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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. 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.

There they had 300 acres of grounds to roam.

gay walter

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. Reproductions of many of these paintings were published in 1920 by Albert Gallatin, also a painter.

The Gays, with a retinue of about twenty servants, loved old houses, and lived in an eighteenth-century apartment on the Left Bank in Paris from January through April and beginning 1904, in a chateau in the countryside at le Breau, near Fontainebleau.

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He ultimately abandoned that subject matter as well, devoting himself in the last decades of his life 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 New England family and spent most of his adult life in Paris, as did many American artists of his generation.

He married the wealthy American expatriate Matilda Travers in London, and when they returned to Paris, her fortune provided the couple with a comfortable life.

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.

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 remained in Europe the rest of his life.

In his compositions, the rooms are nearly always devoid of human presence but suggest that someone has been there.

She was virtually a prisoner there, and the chateau was torn down in 1971.

The Gays also collected antiques extensively and stayed away from America because they did not like what they perceived as harsh newness of the country.

Source: “Magazine Antiques”, 12/2000, ‘Walter and Matilda Gay in Paris’ by William Rieder

Biography from the Archives of AskART

 

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BiographyWALTER 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.

Walter Gay

Artist

born Hingham, MA 1856-died Breau, France 1937

Born
Hingham, Massachusetts, United States

Died
Breau, France

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].

In 1904, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician.

When Walter Gay died in 1937 his obituary in The New York Times described him as the "dean of American artists in Paris." The following year the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a memorial exhibition of his work.

His widow remained at their home in France which was taken over by German officers following the German occupation of France during World War II.

A virtual prisoner in her own home, Matilda Travers Gay died there in 1943.


References

Public Domain This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (Caldwell, Walter Gay: Poems d’Intérieurs, 2003)

Walter Gay

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The Weaver

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Walter Gay (January 22, 1856 - July 15, 1937) was an American painter born at Hingham, Massachusetts.

He became an Officer of the Legion of Honor and a member of the Society of Secession, Munich. 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.

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. In 1907, they purchased this chateau which became quite a showplace and where they entertained extensively. Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, Autumn in the Valley (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1936), p.

Works by him are in the Luxembourg, the Tate Gallery (London), and the Boston and Metropolitan (New York) Museums of Art. His compositions are mainly figure subjects portraying French peasant life. Cambridge University Press.
Walter Gay information at Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide published by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art

External links

Walter Gay papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

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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.