plate negative © National Portrait Gallery, London
Even if she had not met O’Conor at the Chat Blanc, Gray would certainly have known about this Irish painter through her circle. O’Conor came from Castleplunket, County Roscommon. He attended Ampleforth College in York and by 1879 had enrolled in the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and then later at the Royal Hibernian Academy. To further his education he studied first in Antwerp at the Academié Royale des Beaux Arts in 1883 and went to Paris in 1886. He travelled and painted between Grez and Brittany for some years and finally moved back to Paris in 1904. He had participated in the inaugural exhibition of the Salon d’Automne in 1903 and continued to exhibit there, with the exception of a few years, until 1935. It was during this period that O’Conor met Bell, Maugham, Bennett, Crowley and Kelly. Maugham did not like O’Conor and O’Conor compared Maugham to ‘a bed bug, on which a sensitive man refuses to stamp because of the smell and the squashiness’.68 Many of the habitués of the Chat Blanc wrote about O’Conor and by all accounts he apparently reigned there as the accepted pontiff.69 Maugham often used fictional characters as devices with which to comment on or to attack his enemies, as he seems to have done in The Magician in the case of Crowley and possibly Gray. Similarly, he used O’Conor as the model for his character the painter O’Brien, also in The Magician.70 O’Conor like Gray became a permanent expatriate and lived the rest of his life in France, chiefly in Paris. And like Gray he suffered the fate of being ignored, until recently, in his native land.71
It was also during this period that Gray met the English artist Stephen Haweis. Kelly was a mutual friend from Cambridge as was Crowley. Both Kelly and Gray had a lengthy correspondence with Haweis in the later part of his life. His best friends were the Scottish painter Francis Cadell (1883-1937) and the Irish artist Paul Henry (1876-1958). Belfast born, Henry had arrived in Paris in 1898 and like Haweis and Cadell enrolled immediately in the Académie Julian. It was here at the Academy that the three struck up a close friendship. In both Henry’s and Haweis’s memoirs a number of people are mentioned as attending the Académie at that time. Constance Gore Booth (1868-1927), the future revolutionary from Dublin and her husband Casimir Markievicz (1874-1932); the Chilean painter Manuel Ortiz de Zárate (1887-1946); Lucien Daudet (1878-1946); Francis Cadell; the Birmingham-born portrait artist Katherine Constance Lloyd (op.1923-1940), who had also attended the Slade School in 1896-1897, and the woodcut artist Mabel Royds (1874-1941).
1.22 Sir John Lavery, by unknown photographer, circa 1909, platinum print © National Portrait Gallery, London
When and where Gray and Henry were first introduced remains unclear and is only hinted at in letters from Haweis to Henry in their renewed correspondence during the 1950s. Haweis lived in Paris until 1914; however Henry, in his memoirs, records Haweis as briefly returning to London sometime in 1901-02.72 It is during this period that Gray and Henry became acquainted, either in London prior to her leaving for Paris, or in Paris before Henry left for London. Gray is listed in Haweis’s memoirs as being part of their social circle in the 1900s, along with Henry, Cadell, Crowley, Maugham, Kelly, Kathleen Bruce, Jessie Gavin, Katherine Constance Lloyd and others. It is suggested in Haweis’s letters that it was at Kathleen Bruce’s salon that Paul Henry met Gray.73 It was also at Bruce’s salon that Gray was introduced to John Lavery (1856-1941), who also corresponded with Haweis.
Of this circle of friends that Gray developed during these formative art school years it was a Reverend’s son from London, Stephen Haweis, who gave much insight into Gray’s life during this period and would continue to have an influence on Gray’s work for the rest of her life.
ENDNOTES
1NMIEG 2003.508 and NMIEG 2003.510, notes on Eileen Gray’s work.
2Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage, London, Dean and Son Limited, 1906, p.392.
3The Enniscorthy News and County Wexford Advertiser, Saturday 11 July 1895.
4Dundee Advertiser, 10 April 1895. NMIEG 2000.211, NMIEG 2000.212, Eveleen Pounden Gray. NMIEG 2000.213, NMIEG 2000.214, NMIEG 2000.215, James MacLaren Smith.
5Adam, Peter, Eileen Gray: Architect/Designer: A Biography, London, Thames and Hudson, 2000, p.11.
6Bence-Jones, Mark, A Guide to Irish Country Houses, London, Bass Printers Limited, 1996, p.49. NMIEG 2000.201, Brownswood House pre-1895.
7NMIEG 2000.205 and NMIEG 2000.206, the Gray family, circa 1879. James McLaren Stuart, Gray’s eldest brother, was born in 1864 and Ethel Eveleen, her eldest sister, was born in 1866. Gray’s second brother Lonsdale was born in 1870, but died in 1900 from drinking poisoned water during the Boer War. Her sister Thora Zelma Grace was born in 1875 and finally Eileen in 1878.
8NMIEG 2000.219-226 and NMIEG 2003.566, the Gray family, Pre 1900.
9NMIEG 2000.201-204, the Gray family, James Gray, Henry Tufnell Campbell, Rick Campbell and Eileen Gray, at Brownswood, circa 1890s. NMIEG 2000.217, Lonsdale Gray, Ireland, NMIEG 2000.218, Thora and Eileen, Ireland. NMIEG 2003.558, Eileen Gray on horseback, circa 1917.
10NMIEG 2000.242, a Fiat car.
11Ibid, Adam, p.12.
12Ibid, Adam.
13Binchy, Maeve, ‘A Far from Demure Life’, The Irish Times, 16 February 1976.
14Spalding, Francis, Prunella Clough Regions Unmapped, London, Lund Humphries, 2012, p.12.
15NMIEG 2000.209 and NMIEG 2000.210, James MacLaren Smith at his easel.
16Ibid, Adam, p.17.
17NMIEG 2000.202, Brownswood house, circa 1896.
18Ibid, Adam.
19Ibid, Binchy.
20Aquarius Interview, Thames Television Production, 11 November 1975.