[Interior with Oriental Rug]
Artist
Walter Gay
(American, 1856 - 1937)
Date1876-1937
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions18 x 21 1/2 in.
ClassificationsOil Painting
Credit LineGift of the Genevieve H. Goodwin Estate
Terms
Object number1989.16
DescriptionThis view of an unidentified French room is typical of many of Gay’s interiors in the way in which strong light from a window illuminates the room, contrasting the objects in direct light with the softer reflections in the mirror. Many of Gay’s friends lived in similar interiors: French eighteenth-century paneled rooms with parquet floors in the traditional design called parquet de Versailles, having a wide Louis XV marble chimney-piece and decorated with Louis XV furniture, Persian carpets, Oriental porcelain, and Old Master pictures. The writer Daisy Chanler gave one of the best descriptions of Walter Gay and his interiors: “[He] had exquisite taste and appreciation of beautiful things; he found himself when the poetry of the old château in which they lived entered his soul. He knew how to give a room an intimate sense of life, to make you feel that charming people had just left it, and that rooms and furniture had belonged to other charming people long ago.”(1)
WR
Bibliography:
Walter Gay, "Memoirs of Walter Gay" (New York: privately printed, 1930); Gary A. Reynolds," Walter Gay: A Retrospective", exhib. cat. (New York: Grey Art Gallery, 1980); and William Rieder, "A Charmed Couple: The Art and Life of Walter and Matilda Gay "(New York; Harry N. Abrams, 2000).
Notes:
1. Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, Autumn in the Valley (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1936), p. 115.
On View
Not on view
