In silent rooms - selected interiors by Walter Gay

 

The Green Bed, Chateau Le Bréau. (The artist's home.)

Salon, Pavillon Colombe.

The Small Red Drawing Room of the comtesse Robert de Fitz-James, Rue Constantine, Paris.

The Living Hall, the Frick Collection, circa 1928.

The Music Room and Dining Room of Eben Howard Gay's House, Boston.

The Grand Salon, Musée Jacquemart-André, circa 1912.

Edith Wharton's bedroom, Pavillon Colombe, 1926.

Interior, Chateau Le Bréau.

The Library, Chateau Le Bréau.

Galerie des Bustes, Chateau du Reveillon, circa 1907-09.

 The Boucher Room, the Frick Collection, 1928.

View into the Dining Room, Chateau Le Bréau.

The United States embassy, Paris.

The Blue Room, Chateau Le Bréau.

I would assume this painting was left unfinished.

 Elsie de Wolfe's drawing-room, 123 East Fifty-Fifth Street, New York.

The Green Lacquer Room / The Chinoiserie Room, Museo Correr, Venice, 1912/22.

The library of Mrs. Oliver Gould Jennings, 1920.

Salon, Pavillon Colombe.

Les Tableaux, Chateau Le Bréau, circa 1918.

The Fragonard Room, the Frick Collection, 1926.

Salon, Musée Jacquemart-André, circa 1912.

Bedroom, Chateau Le Bréau.

*

Walter Gay (22 January 1856, Hingham, Massachusetts - 13 July 1937, near Fontainebleau), American painter noted both for his genre paintings of French peasants and for his depictions of luxurious interiors; he was also a notable art collector. Born into an established New England family, his painter uncle introduced him to the Boston art community. He married the wealthy New York heiress Matilda Travers, and his wife's fortune allowed the couple to live very comfortably; in 1876, when the artist was only twenty, the pair moved to France. They divided their time between their country homes and their Paris apartment. And in 1907, they purchased the Chateau Le Bréau on a 300-acre walled park near the Forest of Fontainebleau. On his arrival in France he became a pupil of Léon Bonnat - a fellow student was John Singer Sargent, who became a close friend - and he traveled to Spain, where he studied the work of Velázquez and Mariano Fortuny, both proving important influences on his own work. He received an honorable mention in the Paris Salon of 1885 and a gold medal three years later. He collected similar awards in Vienna, Antwerp, Berlin, and Munich in the following years, and was one of the artists selected to represent the United States at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. His first works were still-lifes, the depictions of eighteenth-century French peasant life, later shifting to genre scenes with realistic depictions of peasants and factory workers. But around 1895, he abandoned these themes and began portraying luxurious domestic interiors, glamorous figure-less rooms in French chateaux and elegant private homes. He was created a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1894, officier of the order in 1906, and commandeur in 1927. He also took on many American artists as students, to the extent that the New York Times dubbed him the "Dean of American Artists in Paris." He died at the age of eighty-one, after which his widow donated a portion of his art collection, some two hundred important works, to the Louvre. Matilda Travers Gay, having remained at their home in France, which was subsequently taken over by German officers during the Occupation, died there in 1943, a prisoner in her own home.

The Artist's Study, rue de l'Université , circa 1910.