Walter gay artist

Artist

born Hingham, MA 1856-died Breau, France 1937

Biography

An expatriate who left Boston for Brittany, Gay began his career with genre scenes from eighteenth-century life, shifting in 1884 to the kind of realistic peasant picture seen in Novembre Étaples [SAAM, 1977.111]. He ultimately abandoned that subject matter as well, devoting himself in the last decades of his existence to the elegant interiors that surrounded him in his château and in his Paris apartment.

Elizabeth Prelinger The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000)

Luce Artist Biography

Walter Gay was born into an old Unused England family and spent most of

Walter Gay

Walter Gay was an American painter noted both for his genre paintings of French peasants, paintings of opulent interior scenes and was a notable art collector.

Walter Gay was born on January 22, 1856 in Hingham, Massachusetts into an established Recent England family. He was the son of Ebenezer and Ellen Blake (née Blood) Gay. His uncle was the Boston painter Winckworth Allan Gay, who introduced the young dude to the art community.

In 1876, Gay and his wife moved to Paris, France where he became a pupil of Léon Bonnat. A fellow pupil during this period was John Singer Sargent with whom Gay developed a friendship. Bonnat encouraged the young artist to tour to Spain, where he studied and copied the work of Velázquez. He also encountered the function of Spanish artist, Mariano Fortuny. These artists became an important influences on Gay's brushwork, use of color and understanding of light.

Walter Gay received an honorable mention in the Paris Salon of 1885; a gold medal in 1888, and similar awards at Vienna (1894), Antwerp (1895), Berlin (1896) and Munich (1897). He was one of the not many artists selected to portray the United States at the Exposition Universelle in Paris

A charmed couple: the art and life of Walter and Matilda Gay

The musician Walter Gay and his wife Matilda were part of the happy band of cultivated American expatriates living in Paris in the early years of the last century. Their circle included Henry James, Edith Wharton, Henry Adams, Elsie de Wolfe, J.S. Sargent and Bernard Berenson among their compatriots and a number of French and English aristocratic patrons and collectors who were admirers of Walter’s work.

Walter Gay embarked on his artistic career in Boston, where he enjoyed a modest success before setting out for France in 1876 to continue his studies in Paris. He made a respectable accomplishment as an academic painter on conventional French salon lines, and there his career might have proceeded were it not for the entry into his life of Matilda Travers. She was also studying art and had contrived a position as Walter’s pupil in order to attract his notice, which she achieved, becoming his wife in 1889.

It was after his marriage that Walter gave up painting the large figure subjects required for the academic route and discovered the niche that he was to occupy so happily for the rest of his career as a painter.

He made a s

NEW YORK - VIEWING SPACE

Overview

Gay was born on January 22, 1856 in Hingham, Massachusetts.  In 1875, he began his formal coaching as a painter, joining a studio on Tremont Street to draw from live models.  Like many young painters in Boston, Walter Gay sought the guidance of William Morris Hunt, the influential educator and painter who had enlightened the country about Jean François Millet and the Barbizon School.  Chase encouraged Gay to obey the path he himself had taken with Gay's uncle, Winkworth Allen Homosexual, and seek instruction in France.  With earnings from a few picture sales supplemented by financial assist from new patrons, Male lover headed to Paris in 1876; 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 well as Le Bréau, an 18^th century chateau near the Fontainebleau forest.  The expatriate couple thrived within a wide social circle that included many American and French artists and writers:  James McNeill Whistler,

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