2012.

Even so, it has never had a special exhibition that encompasses the gardens and grounds from the National Museum of African American History and Culture to the National Museum of the American Indian.

That changes with the current, Smithsonian campus-wide “Habitat” that celebrates the interconnectedness of the gardens and its visitors, using large and fanciful sculptures along the way.

“For the first time in 47 years, the exhibition has tied all the gardens together,” says Smithsonian Gardens director Barbara Faust. The 14 different exhibits include not only the best known gardens at the Smithsonian, such as the formal Enid A. Haupt Garden behind the Smithsonian Castle, but also flourishes in corners outside museums that might otherwise be ignored, such as a former loading dock at the National Museum of American History, where Washington, D.C. artist Foon Sham’s sculpture Arches of Life demonstrates the role that dead wood plays in providing microhabitats and sources of nutrients for many living organisms in carbon storage and soil stability.

Supervisory Smithsonian Gardens horticulturist Brett McNish says the work first appeared as Escape , a one-piece 62-foot long tunnel of wood of varying heights outside the American University’s Katzen Arts Center.

Taken apart and separated into six sections, it covers a much longer distance at the Smithsonian Gardens. Already the artwork has attracted scores of families and young people who walk, run—or in some cases use rented, motorized scooters—to pass through their openings, which lead right to other gardens some passerby may have missed on the way to the American History Museum.

It all works with the central mission of the Institution there, McNish says, showing that “environmental history is an important part of American history.”

Sham’s work is a recurrent highlight of the “Habitat” exhibition. His 12-foot-high wooden Mushroom at another corner of the American History Museum, stands like a giant doorknob to the underground, illustrating how vast networks of interlocking, sub-surface strands link plants to one another. Sourced from elm, cypress, oak, birch and katsura from elsewhere on the Smithsonian Gardens campus, it’s meant to show the symbiotic relationships between seemingly unrelated organisms in a habitat.

Another 12-foot work from Sham, titled Vascular Form XI, Unbound is a centerpiece of an exhibit showing how native wildflowers attract beneficial bugs that pollinate vegetable gardens, orchards and croplands.

Other installations in the campus-wide exhibition originate from Smithsonian Gardens staff or artists borrowed from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival staff. One of the most striking are the oversized nests outside the National Museum of Natural History, from a giant mud nest hanging ominously from a branch to a bigger than usual landing platform for an Osprey nest. An “urban nest” is built from random city litter as well as twigs and leafs, with plastic bottles, potato chip wrappers and cigarette butts woven in among the twigs.

But Smithsonian Gardens horticulturalist James Gagliardi says the large eagle’s nest, also on display, is not that much larger than the largest that have been found. To construct them, he says, “we worked like birds.” But he added that the winged visitors of the Urban Bird Garden—and squirrels too—may be borrowing materials for themselves from the artworks and using them for their own nests, which might unravel them a bit before the exhibition closes in December 2020.

On the other side of the Natural History Museum, along a pedestrian walkway that became the Pollinator Garden in 1995, stylized wooden insects illustrate the creatures’ vital role in ecosystems. Inside the wooden sculptures are a variety of natural materials collected to aid in creating homes and nests for insects—a bugs-within-bugs effort in a display called “Bug B&B.”

Aluminum sculptures of dragonflies in the Enid A. Haupt Garden are decorative only, helping show how the presence of dragonflies indicates the health of an ecosystem—they need clean water to thrive. The dragonflies are located near an arrangement of succulent plants meant to fill in for coral reefs as living organisms, and a “Key to the Forest” display shows how a single species can play a critical role in the life of an ecosystem. In this case it’s fig, which sustains many species with its year-round fruiting.

The stylized framed homes installed at the Mary Livingston Ripley Garden between the Hirshhorn Museum and the Arts & Industries Building show how gardens can help provide homes for birds, bees and other insects.

Often, the displays are designed to coincide with the adjoining museum. Native species are arranged at the National Museum of the American Indian. Nurturing branches of southern live oak are celebrated outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

At the National Air and Space Museum, a “Habitat of Flight,” shows how birds and flying insects inspired early inventors of human flight.

One of the exhibits, however, isn’t out of doors at all. “Biomes: Life in the Balance” is indoors at the S. Dillon Ripley Center, the underground gallery and conference center that connects the National Museum of African Art, the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. With silhouettes of animals, it displays how plants and animals adapt to human activities as well as specific ecosystems—aquatic, desert, grassland and, presumably, underground passageways.

