Gay walter
Walter Gay ( – )
Born in Hingham, Massachusetts, Walter Gay became a painter who specialized in interiors, particularly those of eighteenth-century French buildings. His style was traditional, and he ignored the influences of modernist paintings he saw while studying in Paris beginning He remained in Europe the rest of his life.
In his compositions, the rooms are nearly always devoid of human presence but suggest that someone has been there. Many of his interiors are museum settings, and although he was not an impressionist, his work often had atmospheric effects.
When Gay died in , he was described in “The New York Times” as the “Dean of American Painters in France,” where he and his Matilda moved in His first paintings there were genre subjects and realistic views of peasant life in Britanny, but he tired of these works, which he called “pot boilers.” In the s, he began his signature interiors, mostly rooms in fashionable houses of the Gays and their friends. Reproductions of many of these paintings were published in by Albert Gallati
Search The Collection
Showing 36 results for Walter Gay
Walter Gay&#;s Experiences Moving North
The youngest of three children, Walter A. Gay Jr. was born into a well-to-do African-American family in Dawson, Georgia. There, his father was a successful businessman and his mother worked as a schoolteacher.
“My father was, when I can remember, a renter of land, an owner of land, and an owner of authentic property, as well as a storekeeper. He was fortunate. I think he was one of the wealthiest blacks in the town of Dawson, which I don’t think had over 3, people in it. And I would say at that second, it was probably 40 percent black, if my recollection serves me." – Walter Gay, April 25,
In , Gay’s father decided to move his family to the north, for the boll weevil infestation was taking a toll on his cotton fields. More important, however, was the violence against his children.
“This was during the time when the boll weevil threat was on the air, and I consider that was a contributing factor in my parents’ decision to move, but by no means was it the entire… factor, or the predomi Gay was born on January 22, in Hingham, Massachusetts. In , he began his formal training as a painter, joining a studio on Tremont Street to verb from live models. Like many young painters in Boston, Walter Gay sought the guidance of William Morris Hunt, the adj teacher and painter who had enlightened the country about Jean François Millet and the Barbizon School. Hunt encouraged Gay to follow the path he himself had taken with Gay's uncle, Winkworth Allen Gay, and look for instruction in France. With earnings from a few picture sales supplemented by financial help from new patrons, Gay headed to Paris in ; he immediately entered the atelier of Léon Bonnat, where he soon met lifelong friend, John Singer Sargent. France would be Gay's home from then on. As he and his wife Matilda prospered, they were able to keep an apartment in Paris as adequately as Le Bréau, an 18th century chateau near the Fontainebleau forest. The expatriate couple thrived within a wide social circle tha
NEW YORK - VIEWING SPACE
Overview