Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray (Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, 1878 - Paris, 1976) was a scion of a landed Anglo-Irish family. She was born in 1878 at the family domain outside Enniscorthy, but she spent her adult life in France, where she became world famous for her interior designs, her lacquer and furniture work and her architecture.

Gray took up art studies at the Slade School in London, but abandoned the British capital for Paris after the death of her father in 1900. With two friends from the Slade she went to Paris and continued her studies at the Ecole Colarossi in rue de la Grande Chaumière (6th arrondissement) and then at the Académie Julian (6th arrondissement). She first lived in a "sordid boarding-house" at 7, rue Joseph Bara (6th arrondissement, house no longer exists), before moving to rue des Saints-Pères (6th arrondissement).

Eileen Gray's residence in rue Bonaparte

Not that Eileen Gray ever really had any financial worries as a young single woman in Paris. In 1907, when - at age 29 - she moved to an apartment at 21 rue Bonaparte (6th arrondissement) in the Latin Quarter, she was still living on "la pension de sa mère", while at the same time renting a studio in rue Guénégaud and then at 17, rue Visconti, just around the corner from her apartment. Gray bought the rue Bonaparte apartment three years later, thanks, presumably, to her family's support.

In 1906, Gray started studying lacquer work with a master craftsman from Japan called Sugawara and in 1913 held her first exhibition of decorative panels at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. This led to the odd commission before the First World War broke out, forcing Gray (plus Sugawara) to move to London. But Gray's big break came in 1917 when she was asked to decorate the apartment of Madame Mathieu-Lévy in the rue de Lota (16th arrondissement). Her work there brought her to the attention of the Paris upper classes and finally hauled Gray out of financial dependence on her family.

Gray's workshop in rue Visconti

Just as Maud Gonne was a creature of the 16th arrondissement, Eileen Gray elected the sixth arrondissement - the most expensive in Paris - as her physical and spiritual home. The various apartments, schools and studios heretofore mentioned are all located in that arrondissement. But Gray proved for once unfaithful to her favourite stomping ground when, in 1922, she opened a gallery at 217, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré (giving it the name of Galérie Jean Désert for more credibility) in the eighth arrondissement, although she herself is described as having been "too shy and introspective to serve there".

Gray was heavily influenced by the De Stijl movement, which - as a reaction against Art Nouveau - emphasised clean lines and simple forms. Several exhibitions of Gray's interior design work followed in the 1920s even as she turned increasingly to architecture. In 1924, together with the Romanian architecture critic Jean Badovici, she began work on the construction of a 'Modern Movement'-style house, called E-1027 on the cliffs near Monaco. Other architectural work followed along the Mediterranean coast and in Paris. After the war, Eileen Gray lived relatively secluded and forgotten in her rue Bonaparte flat until her death in October 1976. Interest in her art has only grown in design circles in recent years. But that interest has not saved her mortal remains. Upon her death in 1976, Eileen Gray’s body was cremated and placed in niche 17616 in the Columbarium of Père Lachaise cemetery. But with nobody found to renew the lease, the authorities took back ownership of the niche on February 5, 1998 and quickly leased it out again.

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