At least one of the sites will continue to be a habitat after the Smithsonian Gardens’ inaugural show is over. The Monarch Waystation with milkweed and other plants to attract them at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is one of 23,500 designated spots created by the conservation group Monarch Watch.

Overall, Faust says the exhibition “underscores Smithsonian gardens’ mission to inform people on the importance of plants in our cultural and natural worlds.” She said she hopes it will also help introduce people to the rich museum holdings outside the buildings. “We hope they’ll come back too.”

“ Habitat” continues at 14 sites on the Smithsonian campus on the National Mall in Washington D.C. through December 2020.

These Engaging, Immersive Works Erase the Line Between Art and Audience

For many, the word “art” conjures thoughts of haughtiness and stuffy galleries, of ornate salons and elites hobnobbing over cocktails. The stereotypical museum experience, though less accurate than it used to be, puts art on display at a remove, as the product of some walled-off portion of society to which the hoi polloi have no access. This year’s By the People art festival in Washington, D.C., which began on June 15 and will continue through June 23, completely overturns this notion of art in its celebration of participatory works with strong ties to the communities and cultures of everyday people.

Launched last year by the nonprofit Halcyon, which seeks to support civic-minded artists and social entrepreneurs, By the People showcases art emblematic of the democratic ideals of America and the nation’s frequent struggles to live up to them. It is a festival rooted in lived experience, human interaction and history, and it is unfolding this week and coming weekend across D.C., including the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building and Union Market. In keeping with its mission, the festival is free to attend.

On opening weekend, Smithsonian spoke with several of the artists whose wide-ranging work is on exhibit at the Arts and Industries Building, located on the National Mall. Here’s what they had to say on their featured pieces and their approach to By the People’s core themes:

Virginia-born sculptor Martha Jackson Jarvis has long been known for her thoughtful mixed-media evocations of black and indigenous communities and the spaces they inhabit. At By the People 2019, Jarvis is exhibiting a piece called Adaptation , which centers on an assortment of large, abstractly painted rectangular blocks laid out across a wide stretch of floor—some in direct contact with it, some held aloft with lean metal scaffolding. Overhead, primary-source historical texts printed on semitransparent cotton descend from a vaulted ceiling like stately ghosts.

Jarvis explains that her piece was inspired by the life story of a distant great-grandfather named Luke Valentine, a freeman who was living in Virginia when the Revolutionary War broke out and who ventured north as a militiaman to do battle with the British. When he was older, Valentine was called into court to demonstrate that he had in fact participated in the war. “He got signatures from two of the generals he served under proving that he deserved his pension,” Jarvis says. She found Valentine’s “personal involvement with the urgency of his time” moving and transcendent; the documents featured in the exhibit pertain directly to Valentine’s assertion of his identity.

Each face of the blocks, meanwhile, depicts a different stage in the process of an ambitious painting project by Jarvis herself. She wanted Adaptation to offer a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the long journey of creating an artistic product. Just as each step of her process contributed to a grand, cohesive artwork, so too did each individual living in any given historical moment—like Luke Valentine—contribute to grand changes in their societies. Above all, Jarvis hopes her piece is an empowering reminder of our ability as individuals to contribute to the ever-evolving landscape of history. “We all have an extraordinary power in the process of what happens,” she says.

Complementary to Jarvis’s meditation on time and influence is young mixed-media artist Ada Pinkston ’s take on time and memory, More than a number . Rather than focus on a well-documented single individual, Pinkston chose instead to pay homage to a collection of lives overlooked by conventional history: the 272 enslaved laborers sold in 1838 by Georgetown University’s Jesuit president to keep his school afloat.

More than a number consists of a collection of disparately proportioned boxy white blocks painted with forking blue streaks suggestive of tree branches. The quantity and closeness of the blocks taken together with the interconnectivity of their branch imagery and the simple elegance of Pinkston’s painting captures well the concept of 272 unique human souls bound together in a moment yet shunted from the history books and rendered anonymous.

These visuals are accompanied by audio recordings of living descendants of the enslaved men and women in question that continually play in the space the exhibit occupies. These recordings breathe life into the unknown 272 and give what could be a tragic piece a surprising triumphant quality. Pinkston hopes it spurs visitors to consider the histories of their own families and reflect on the gaps in the historical record in which meaningful people lived out their lives.

