It currently hangs above the fireplace in The Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Princess depicts a European woman wearing a kimono worn in a Western manner, standing amidst numerous Asian art objects,[1] including a rug, Japanese folding screen and a large decorative porcelain vase.

[8] When the portrait was completed, Spartali's father refused to purchase it; Whistler's large signature at the top led another would-be buyer to withdraw.

The following year, it was displayed at Gambart's French Gallery in London; when the exhibition finished, his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti received the painting as Whistler was in South America at the time.

It was then sold by either Rossetti or Joanna Hiffernan, Whistler's muse and lover, to an art collector thought to be Frederick Huth.

[7] Several years later, the portrait was bought by Leyland[7] He displayed Princess in a dining room filled with Kangxi ceramics, but was displeased how it had been decorated by a previous artist, Thomas Jeckyll.

[1][9] Princess continues to be housed in The Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery, shown hung above the fireplace amidst a rotating stock of Asian ceramics.

[b][12] In her doctoral dissertation, Caroline Doswell Older wrote that, when viewed without its frame, Princess came across as a being like a closely cropped, carelessly taken photograph which seems as if it would be swallowed up by The Peacock Room.