The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-12-27

and gold leaf. The leather was appa- rently defaced. The work had gone on quite without his permission, and all ready many thousands of dollars worth of material had been ruined. He asked Whistler angrily what he had done with his leather.
 Whistler, without turning from the work he was busy with, replied: Your leather is beneath my peacocks and an excellent ground, too, 1t formed to paint or"
 Mir Leyland was furious and asked Whistler how much he was indebted to the artist for having wrecked his room.
 One thousand guineas," Whistler re piled instantly.
 But you have ruined more than that much in leather already said MT, Leyland. II will give you that many pounds.
 Whistler readily agreed to this on condition that he be allowed to finish the room uninterrupted The applica- Ition of gold and blue was continued. But the incident was responsible for perhaps the most striking decoration of the remarkable room Whistler im- mortalized the quarrel with MT. Ley land on the remaining panel. In the same style, suggestive So strongly of the Japanese art at it's best, Whistler proceeded to paint fantastic group of two great peacoclxs. One of the birds earicatured Leyland. It was smothered lin golden eagles, while all about it on the floor were silver shillings, comrnem Horating the difference between the SOW ereign and the guinea which Leyland refused to pay him. The second pea cock represented Whistler himself, and struts about prancing and triumphant. The quarrel over the extra shillings is thus recorded for all time.
 In some respects Whistler's greatest conquest in this work is his decoration of the inside window shutters. The shutters when closed formed a compar- atively smooth face, and on each Whist Ter has painted a marvellous conven- tionalized peacock. with tail feathers extended in successive fans until every part Of the shutter is covered. So care fully has this been done that the detail of the shutter is completely lost in the design. The hinges, for example, are skillfully worked into the shadings of the feathers, so that they can only be discovered on the closess. inspection. Each of the panels formedaby closing the shutters contains different design, although all are similar. The plumage of single peacock suffices in each case to fill the panel.
 The room was originally intended to reproduce the old Norman interiors, and the walls accordingly are lined with a series of bracket-like decora- tions, with many slender uprights of dark wood. The wooden uprights pre- scented unusual difficulties. Whistler overcame these by covering them with brilliant peacock feathers, shaded from dark to light downward. An unexpect- ed effect was thus obtained. Not only do the walls and ceilings, once covered with somber leather, shine resplendent, but the hundreds of additional feathers thus introduced, as it were, in relief, lend a certain air of animation to the whole.
 The ceiling of the peacock room har- nlonizes well with the whole, which is perhaps the highest praise 1t can have. The drop ceiling of the Norman room is naturally divided into a series of tri- angles by the arches Whistler at tempted no general designs h these panels, but filled the entire surface with a series of great fans of peacock eyes,