Arts and Letters

Walter Gay was elected a member of the Academy on November 8th, 1934. He died at his home in Paris on July 13th, 1937. As he spent most of his long life in France his personality was comparatively little known here, but he is affectionately remembered by his friends on both sides of the Atlantic, a man full of an endearing charm. His work was made familiar to New York by repeated exhibitions. One, well representative, was organized in his memory at the Metropolitan Museum in the spring of 1938. It was composed of pictures of interiors, a few painted in New York, but most of them done in his own homes, illustrating the dix-huitième which he loved. They, like Gay himself, had great charm.

In 1930 he wrote his Memoirs and had them privately printed in a slender volume. He gave me a copy and from it I can recover a little of the story of his artistic career. "About 1895," he says, "I began to give up painting large figure pieces. Medals and honors were all very well, but to obtain them I was obliged to make too many concessions to the public in the way of subject and of treatment. Besides, I felt that I could be more personal in small ones. Added to this I had a sentiment for the past: it meant much to me. So I painted many studies at the Château de Fortoiseau, without exhibiting them, showing them only to sympathetic people who could understand what I was trying to do. I was searching for the spirit of empty rooms—interiors."

What he sought he found and placed upon canvas with a singularly sensitive touch. I have a vivid recollection of his "interior" in the Rue de l'Université and of that which made his château of Le Breau, down near Melun, enchanting, and I can testify to the perfection of his transcripts. Both places were vibrant with the beguilement of eighteenth century France, not only through the architectural and decorative motives present but through the drawings and bibelots which Gay had collected with unerring taste. And the envelope that he had fashioned for himself meant more than tangible things, it meant the sentiment of which he speaks. It is this impalpable element that comes back to me as I look at his pictures. He caught veritably "the spirit of empty rooms," because they were not really empty, a spirit inhabited them. An especially felicitous word on his evocations has been spoken by his friend Louis Gillet, of the Académie Française, and I must quote it from the essay published shortly after Gay's death:

He found his style; he organized little fêtes, a sort of ballet or quiet fairy tale where objects took the place of vanished figures; he composed little sonatas, a delicate kind of chamber music where the table, the curtains, and the old armchair balance each other and play the part of violin, flute, and double bass and sing their song without the help of features or words, while light streams in or the moonbeams circulate with noiseless steps between the old pieces of furniture. He expressed the atmosphere and filtered light from shade and caught the little secrets which inanimate things record when they are alone, and translated delicate shades by the illusion of the unsaid, and marked the pulse of time, the regret and sadness by an absence of living figures.

There is, as the foregoing fragment subtly suggests, a certain romanticism implicit in these interiors. Yet for all his emotional response to his subject Walter Gay kept his eye on the measurable fact. It was not for nothing that he had been trained under that strict disciplinarian, Léon Bonnat. He developed the soundest of techniques. He was always an able craftsman. And from the very beginning he pitched his standard high. On going abroad long ago he went first to London, and there, he says, "I spent three happy weeks studying the pictures in the National Gallery." Arrived in Paris, he continues, "I went every day across the footbridge over the Seine to the Louvre." He had, also, stimulating comrades. In the night school at Bonnat's he came to know Sargent. At Auvers-sur-Oise he painted with Daubigny. Inspiring figures moved across his horizon, Manet, Boldini, Puvis de Chavannes. He knew Whistler, Miss Cassatt, and Degas, who received him in his studio and came to Gay's. Then Bonnat sent him to Spain to study Velasquez. Out of it all came the pictures of what seemed at the time only a typical Salonnier. But in due course Gay was to gather up all his inner resources and find himself, to paint "the spirit of empty rooms."

The pictures of those rooms and the pictures of his earlier career do not offer the only contrast in his biography. On the first page of the Memoirs he makes this statement: "There have been three great events in my life: going West in 1872 at the age of sixteen, going to Paris in 1876, and my marriage to Matilda Travers in 1889. I have never regretted any of them." The first pages of his book deal with the roughest kind of Western life, with Indians and buffaloes. He looked back with a wistful memory upon that youthful experience. Yet after its adventure he was to be made over by France, where he was to spend happy and fruitful years. The sportsman in him survived and he was a good shot at the pheasants, down practically to the end of his days. But the fastidious artist prevailed, the artist who was a connoisseur, saturated in knowledge and in taste. It was a great privilege to sit with him and Mrs. Gay in the garden at Le Breau and later to explore the château, with its boiseries, its furniture, its graphic souvenirs of the eighteenth century masters. Walter Gay had a most engaging way with him, gentle, exquisitely courteous, as though there lived again in him the tradition of that period of culture to which he was devoted. Traversing his pictures I have been moved by the beauty with which they reproduce interiors I have known and others strange to me. At the same time I have been conscious of the beautiful nature out of which they proceeded, the man who was as lovable as the artist.