From the moment of its creation, the Peacock Room has been a personal, artistic, and cultural battleground. Created by artist James McNeill Whistler (18341903) for the London home of British businessman Frederick Leyland, the room has a dramatic and complex origin story that works in the Freer Gallery of Art collection. Situated next to the Peacock Room, Ruffled Feathers offers visitors a chance to explore this rooms tangled history and the personal and global forces that shaped it through paintings, works on paper, and decorative art. Situating audiences in London during the rooms formation between 1874 and 1876, Ruffled Feathers offers a unique opportunity to see intimate and formal portraits Whistler created of the Leyland family, chronicling the personal relationships that flourished and fractured over the course of the rooms creation. Additional paintings and examples of design from Leylands home help audiences understand how Whistler incorporated motifs sourced from Asia throughout his designs and rethought his own approach to art and art-making. Whistlers relationships, with his patron, with the art market, and with the world at large, offer visitors multiple ways to consider one of Washington, D.C.s, most iconic spaces and to more fully immerse themselves in Whistlers most complete artistic interior. The exhibition grew out of a 2022 Peacock Room Think Tank co-sponsored with the Chipstone Foundation. During this convening, we gathered artists, interpretation specialists and art historians to discuss new approaches to this iconic space. Those thought-provoking conversations inspired this exhibitions goal to reveal new perspectives on this remarkable work of art, explained Diana Greenwold, Lunder curator of American Art. The exhibit is on view at Smithsonians National Museum of Asian Art, the Freer Gallery of Art, located at 1050 Independence Ave. S.W., Washington, D.C.