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
2.6 Thora and Eileen Gray, Palermo, 1895-1897, black and white photograph © NMI
For Gray the Slade School had been the initiation into the avant-garde, the world of the déclassé and cosmopolitan artists. However, the school did nothing to encourage individuality, particularly in a woman. In Haweis’s memoirs Gray is listed as amongst his circle of friends from the 1900s. Haweis arrived in Paris in 1899 befriending Irish artist Paul Henry and Scottish artist Francis Cadell when they all enrolled in the Académie Julian. In his memoirs he says that he was there between 1899 and 1900. He then returned to England sometime in 1900, but was back in Paris at the École Colarossi in 1902 where he was attending night drawing classes and where he met his future wife Mina Loy (1882-1966).16 Gray and Haweis attended the École at the same time.
In Paul Henry’s autobiography An Irish Portrait, 1951, he provides much insight into the city of Paris at that time and what the Académie Julian was like for Gray when she enrolled in 1903.17 ‘Paris in those years was filled with students from all over the globe, all filled with a high resolve to learn as much as they could and to seize every opportunity to perfect themselves in their particular arts’.18 Henry describes in detail the Académie, which was in stark contrast to the Slade. ‘The Académie Julian was not in any sense of the word a teaching institution. It was not a school with regular classes and teachers, it granted no degree, and there were no prizes. As long as you paid up, behaved properly and did not steal the easels, you were free’.
2.7 Eileen Gray, 1902, black and white photograph © NMI
Haweis’s circle was described as a blend of dabblers in black magic, spinsters and elderly ladies.19 Descriptions of Haweis also vary. Loy described him as preferring the female sex to his own and added that his lady friends were not an attractive lot. According to Loy he served as a token of masculinity in their lives. Many found Haweis irritating because he attempted to ingratiate himself with those with a more luxurious standard of living, and he was known for charming women with a monthly allowance.20 Haweis’s memoirs and letters reveal a man who had an equal number of male as well as female friends. He compensated for his lack of stature by an eccentric personality and dress. He is described as having ‘flashing black eyes, olive skin, and glossy dark hair, hanging down like a curtain about his head, gave him the appearance of a young Italian who had stepped from a picture by Raphael’.21 Haweis wanted to stand out. Paul Henry wrote of him, ‘we had to find other ways of showing to the world that we were not as other men’. He continued; ‘Stephen Haweis was just down from Cambridge and he was one of the most colourful persons in the quarter, his small neat figure was dressed in brown corduroy, he wore a black beret and his long hair was cut straight across his forehead like a Florentine page; collarless he looped around his neck or throat a long string of amber beads. Sometimes in place of the beads he wore a jade green live snake which often caused much commotion in the studio when it wandered among the easels’.22 Haweis at times flaunted his eccentricities possibly because he had to live up to the reputation of his father. Henry says that ‘Haweis, like his father, was something of an oddity, but I liked him in spite of his eccentricities which I cannot describe as poses because they were the natural expression of a very vivid personality’.23
Gray also was strikingly attractive. In her autobiography Kathleen Bruce gives a description of Gray during this period, as lovable but remote in personality.
2.8 Self Portrait of an Artist, by Kathleen Bruce, 1949, detail showing Bruce inside the front cover of the book © NMI
She was fair, with wide set pale blue eyes, tall and of grand proportion, well born and quaintly and beautifully dressed. But for a rather vague look and an absent minded manner, she would have been wonderful. I thought she was wonderful, when, one night she told me that she lived her whole life in terror because there was madness in her family. I thought her not only wonderful to look at, but also the most romantic figure I had ever seen.24
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,
It is not only for their beauty that these girls are to be remembered, nor for their talent, though some of them were talented enough and one was a genius. They marked the end of an era, and created a new one without knowing very much about it. To repeat, ad nauseam, most of the girls were as poor as the men, but they cared for ‘beauty’ and were not content to be dull echoes of the prevailing fashion.25
2.9 Eileen Gray, 1900s, black and white photograph © NMI
The Anglo-Irish aristocracy based their ideas of the French on the popular novels of la vie de bohème and thus saw France as a nation of seducers. The artistic quarter of Montmartre was depicted as a sordid area with dangers lurking in every side street. In George Moore’s (1852-1933) Confessions of a Young Man, 1886, stories of free love were just the sort of thing which concerned respectable people. Haweis also knew Moore, who came to Paris sporadically with Walter Sickert (1860-1942). Haweis said that Moore and Sickert were old friends and ‘frequently dined with us at the Restaurant Garnier in the Boulevard Raspail. They both enjoyed young people, though it appeared to me that Moore’s interest in them was highly specialised and referred principally to girls’.26 Moore was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic and dramatist. He came from Carra, County Mayo. Originally he wanted to be a painter and studied in Paris during the 1870s, where he befriended the many leading French artists of the day. Whether Gray was ever introduced to him is unclear; but through Haweis she must have been aware of this Irishman who had made such an impression in