1.1 Eileen Gray, 1883, black and white photograph © NMI
Eileen Gray’s family history was unconventional. However much she affirmed her Irish patrimony she also could not escape or ignore that her family, on her mother’s side, was very distinguished. Her grandmother, Lady Jane Stuart (1802-1880) was the granddaughter of Francis Stuart (1737-1810), the ninth Earl of Moray and his wife Jean Gray (1743-1786). On Francis’s father’s side of the family the first Earl of Moray, James Stewart, was the illegitimate son of King James V. Jean Gray was a descendant of the first Lord Gray who was the first master of the household of King James II of Scotland.2
Lady Jane was fifth in the line of succession after her four brothers to the title of Baron of Lord Gray. However, her four unmarried brothers all died without issue and she then inherited the title becoming Baroness Lady Gray. Lady Jane Stuart married Sir John Archibald Drummond Stewart (b.1794) of Grandtully on 25 January 1832. He died on 20 May 1838. Just three months after his death she married Jeremiah Lonsdale Pounden (d. 3 March 1887), Eileen Gray’s grandfather, on 25 August 1838. Pounden was an Irishman and a Doctor of Medicine. The couple renewed their vows at the end of 1840 when Jane was pregnant with their only child, a girl. Eveleen Pounden was born in Dresden on 3 May 1841, but was baptised in Ireland.3 Eveleen caused quite a scandal when she eloped to Italy in 1863 to marry a 31-year-old middle-class painter, James Maclaren Smith (d.1900) who was from Hazelgrun in Lancashire.4 Though this union, which did not last, was not welcomed by the family, the couple returned to live at Brownswood House, in Enniscorthy, County Wexford.
1.2 Eveleen Pounden Gray, 1860, black and white photograph © NMI
1.3 James Maclaren Smith, 1860, black and white photograph © NMI
Gray’s grandfather Jeremiah Lonsdale Pounden, having amassed a large fortune, had bought Brownswood estate at the beginning of the nineteenth century for £5,500.5 The Georgian manor was an elegantly proportioned early nineteenth-century house with two storeys and five bays. The centre bay broke forward and the house had a pillared porch and an eave roof.6 Eileen Gray was born on 9 August 1878 at Brownswood, the youngest of five children.7
1.4 Brownswood House, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Pre 1895, black and white photograph © NMI
Her well-documented childhood was spent between the family’s London residence at 14 Boltons in South Kensington, a brief spell at school in Dresden, and Brownswood House in Ireland. Photographs and memorabilia reveal trips to Milan, Genoa, Paris, Nice, Egypt, America and skiing trips in the Alps.8 There are numerous photographs also of the family’s life in Ireland which she kept with her throughout her life. These included images of her brother Lonsdale using the horse and trap, Gray horse riding through the Brownswood estate, on a picnic with her sister Thora and the family with friends playing croquet on the lawn in front of the family home.9 On the back of one photograph Gray purportedly reports that the family had the first Fiat in Ireland.10
1.5 The Gray family, from left to right, standing, her sister Ethel, her father, her brother James; seated, her brother Lonsdale, Eileen on her mother’s lap, and her sister Thora, 1879, black and white photograph © NMI
1.6 Ethel and Eveleen Gray in Egypt, 1880s, black and white photograph © NMI
1.7 Eileen Gray on skis, 1893-94, black and white photograph © NMI
1.8 Eileen Gray at the front of Brownswood house with a croquet mallet in her hand, 1896, black and white photograph © NMI
1.9 The Gray family on holidays in the Alps, Eileen is wearing the white hat, pre 1900, black and white photograph © NMI
1.10 Eileen Gray on horseback, circa 1917, black and white photograph © NMI
Different descriptions of her childhood have materialised. In some, Gray describes her upbringing as ‘lonely and unloved’ at the estate. ‘Despite considerable wealth and many servants, life was far from comfortable at Brownswood. In the cold wet weather the children had to put on coats to cross the icy halls and staircases’.11 Gray herself stated that ‘even the nursery seemed never to warm up’.12 However, in an interview in 1976 with Irish journalist and writer Maeve Binchy (1940-2012), Gray recollects Brownswood somewhat differently. ‘It was a happy childhood that seemed like one long sunny summer when she looks back to it, days and days of being with the horses and down by the river and picking great branches of flowering bushes for the house. They used to go to the Dublin Horseshow and her mother would walk around dreamily looking at the great hunters and show jumpers and saying how nice it would be to have horses like that at home’.13 Gray also recalled the peacefulness and beauty of the surrounding countryside while taking her boat out onto the river Slaney, which ran through the estate. She had very fond memories of Ireland, describing it as home.
1.11 Thora and Eileen Gray picnicking in Wexford, circa 1895, black and white photograph © NMI
Eileen Gray’s father, James Maclaren Smith was an artist, a minor figure in Victorian painting of portraits and landscapes. He was also quite an accomplished watercolourist. Her father was well connected in the art world and corresponded with great artists of the time such as William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), John Brett (1831-1902), William Powell Frith (1819-1909) and John Everett Millais (1829-1896).14 He sublet his studio to Hunt. Eileen Gray often travelled with her father in Italy and Germany as he painted a lot in these countries, and in Switzerland.15 When her parents separated he remained in Italy permanently except for a few visits. Gray ‘couldn’t understand why he (her father) had to spend such a long time in hot landscapes where even the ground and walls looked parched in villages instead of painting cool green things that were shiny and silky in Wexford’.
1.12 Watercolour by James Maclaren Smith,