Walter Gay

WALTER GAY

(1856–1937)

Walter Gay was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, and was encouraged by his uncle, the landscape painter Winckworth Allan Gay, to become an artist. He studied at the Lowell Institute for Drawing and began painting still lifes that he exhibited successfully in Boston. In 1876 he moved to Paris and studied for three years in the atelier of Léon Bonnat, where his work reflected the French academic training for which Bonnat was well known. Gay’s pictures of realistic genre subjects, strongly influenced by Jean Meissonier and the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny, were exhibited at the annual Salon in Paris. After summer trips to Brittany and Barbizon and under the influence of Jules Breton and Léon Lhermitte, he shifted to a larger format and painted scenes of peasant life that he exhibited in Paris, Munich, Berlin, Antwerp, Vienna, and Budapest.

He joined the Société des Peintres et des Sculpteurs, the Société de la Peinture à l’Eau, and the Brussels Royal Society of Water Colorists and in 1894 was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

About 1895 Gay became interested in interior views, which he continued to paint almost exclusively for the rest of his life. Exhibited frequently both in Paris and New York, these light-filled pictures capture the ambiance of the sophisticated rooms in which the Gays and their friends lived. They were often commissioned by famous collectors on both sides of the Atlantic and were acquired by a number of French and American museums.

Gay and his wife, Matilda, collected Old Master drawings, which they left to the Louvre. They lived in considerable comfort in an apartment in Paris and in a large château near Fontainebleau, where they entertained a wide circle of socially prominent friends.

"Interior"

Oil on canvas

18 x 21 ½ in. (45.7 x 53.3 cm)

Signed (lower right): "Walter Gay"

Gift of the Genevieve H. Goodwin Estate (1989.16)

This 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)1 WR

1. Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, Autumn in the Valley (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1936), p. 115.

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.