A peacock in a painting rarely says the same thing twice. The same bird can stand for virtue or vanity, for holiness or hard cash, for protection, power or desire.
Where the painter sets it usually tells which. The twelve works below span more than seven centuries and run from England to Japan, from a medieval book of animals to Whistler's Peacock Room.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
A peacock earned its place here only if its meaning can be read. A writer of the period or a later scholar had to have explained what the bird means in that picture. Peacocks painted only to look pretty stayed out, however famous the work.
12. Abbott Handerson Thayer and Richard S. Meryman, Peacock in the Woods (1907)
A peacock sits high in a tangle of leaves, so well hidden that it takes a second look to find it. Its blue neck rises against small patches of blue sky, and its long folded train falls through the greenery toward the lower left corner.
The picture was painted to prove a point. Abbott Handerson Thayer, an American painter better known for his angels, made this oil study in 1907 with his assistant Richard S. Meryman, for a book on animal camouflage.
Thayer believed that the coloring of every animal served to hide it from predators. The peacock, the showiest bird anyone could name, was the hardest test of that idea.
If even this bird could vanish, the theory would hold. The book came out in 1909 as Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, under the name of Thayer's son Gerald, and this peacock opens it, in color, on the plate facing the title page.
In the picture the green feathers of the back blend with the leaves, and the round spots on the train melt into the patches of light and shadow under the trees.
The woods were real, but the bird was not alive. Thayer and Meryman worked from a stuffed peacock from the family's own menagerie, propped on a stone wall in the woods near Thayer's home in Dublin, New Hampshire.
The sky is where the trick shows. Thayer chose the color of the gaps between the leaves himself and painted them in exactly the blue of the neck. The match that makes the bird disappear came from his palette, not from the woods.
Theodore Roosevelt, the former president and a big game hunter, spotted the trick. In a long paper published by the American Museum of Natural History on August 23, 1911, he took the opening plate apart.
Roosevelt wrote that a bird set against a sky of its own color was shown in conditions under which it "probably would not be seen once in a thousand times." Then he raised the missing peahen.
The female looks nothing like the male. If his blue made him vanish against the sky, she would stand out in the same spot, and the idea that every animal's colors hide it would collapse. Thayer had simply left her out of the picture.
At a Glance
Artist: Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849 to 1921) and Richard S. Meryman (1882 to 1963), American
Painted: 1907
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 114.9 × 92.4 cm (45 1/4 × 36 3/8 in)
Where to see it: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (not on view)
About This Painting
Who wrote Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom?
Gerald H. Thayer, Abbott's son, is the named author of the book, published by Macmillan in New York. It mostly sets out his father's theories. Abbott's wife Emma painted many of the backgrounds of its color plates.
Was Abbott Thayer's camouflage theory right?
Only in part. Thayer had serious supporters, among them Alfred Russel Wallace, who arrived at natural selection alongside Darwin. Thayer's claim that every animal's coloring exists to conceal it did not hold, and The Public Domain Review calls it wildly erroneous.
Are there other paintings from Thayer's camouflage book?
Yes. The Smithsonian American Art Museum also holds his studies of white flamingoes, roseate spoonbills and a male wood duck in a forest pool, all made for the same book.
11. The Aberdeen Bestiary, The Peacock (about 1200)
A blue peacock walks across a block of burnished gold, its tail held low and trailing behind it. The little picture interrupts a column of Latin in the Aberdeen Bestiary, an illustrated English book of animals made around 1200.
The words around the bird explain what it stands for. They follow it from its name to its flesh, and they end with an order that no peacock obeys willingly.