Harmony in art is agreement between the parts of a picture: colors from the same family, shapes that echo one another, tones that sit close together, so that the eye settles instead of jumping from one clash to the next.
The work where it is easiest to see is James McNeill Whistler's Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, a London dining room he covered in blue and gold in 1876 and 1877, and whose title is the word itself.
Harmony is the calm half of a pair. Contrast sets unlike things against each other to wake the eye, and harmony does the opposite, keeping everything close enough that nothing shouts. A painter gets there by choosing neighbors on the color wheel, by repeating one color across the whole surface, or by letting a single tone, like gold, absorb everything beside it.
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The room did not begin as a painting job. Frederick Leyland, a shipping magnate, wanted a dining room in his London house to show his collection of blue and white porcelain, and the designer Thomas Jeckyll had built the shelves. Jeckyll fell ill before he could finish, and Whistler, who had been consulted on the colors, took over.
Leyland went away, and while he was gone Whistler covered the room: blue green walls, gold, peacock feathers on the ceiling, painted peacocks on the shutters. Every surface now agreed with every other, and he called it Harmony in Blue and Gold. Leyland had ordered none of it, and he refused to pay the 2,000 guineas Whistler asked.
Leyland agreed to half, and wrote the check in pounds rather than guineas, a pound being worth less. Whistler answered on the leather wall facing his painting The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, where he painted two fighting peacocks and titled the mural Art and Money.
One peacock is covered in coins and stands for Leyland. Whistler finished in March 1877 and never saw the room again. A room built to be the picture of agreement has a quarrel painted on one of its walls.
What did Frederick Leyland ask Whistler to do?
Very little. Leyland wanted a setting for his porcelain, and the room at 49 Prince's Gate was Thomas Jeckyll's design, with shelves built for the pieces…
What You'll Discover
Why Whistler titled paintings like music.
How Monet made a whole room agree.
Where the room went after Leyland.