Jennifer Goff

Eileen Gray


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He was a celebrity, but some of us rather enjoyed the off-hand, friendly contempt with which Walter Sickert treated him and which Moore never quite seemed able to tackle’.27 The sordidness, which Moore described in his novel Confessions of a Young Man, 1886, of this district of Paris with its bohemian artists and free love seemed unreal at times to Haweis, ‘I went to study in Paris and incidentally I did not find it any wickeder than anywhere else. Whether it be that I am so pure that evil cannot touch me or whether I am so depraved that evil is the natural breath of my nostrils I have never been able to determine but I often think of Nietzsche saying “behold when I looked at wickedness of men it was seldom more than four shoes broad and three months long”’.28 He differed somewhat from Gray who explained in a letter to Haweis years later that ‘At that time, I was always in a dream, and had no grasp on realities so-called: parental sternness, and terror by night left me with a complex, dread of people that I still have. Until I knew them well, they leave me with a feeling of frustration, because the real “Me” retreats to an immense distance, while the creature that is apparent, seizes on any nonsense to pretend that it is really there. Probably to you this doesn’t make sense’.29 Gray’s personality always tended towards introversion and in her later life she tells him, ‘that I am “en marge de la vie” and have no grasp on material, practical realities. I know that I would like to be quit of them, and yet problems of another kind interest me enormously’.30

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      2.10 Paris VI – Montparnasse, circa 1900, black and white photograph, © Roger Viollet /Topfoto

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      2.11 Countess Markievicz in uniform, 1915, photographic negative glass, Keogh Photographic Collection © National Library of Ireland

      Before I married I had a studio which had a top light only for the good and sufficient reason that it was underground. Above was the studio of the beautiful Miss Gore Booth, the Irish patriot, who was married to a Polish Count Markievicz. I knew them slightly, but was not included in the gay parties which often took place over my head. I complained of the light in that wretched studio, which by the way had formerly been occupied with the Leyendecker brothers who made brilliant pictorial covers for the Saturday Evening Post in the USA. Rodin did not seem to think the light of a studio made much difference. ‘I can paint anywhere,’ he said. ‘I spread my watercolours out on the floor and colour them all together. Anywhere any light is good enough, no?’ It helped cure me of the superstition that a studio must have a north light.