received at the 120 Salon des Artistes Français au Grand Palais.2 Gray took her apartment on the rue Bonaparte in 1907 and by 1908 was already working directly in lacquer.3 From this moment Gray began to follow, and acquire into her library, the manifestoes from many major art movements. Gray’s library had numerous books on art history, painters, sculptors, architecture and their theories. Many were written by fellow artists or acquaintances whom she knew and many were signed by the original authors.
Gray also owned a number of art books which pre-date her formal art training in both London and Paris. Three particular texts were of importance; The Renaissance, 1873 by Walter Pater, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1890 by James Abbott NcNeill Whistler and The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley, 1899 by John Lane. These three publications along with the writings of Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), in whom Gray also had a profound interest, reveal Gray’s interest in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements. These movements were also linked with the Symbolist movement in France which had its beginnings with Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) poem Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857 (Gray later used the title of Baudelaire’s poem Invitation au Voyage as a coded symbol and decorative feature on the wall of the living in the house E.1027 in 1929). The Symbolist movement’s ideas were anticipated in the work of the idealising neo-classicist Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), in whose work Gray also expressed an interest. The influence of the ideas expressed in these publications is revealed in Gray’s artistic development; especially in her figurative artwork, her use of symbolism and her ideas on decorative art. They are significant not only in her early artistic career but also in her later career as a designer and architect.
The Aesthetic movement in England was influenced by the writings of the Oxford professor Walter Pater (1839-1894) and his essays, which he published in 1867-68, culminated in the book Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873 and later renamed in the second and later editions The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.4 In this controversial book Pater maintained that our thoughts and lives were in constant flux and for this reason he emphasised that people should get the most out of life through sharp and eager observation. It was more as a designer and architect than as a painter that Gray adapted Pater’s ideas to suit her own requirements. She acutely observed the way that people interacted with her furniture and her architectural interiors, adapting her designs as such.
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) were two of the key artists associated with the Aesthetic movement. They became the main leaders of the movement along with Oscar Wilde. Rejecting John Ruskin’s (1819-1900) idea of art as something useful or moral they advocated that art did not have a didactic role – rather they emphasised its aesthetic values. Nature was considered crude, lacking in design when compared to art. The use of symbols, sensuality and the correspondence between words, colours and music were key components. Gray related to these movements’ ideals of synaesthesia. Rather than conveying moral or sentimental messages they professed that the arts should engage with the haptic and cognitive senses, providing refined sensuous pleasure. Later Gray refined her ideas on synaesthesia especially in her lacquer work and interior design, creating rooms with furniture and furnishings which directly engaged with all of the occupant’s senses.
3.2 Drawing of a nude figure in a landscape, unknown date, paper, paint, crayon, pencil, collage © NMI
Whistler’s book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies emphasised how art was its own end and that nature was rarely right, relying upon the artist to improve it through his own vision.5 The artist’s responsibility was not to society but to himself to interpret through art, and neither to reproduce nor moralise what he saw. This book invited controversy, a self-authorised publication critical of those such as Ruskin, who accused him of throwing a pot of paint in the public’s face after Whistler had exhibited Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket in The Grosvenor Gallery, London in 1877.6 Gray maintained this distance in her treatment of her natural subject matter. One particular undated abstract, untitled, monograph completed in pencil and charcoal suggests the figure of a nude woman standing on rocks in front of a waterfall or possibly trees.7 Gray’s lack of colour and use of bleak monochromatic tones develops a muted, yet harmonious composition. A separation between the background and foreground occur with Gray’s simplistic treatment of the nude figure. The only suggestion of colour is developed through the pale blurred lines of a faint yellow, suggesting the reflection of the moon. As with the majority of Gray’s artwork this piece is unsigned.
Gray remained interested in the life, ideas and work of Whistler, purchasing in 1908 The Life of James McNeill Whistler written by his friends Joseph (1860-1926) and Elizabeth Pennell (1862-1952)8 which had an illustration of The Peacock Room which he completed in 1876-77.9 Whistler’s palette of brilliant greens and blues influenced the choice of colours used in some of her early lacquer work and in an early gouache completed in the same colours which was probably intended for a carpet.10
Gray’s interest in the work of Aubrey Beardsley was surprising as his work has become known in the larger context of Art Nouveau – a movement that Gray did not appreciate. She stated: ‘I don’t care to be absorbed into it as representing willingly a disciple of Art Nouveau’.11 Gray owned a copy of The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley, 1899 by John Lane.12 But it was Beardsley’s use of a defined line with his caricatures which intrigued her. Her interest in caricatures also led her to purchase Les Caricatures de Puvis de Chavannes, by Marcelle Adam in 1906 and a copy of James Ensor, by Emile Verhaeren, in 1908.13 The nineteenth century became the heyday for caricature and by the mid-nineteenth century there was an enormous output of graphic and sculptural caricature, with a great number of artists like Beardsley, de Chavannes and Ensor dedicated to it. Caricatures by Aubrey Beardsley, James Ensor (1860-1949) and Puvis de Chavannes directly inspired the drawings which eventually culminated in Gray’s Ballet des Animaux, (The Animals’ Ballet) 1916-1919 and her fresco drawings from the 1940s. She appreciated these satirical drawings and their use of the grotesque. Whereas the caricatures of Beardsley, Ensor and de Chavannes mocked the salon, or the establishment, or documented relationships with other artists or friends, Gray’s characters are noted more for their graphic adventurousness rather than their allegorical nature.
The drawings for Ballet des Animaux are a surprising contrast to Gray’s better known abstract art work which adheres to the ideas and principles of early twentieth-century art movements. They also reveal Gray’s interest in children. Gray’s designs have looked to children on several occasions and she had explored furniture for their rooms and playrooms.14 Throughout her career Gray was considered withdrawn, reserved, a devotee of her work, aloof and somewhat stuffy, however the light-hearted theme for this ballet and its characters reveal her conviviality, her sense of irony and her wit.
Another influence for the creation of this ballet was Sergei Diaghilev’s (1872-1929) Ballet Russes production of Schéhérazade which opened on 4 June 1910 at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra in Paris. The music
