Jennifer Goff

Eileen Gray


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Gray remained close with her sister Thora (1875-1966) and Thora’s husband Eric Clough Taylor (1883-1947). In her later years, like Haweis, contact with her family was with her niece Prunella Clough (1919-1999). This she shares with Haweis, and in one letter affectionately sends Haweis ‘poems written by my brother-in-law (Clough Taylor) before he died as I think you might like them’.15

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      2.6 Thora and Eileen Gray, Palermo, 1895-1897, black and white photograph © NMI

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      2.7 Eileen Gray, 1902, black and white photograph © NMI

      Gray also was strikingly attractive. In her autobiography Kathleen Bruce gives a description of Gray during this period, as lovable but remote in personality.

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      2.8 Self Portrait of an Artist, by Kathleen Bruce, 1949, detail showing Bruce inside the front cover of the book © NMI

      Gray’s appearance also caught Haweis’s attention. He describes many female painters, sculptors and society women in his memoirs. He considered Gray one of the beauties of those Paris days.

      There were several amazingly beautiful girls in our Paris of the early 1900s. Mina (Loy) was half English, half Jewish Hungarian, whose complexion was so perfect that the students betted upon its truth, and would not believe their eyes when a scrub on the studio towel left it ... perfectly white. Her mouth was an incredible wonder and almost plum coloured. It was as beautiful as Eileen’s shoulders, which were the most perfect I ever saw ... things beautiful which live forever in memory and for which to be grateful. Of course there are always beauties where many young people of different nationalities are gathered together, yet some remain like planets among the stars, more radiant than others.

      These notes in his memoirs are typewritten but at the end of the paragraph describing these women Haweis pencilled in ‘The Hon. Eileen Gray’. He continued,

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      2.9 Eileen Gray, 1900s, black and white photograph © NMI