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 Art and Life
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| Demolition work. 1:10 PM. Photo: JH. |
Friday, September 2, 2011. Beautiful late summer day in New York. Town is winding down for the last long holiday weekend of the summer season.
For the last of our retrospectives on this day when NYSD runs our HOUSE series, we chose this for the obvious reasons.
This was our six or eighth Diary in the first year of business, October 2000. The book, A Charmed Couple, Matilda and Walter Gay, by William Reider of the Metropolitan Museum in here in New York had just been published.
In his day, Walter Gay’s portraits of interiors and exteriors of private houses and chateaux were a must have especially among the American rich. These status symbols, many remaining in the hands of the original family have become heirlooms, a confirmation of the status the family ancestors represented. They also have their own charm aside of the interior décor in the picture.
Walter Gay was born in 1856 in Boston. He grew up there. In those days Boston of his family background could be/was accurately characterized by the lines:
And here’s to dear old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod;
Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots,
And the Cabots speak only to God.
Young Walter Gay went to Paris to study painting. And never came back. To live, that is.
He was from a fourth generation prosperous Boston family. Matilda was from an old New York-Newport family; both born in the middle of the 19th century. They had met in Paris, where he was already establishing himself as a painter of interiors.
She spotted him first, and introduced herself by asking him to give her painting and drawing lessons. The following year, they were engaged. In April 1889, both in their early 30s, they were married in London and embarked on a marriage that endured for almost a half century. It can best be described as ideal, idyllic, and something that most of might only dream about, but never realize.
The book is beautiful and intriguing, recording an artist's life and times with scholarship and intimacy. (The author had major assistance by a diary that Matilda Gay began in 1904 and continued almost to the time of her death in 1943).
The couple, being very well connected socially in New York, Boston, and Newport, settled in France where they attracted many prominent American travelers and émigrés (such as Edith Wharton, Henry James, Elsie de Wolfe, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, James Hazen Hyde, Anne Morgan, Bernard Berenson, Henry Adams), French and English aristocrats, as well as fellow artists such as John Singer Sargent, Paul Helleu, all of whom came frequently to lunch, to picnic, or to stay at their famous, very large Château du Bréau, within driving distance of Paris. |
Most assumed they were wealthy considering their lifestyle. Although both came from moderately wealthy families, they nevertheless supported themselves mainly on Walter's substantial earnings as a painter. By the time they first leased the château in 1905 (they purchased the property in 1907) his work had become very popular both in America and in Europe.
Life at Le Bréau was supported by a staff of twenty, many guest bedrooms (decorated by Matilda), and frequent visits to neighboring châteaux, such as Vaux-le-Vicomte, owned by their friends the Alfred Sommiers; the Duc de Trevise at the Château Livry and Hubert de Ganay at Château Courrance (see NYSD 10.3.05). All would-be guests knew that a visit to Bréau would be interesting visually, socially, and even intellectually. |
| Château du Bréau by Walter Gay, oil on canvas; private collection. |
The Open Window, Bréau, by Walter Gay, watercolor on paper, 1915. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. |
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Matilda Gay's diaries bear witness to a way of life that no longer exists. Her reflections on the changing times are trenchant and remind us of how "the experts" are very often the last to notice. She had her eye on the future but not on the pulse. She wrote of Matisse, with much agreement in the art world, "There is a certain force in his things, but they are shocking in color, in drawing, and in subject. Diseased art." She called Art Nouveau "a modern atrocity." Of Impressionism, she said, "What is amusing is that the wild impressionists try to trace their inspiration from Ingres and admire him reverently; I wonder what he would say to them?"
Her observations bring her past to life: "Tea with Anne Vanderbilt in her gorgeous white marble palace on Fifth Avenue. Why do such houses always seem like splendid prisons?" After a visit to the studio of their friend John Singer Sargent: "His personality gives one no idea of his great talent. No glimmer of genius ... It is all absorbed by his pictures. What remains is a pleasant, embarrassed, affected society man, with an artificial accent and the fond is distinctly ordinary."
Matilda's abiding main interest was her husband and his work. She never saw a picture of his that she didn't like and she never met a professional opportunity for him that she didn't encourage. His work, his art, was her work and her art. |
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| Elsie de Wolfe's Drawing Room, 123 East 55th Street, New York by Walter Gay; oil on canvas. Elsie de Wolfe Foundation, Los Angeles. |
Villa Trianon, Versailles, Walter Gay. Oil on canvas. Elsie de Wolfe Foundation, Los Angeles. |
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Mainly forgotten and unknown today where the camera has replaced the deft hand and eye of the artist, Walter Gay had a great career as a painter of interiors for both European and American aristocrats and the rich of the early part of the 20th century.
