some of the work for Mme Mathieu-Lévy’s Rue de Lota apartment. These notes, invoices and letters give much insight into the materials she used such as parchment, ostrich eggs and ivory and the techniques she employed such as scorching wood and then sanding it down to add to the textures and variety to her pieces. Gray also kept the business cards and details of various craftsmen, suppliers and workshops where she could purchase necessary items suitable to her trade.42 Any materials which weren’t used by these craftsmen Gray kept – often experimenting with them as sculpture – which is what she did in November 1916 with leftover ivory handles for a piece of furniture.43
4.8 A three-panelled black lacquered and gold leaf screen, black lacquered back, Katsu Hamanaka, 1930s, wood, black lacquer, gold leaf © Galerie Dutko
From 1908 onwards Gray began to produce small lacquer pieces but she said that in 1910 she began to produce screens.44 Indeed her first object she completed in lacquer was a screen.45 This continued into lacquer panels and furniture ranging from chairs, tables, bureaus, beds and dressing tables. Soon she expanded into domestic pieces, bowls, plates, toiletries. Her first screen which she produced in blue lacquer inlaid with mother of pearl was a large four-panel screen produced for a friend Florence Gardiner in 1912 and was called La Voie Lactée (the Milky Way).46
4.9 La Voie Lactée (the Milky Way) four-panelled screen, 1912, wood, blue and natural lacquer, engraved, raised colours, mother of pearl inlay © NMI
It was reproduced in Vogue magazine in 1917 illustrating an abstract nude figure running over a mountain, a trail of constellations of stars extends across the night’s sky, emitting from the figure’s head.47 It was also illustrated in the Dutch magazine Wendigen in 1924.48 The work has now disappeared but it was described in the French magazine Les Feuillets d’Art by the Duchess Clermont-Tonnerre saying it depicted ‘The dust haze of the Milky Way, made from mother of pearl thrown over the matt of the lacquered leaves of the screen’.49 At the eighth Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1913 Gray exhibited two lacquer panels, a yellow and silver panel for a library, a door panel and a frieze. The first was a blue lacquer panel, Le Magician de la Nuit (The Magician of the Night), 1912-13, which attracted considerable attention.50 The second panel was entitled Om Mani Padme Hum, 1912-13.51 A critic in Art et Décoration stated after seeing her display that, ‘Miss Gray uses that admirable material lacquer... Seeing her entries one regrets that this beautiful technique is not more favoured by our decorators’.52
As with many of her lacquer screens and panels the subject matter is compelling and mysterious. The author from Vogue magazine asked ‘What is the mystery which impels?’53 There is a spiritual, enchanting quality to the stories Gray depicts in many of her lacquer panels and screens, evident in the names. Inspired by the contemporary art movements such as Symbolism, Surrealism, Cubism, the subject matter for these pieces is derived from books in her library on mythology (Greek, Persian, Indian and Irish Celtic), poetry, psychology and philosophy.
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