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

Whistler never visited Asia, and his creative borrowing of eastern objects and influences was motivated by a desire to suggest the temporal and spatial distance of a foreign and therefore imaginary realm, rather than by an interest in Asian cultures per se.

The Princesse was purchased around 1867 by the shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, who hung it in his London dining room, where he also displayed his extensive collection of Kangxi 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.

That following year, Freer acquired the entire Peacock Room, and the Princess once again took her place in a realm of Asian ceramics—not porcelain, which Freer didn't care for, but earth-toned, often iridescent, glazed pottery and stoneware from Japan, China, Korea, Syria, and Iran. In 1923, the room and the Princesse were moved yet again, to the Freer Gallery of Art where the painting has presided over a changing array of Asian ceramics ever since. It, like the room in which it hangs, is an apt illustration of the Freer aesthetic, an imaginative, cosmopolitan representation of East-West harmony.