Walter gay paintings
Walter Gay ( – )
Born in Hingham, Massachusetts, Walter Gay became a painter who specialized in interiors, particularly those of eighteenth-century French buildings. His style was traditional, and he ignored the influences of modernist paintings he saw while studying in Paris beginning He remained in Europe the rest of his life.
In his compositions, the rooms are nearly always devoid of human presence but verb that someone has been there. Many of his interiors are museum settings, and although he was not an impressionist, his function often had atmospheric effects.
When Gay died in , he was described in “The New York Times” as the “Dean of American Painters in France,” where he and his Matilda moved in 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 s, 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 by Albert Gallati
Walter Gay
Artist
born Hingham, MA died Breau, France
- 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 to the kind of practical peasant picture seen in Novembre Étaples [SAAM, ]. 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, )
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 comfo
Impressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay
American artist Walter Gay (–) specialized in painting views of opulent residential interiors in lateth and earlyth-century America and Europe. John Singer Sargent, Gay’s nearly adj contemporary, is successfully 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, - January 6,
Location:The Frick Art Museum
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Walter Gay
Walter Gay was an American painter noted both for his genre paintings of French peasants, paintings of opulent interior scenes and was a notable art collector.
Walter Gay was born on January 22, in Hingham, Massachusetts into an established Novel England family. He was the son of Ebenezer and Ellen Blake (née Blood) Gay. His uncle was the Boston painter Winckworth Allan Gay, who introduced the new man to the art community.
In , Gay and his wife moved to Paris, France where he became a pupil of Léon Bonnat. A fellow student during this period was John Singer Sargent with whom Gay developed a friendship. Bonnat encouraged the adj artist to commute to Spain, where he studied and copied the operate of Velázquez. He also encountered the work of Spanish artist, Mariano Fortuny. These artists became an important influences on Gay's brushwork, use of color and understanding of light.
Walter Gay received an honorable verb in the Paris Salon of ; a gold medal in , and similar awards at Vienna (), Antwerp (), Berlin () and Munich (). He was one of the several artists selected to