Filthy Lucre ginger jar enamel badge

This pin badge design commemorates Filthy Lucre: Whistler's Peacock Room Reimagined. 

Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre is an unsettling and dramatic response to the celebrated Peacock Room of 1876, designed by the architect Thomas Jeckyll to house Frederick Richard Leyland’s collection of blue and white ceramics. This lidded jar known as a “ginger jar” was made in the Jingdezhen province around 1683-1710 and is typical of the Chinese ceramics that would have been on display in the Peacock Room, made infamous by the painter James Abbott MacNeill Whistler. Whistler lavishly covered the room in vivid blues and iridescent green-golds from floor to ceiling while Leyland, his patron, was away on holiday. 

Filthy Lucre © Darren Waterston, courtesy of MASS MoCA, the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York.

Created exclusively for the V&A.