English, half Jewish Hungarian, whose complexion was so perfect that the students betted upon its truth, and would not believe their eyes when a scrub on the studio towel left it ... perfectly white. Her mouth was an incredible wonder and almost plum coloured. It was as beautiful as Eileen’s shoulders, which were the most perfect I ever saw ... things beautiful which live forever in memory and for which to be grateful. Of course there are always beauties where many young people of different nationalities are gathered together, yet some remain like planets among the stars, more radiant than others.
These notes in his memoirs are typewritten but at the end of the paragraph describing these women Haweis pencilled in ‘The Hon. Eileen Gray’. He continued,
It is not only for their beauty that these girls are to be remembered, nor for their talent, though some of them were talented enough and one was a genius. They marked the end of an era, and created a new one without knowing very much about it. To repeat, ad nauseam, most of the girls were as poor as the men, but they cared for ‘beauty’ and were not content to be dull echoes of the prevailing fashion.25
2.9 Eileen Gray, 1900s, black and white photograph © NMI
The Anglo-Irish aristocracy based their ideas of the French on the popular novels of la vie de bohème and thus saw France as a nation of seducers. The artistic quarter of Montmartre was depicted as a sordid area with dangers lurking in every side street. In George Moore’s (1852-1933) Confessions of a Young Man, 1886, stories of free love were just the sort of thing which concerned respectable people. Haweis also knew Moore, who came to Paris sporadically with Walter Sickert (1860-1942). Haweis said that Moore and Sickert were old friends and ‘frequently dined with us at the Restaurant Garnier in the Boulevard Raspail. They both enjoyed young people, though it appeared to me that Moore’s interest in them was highly specialised and referred principally to girls’.26 Moore was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic and dramatist. He came from Carra, County Mayo. Originally he wanted to be a painter and studied in Paris during the 1870s, where he befriended the many leading French artists of the day. Whether Gray was ever introduced to him is unclear; but through Haweis she must have been aware of this Irishman who had made such an impression in Paris. Haweis’s comments about Moore and Sickert are quite revealing. ‘We treated George Moore with great respect. 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
2.10 Paris VI – Montparnasse, circa 1900, black and white photograph, © Roger Viollet /Topfoto
Montparnasse by all accounts in 1902 was a pastoral outpost on the edge of the city and still retained traces of peaceful country life. The area would soon undergo rapid transformation. Work had just begun on extending the Boulevard Raspail and houses and shops were being replaced by multi-storied modernist buildings and artists’ studios. Across the Seine women art students may have been leading disciplined and respectable lives – however as art students they were still viewed with disdain. Bruce summed up public opinion in her autobiography. ‘In the first years of the twentieth century to say that a lass, perhaps not out of her teens had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to hell’.31 Nonetheless, women artists were already studying there in increasing numbers, and lived without outraging public opinion. Clive Holland, a British journalist, wrote, ‘That the life they lead differs from that led by their male companions, both as regards its freedom and its strenuousness, goes without saying; but its (sic) sufficiently Bohemian for the most enterprising feminine searcher after novelty’.32 Haweis described life as exceedingly difficult for artistic women who, when left to their own devices, had few choices once their financial support ran out, other than prostitution. The American expatriate painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), a friend of both Gray and Haweis, recalled her adventures in the turn-of-the-century Montmartre, where her attempts to earn a living included stints as an artist’s model and a brief career as a music-hall performer. Many female art students boarded in family-style pensions; the more emancipated found their own apartments. Most young women rented rooms in the studio complexes around Montparnasse and set up housekeeping on a modest budget. Many students, including Paul Henry, first lodged at the Hôtel de la Haute Loire, at 203, boulevard Raspail. Haweis amusingly comments that ‘the memoirs of the concierge in the old Hôtel de la Haute Loire should be interesting reading. There are so many who went there in search of cheap accommodation who were poor, but very often talented. It was from there so many of us went away when we had found even cheaper roofs shared in stern virtue or unquestionable sin’.33 Within a short time, Henry and Haweis managed to find a ‘ramshackle, and out-at-elbows, but adorable studio’ in a now-demolished building in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, a street more redolent of art and artists.
2.11 Countess Markievicz in uniform, 1915, photographic negative glass, Keogh Photographic Collection © National Library of Ireland
There was a well in the garden, from whence they drew water, and the toilets, which were in the courtyard, were appalling. Haweis describes in detail the studio off the courtyard where he lived. It was clearly subdivided between those with money and those without. ‘At one sad moment I lived in an underground studio in Paris, a cellar which had once been endured by two brothers who became famous illustrators in the Saturday Evening Post.34 Its claim to be a studio at all rested upon its having a top light; it had no other. Above my head, on the ground floor, dwelt Countess Markievicz and her very large Polish husband, but they did not concern themselves with those who frequented the bowels of the earth beneath’. In later notes that he had edited he said:
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