Their Château du Bréau was set in a 300-acre park surrounded by 200 acres of woods and fields. The four-story brick and stone house was built in 1705 on the foundations of an earlier house. It was a dream house to all its visitors. Edith Wharton used it as a model for the Château Givre in her novel, The Reef.
Annually they moved down from their apartment in Paris in May or early June, and stayed through New Year's. In the summer, they lived in a suite in the north wing on the ground floor. In the winter, they moved to a suite in the south wing on the second floor. There were guest bedrooms on all three principal floors. French friends stayed on the ground floor and the Americans on the second floor ("the French had a horror of stairs and our compatriots a horror of dampness.") Children and servants stayed on the third floor.
Guests often came down from Paris for lunch. In her diary, Matilda noted the first visit of Comte Robert de Montesquiou: "For four hours we listened to his torrent of eloquence and witticism, which never flagged — nor did our interest. He is tall, striking-looking, with a large fine head and flashing black eyes — his thick hair and waxed moustache dyed carefully, and I detected a very adroit maquillage (makeup). In speaking of our neighbours he quickly made mincemeat of them all — and some of his wicked thrusts were merited."
Bessie Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe, who was America's first interior decorator, were friends. The most famous lesbian couple of their day, they shared two houses — one in New York on East 17th Street and the other, the Villa Trianon at Versailles. Known as "the Bachelors," they loved to entertain and their guest list was eclectic, as well as grand. John Jacob Astor, Willie K. Vanderbilt joined Henry Adams and Henry James, on the roster.
Matilda wrote "some of the ... guests have unpleasant little stories of various kinds hanging on to them, which may be more or less true .... One meets respectable people as well — all kinds, in fact. It is the only really Bohemian house I know where the hostesses have themselves kept within the limit that their guests have frequently overstepped."
Edith Wharton could not stand Marbury and de Wolfe, however, and quite generous about her sentiments. "Those two women are really not fit to traffic with, and I always feel degraded when I go against my prejudices and treat them as if they were."
Elsie, however, was more generous (or gracious) in her recollection: "Edith Wharton, as I remember her — I have not seen her for many years — was handsome, small and slight and with a wealth of blond hair. There was something sharp about her and she had a forbidding coldness of manner."
Diana Vreeland later recalled de Wolfe's genius as a decorator at the turn of the century: "She simply cleared out the Victoriana and let in the twentieth century."
The Gays occasionally traveled to America to visit friends and relatives, to exhibit Walter's new work, and especially to get new commissions. During Walter's trip in 1908, (when he painted the James Speyer house at 1058 Fifth Avenue), he wrote back to Matilda: "How I long to get back anywhere over there! And away from this fearsome New York. It is always a perpetual tearing up of the city, and the noise and the smoke, now that the omnibuses have been replaced by autobuses, is enough to drive one mad."
In 1928 Walter Gay was commissioned by Helen Frick to paint three rooms in the residence at 70th and Fifth (now the Frick Collection). The Gays were of course bowled over by the spectacular collection. Although Matilda later wrote in her diary: "After dinner we visited the Gallery, where we had sat before an open fire before dinner. Miss Frick had arranged a curious lighting system. All the light was extinguished, with the exception of the special lights over the pictures; so that the pictures stared out of the gloom at us. This gave the effect of projections on the screen; the masterpieces therefore lost the quality of painting and looked like ghosts."
Everything about New York was too brash for their now European tastes and sensibilities. Nevertheless, new business was important, although Matilda might be skeptical of a new client. About Mrs. Oliver Gould Jennings who had commissioned Walter to paint several views of her fabulous new Fifth Avenue apartment, she wrote, "a pleasantish, youngish, prettyish woman, rather brand new, but of such are the kingdom of picture-buyers."
Upon seeing the apartment, she wrote: "With W.G. in the afternoon to see the interior he has just finished of Mrs. Jennings — a very banale subject, which he has treated most skillfully." Nowhere did she reveal that Mrs. Jennings was in fact a stunning beauty and that the banale boiserie was as good as a very similar boiserie at Le Bréau.
Walter Gay died in 1937 at his beloved Chateau. Their friend Edith Wharton died the same year at her beloved chateau nearby. |
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