Antique and Collectible Peacocks

Peacocks and peacock feathers have been favorite design motifs of artists, especially during the Art Nouveau era. That’s when Will Bradley, Albert Turbane, and others used the bird’s elongated neck and showy plumage to illustrate book covers and posters. Almost a century later, rock-poster artists such as Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Bonny Maclean, and, later, Emek, would return to the peacock theme to create posters for concerts featuring everyone from Quicksilver Messenger Service to Queens of the Stone Age. Artists and designers working in three dimensions also favored the colorful birds. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s famous Favrile glass Peacock Vase from 1892 appears to be made of nothing but overlapping peacock tail feathers, while Staffordshire ceramists such as T.H. Sandland reproduced full birds, sold in pairs, standing with their feathers raised high behind their crested heads. Makers of carnival glass such as Northwood and Millersburg put peacocks in the centers of their iridescent plates; costume jewelers like Trifari, Coro, and Kramer fashioned peacocks into pins and brooches; and in the 1930s, so many Georgian tufters produced bedspreads featuring peacock designs, Highway 41, which runs north and south through the state, was known as Peacock Alley.