The Princess from the Land of Porcelain

Whistler painted this in the mid-1860s, when London and Paris were caught up in a craze for all things Japanese, freshly available now that Japan had reopened to Western trade. His model was Christine Spartali, the daughter of a Greek merchant in London, and he wrapped her in a kimono and set her among a folding screen, a patterned rug, and a tall porcelain vase. She wears the robe in a distinctly Western way, a European woman playing at being a figure from a far-off imagined country. Years later this canvas became the centerpiece of the Peacock Room, the blue-and-gold dining room Whistler decorated for a wealthy patron, and it hangs there still above the fireplace in Washington.