“How do we honor the lives of people we don’t know a lot about?” asks Pinkston. “I want people to consider moments like these with more reverence.”

Where Pinkston draws on arboreal imagery to suggest connection across time and space, fiber and wood artist Rania Hassan invokes strands of thread. When you knit something, she notes, “the whole structure is from a single line of thread. To me that’s really inspiring, because my work is about connection and how we’re all interconnected.” Threads can also be interwoven, of course, like the stories of people moving through places and moments together. These thoughts inform much of Hassan’s work.

Hassan’s featured piece at By the People this year is Paths 7 , part of a series examining the threads we follow as we make decisions throughout our lives—decisions which we often come to regret. Paths 7 , a repudiation of this regret, takes the form of a strikingly symmetrical pile of gold leaf situated just beneath the tip of a drop spindle pendulum. It’s a clean, beautiful image that suggests serenity and perfection. Hassan sees it as a cosmic “You Are Here” sign.

Hassan explains that the wondrous quality of the piece arose from her own wonder at the fact that everyone who would be seeing it at the festival would have arrived at the exact same place and moment in Washington, D.C. despite having followed completely unique paths in their lives up until then. She finds a kind of reassuring solidarity in that—the inevitable confluences of all our respective strands through time. “All of your stories are colliding at the same time,” she says. “This is where you’re meant to be. Everything you’ve done has brought you right here.”

Jonathan Rosen abruptly pivoted from a career in advertising to the life of an artist, so he, too, spends a lot of his time thinking about the paths not taken. In particular, he is fascinated by dreams and saddened at the ways in which life’s constraints so often lead us to abandon them.

“A lot of times we’re told by our bosses, by our parents, by religion, by society that we’re not allowed to have dreams, or that dreaming is wrong,” Rosen says. “And so, we start to forget our dreams, we start to ignore them. Life moves on and we get older, and then we let them go.” He wants his art to be a wake-up call to all who experience it. “I’m here to say: Follow your dreams!”

Rosen’s By the People installation, Walking on Clouds , is elegant in its simplicity. It consists of a series of mirrors each bearing enticing openings to sentences: “I am…” or “I could be…” or “I see…” Beneath these starters, nouns and adjectives flash by electronically at a blistering pace: “a flower,” “an asshole,” “sparkling,” “royalty,” hundreds more. When you snap a selfie with one of the mirrors, that flurry is replaced by a single, random phrase, which suddenly takes on great personal significance, having been singled out and immortalized alongside your own image thanks to the precise push of your thumb. “I am a firework.” “I see ghosts.” “I could be radiant.”

Rosen’s mission with this piece is to get people thinking about what is possible in their lives, to jar them out of complacency and link them spontaneously with a dream. He believes that in order for dreams to become reality they must first be articulated, and Walking on Clouds articulates dreams you may not even have realized you held. “If I’d never said I wanted to be an artist,” Rosen says, “this wouldn’t exist. We need to say it out loud for it to be true.”

Where Walking on Clouds sets out to get you thinking about yourself and what you are capable of, Stevie Famulari and her By the People project Engage Urban Greening are all about the communities and natural wonders surrounding our individual selves.

At the heart of the exhibit is a field of colorful paper flowers sloping down a staircase, each fashioned from a special sort of construction paper that contains seeds and will eventually be planted and watered to yield wildflowers. Like the plant life it celebrates, Engage Urban Greening is itself ever growing as visitors to the gallery fashion their own origami creations and take them home to plant, water and raise.

Famulari, whose art first started to take on an environmental character as she completed her master’s in landscape architecture, sees the Engage project as a novel spin on the By the People theme of “marginalized communities.” To her, plant life in urban settings is the epitome of a marginalized community—one which deserves to be welcomed into neighborhoods.

Just as she believes we are all capable of making a positive impact on our environment, Famulari is also a passionate advocate of the idea that anyone can create art if they put in the effort. “Everybody’s style should not be judged as ‘better’ or ‘worse,’” she says. “Their art has value because it’s their perspective.”

See this art for yourself at the Arts and Industries Building before the June 23 conclusion of the By the People festival. The full rundown of By the People events and locations is available here .