Walter gay

Around 1884, the artist painted larger works and chose for his subject matter contemporary people engaged in such activities as spinning, weaving, and cigarette-making. 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.

Instead he featured eighteenth-century woodwork, furnishings, and decorative objects, a reflection not only of his taste as a collector but also of the contemporary interest in the Rococo style. There they had 300 acres of grounds to roam. Around 1884, the artist painted larger works and chose for his subject matter contemporary people engaged in such activities as spinning, weaving, and cigarette-making.

It is not necessary for our enjoyment to get even a glimpse of the occupants of these rooms, because we can feel their presence. 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.

As his friend the painter Albert Gallatin (1882–1952) wrote in 1920, “Mr. After a brief stop in London, Gay went to Paris, where Johnston joined him on his travels. In a sense he returned to the historic character of his early paintings but no longer included figures. His success brought him commissions from English, French, Belgian, and German art dealers, and by the early 1890s, his work was also being shown in Vienna, Antwerp, Munich, and Berlin.

Far are theses apartments from being deserted.”

In 1907, Gay purchased the Château du Bréau, a charming eighteenth-century residence in Dammarie-les-Lys, near Fontainebleau, where he lived and worked until his death at the age of eighty-one. The rooms are full of human interest. His style was traditional, and he ignored the influences of modernist paintings he saw while studying in Paris beginning 1876.

Part of his collection of decorative arts was given to the Louvre.