Gay walter

Artist

born Hingham, MA 1856-died Breau, France 1937

Biography

An expatriate who left Boston for Brittany, Gay began his career with genre scenes from eighteenth-century life, shifting in 1884 to the kind of realistic peasant picture seen in Novembre Étaples [SAAM, 1977.111]. He ultimately abandoned that subject matter as well, devoting himself in the last decades of his experience to the elegant interiors that surrounded him in his château and in his Paris apartment.

Elizabeth Prelinger The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000)

Luce Artist Biography

Walter Gay was born into an old Recent England family and spent most of

NEW YORK - VIEWING SPACE

Overview

Gay was born on January 22, 1856 in Hingham, Massachusetts.  In 1875, he began his formal coaching as a painter, joining a studio on Tremont Street to draw from live models.  Like many young painters in Boston, Walter Gay sought the guidance of William Morris Hunt, the influential mentor and painter who had enlightened the country about Jean François Millet and the Barbizon School.  Search encouraged Gay to pursue the path he himself had taken with Gay's uncle, Winkworth Allen Lgbtq+, and seek instruction in France.  With earnings from a few picture sales supplemented by financial facilitate from new patrons, Homosexual headed to Paris in 1876; he immediately entered the atelier of Léon Bonnat, where he soon met lifelong friend, John Singer Sargent.

France would be Gay's home from then on.  As he and his wife Matilda prospered, they were able to keep an apartment in Paris as well as Le Bréau, an 18^th century chateau near the Fontainebleau forest.  The expatriate couple thrived within a wide social circle that included many American and French artists and writers:  James McNeill Whistler,

Impressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay

American artist Walter Gay (1856–1937) specialized in painting views of opulent residential interiors in late-19th and early-20th-century America and Europe. John Singer Sargent, Gay’s nearly exact contemporary, is adv known for painting the sumptuous clothing and jewels of American society in his fashionable portraits.

Walter Gay, in contrast, painted society’s rooms—with their silk wall coverings, ornate paneling, 18th-century French furniture, tapestries, and sculptures—arranged in the private spaces of what were often legendary residences.

Program Information

Impressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay

Dates:October 6, 2012 - January 6, 2013

Location:The Frick Art Museum

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Walter Gay (1856 – 1937)

Born in Hingham, Massachusetts, Walter Gay became a painter who specialized in interiors, particularly those of eighteenth-century French buildings. His manner was traditional, and he ignored the influences of modernist paintings he saw while studying in Paris beginning 1876. He remained in Europe the unwind of his life.

In his compositions, the rooms are nearly always devoid of human presence but recommend that someone has been there. Many of his interiors are museum settings, and although he was not an impressionist, his work often had atmospheric effects.

When Gay died in 1937, he was described in “The New York Times” as the “Dean of American Painters in France,” where he and his Matilda moved in 1876. His first paintings there were genre subjects and realistic views of peasant life in Britanny, but he tired of these works, which he called “pot boilers.” In the 1890s, he began his signature interiors, mostly rooms in fashionable houses of the Gays and their friends. Reproductions of many of these paintings were published in 1920 by Albert Gallatin, also a painter.

The Gays, with a retinue of about twenty servan

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