Walter and Matilda Gay in Paris and the country

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2000 by William Rieder

When Walter Gay died in 1937 he was described in the New York Times as the "Dean of American Painters in France." [1] He had begun in Boston painting flower pictures, and after moving to Paris in 1876 took up genre subjects: eighteenth-century costume pieces and realistic scenes of peasant life in Brittany. He quickly tired of these "pot-boilers," as he called them, and switched in the 1890s to views of rooms, mostly rooms in the fashionable houses of the Gays and their friends, stylishly furnished with eighteenth-century furnished and objets d'art. He gained considerable renown for these interiors, which he continued to paint and exhibit in Paris and New York City for the next thirty years. A number of them were published in 1920 by the painter, critic, and collector A. E. Gallatin (1881-1952) who summed up their appeal:

In a word, in these paintings we have preserved the very essence of the art and the charm of the epoch, in which taste seemed to have been almost a matter of instinct. [2]

Gay and his wife, Matilda (Fig. 1), loved old houses. "A new house never has any human quality," Matilda wrote in her diary. [3] In an eighteenth-century apartment on the Left Bank in Paris and a chateau in the country in Dammarie-les-Lys, they lived amidst the parfum du passe, which they found wanting in the harsh newness of the United States, where they felt like native-born foreigners. Matilda wrote: "Walter Gay and I were made for traditional countries. It is the 'sense of the past' within our veins." From the past also came some of the resources that contributed to their comfort, for Matilda's father, William R. Travers, had made a fortune on Wall Street in the mid-nineteenth century.

In addition to old houses, they also loved antiques. The hunt began on their honeymoon in 1889 in England, where they bought a set of blue-and-white china and some Georgian silver. As Walter Gay wrote in his Memoirs, "We formed a collection of old English silver, to be had at that time at reasonable prices." [4] On a visit to London fifteen years later, prices were no longer reasonable. Matilda Gay wrote:

Went yesterday morning to hunt up old silver--had much trouble in finding what we wanted. The prices have risen enormously of late years. After spending 50 pounds on spoons and forks that would have cost 25 or 30 pounds 15 years ago, we came back feeling very poor and depressed.

Their complaints about the rising cost of antiques were not infrequent. "Went to hunt up chaises longues with W.G. for the country," Matilda wrote. "Found two lovely ones at Buvalot's on the Quai Voltaire--but the prices are always mounting higher for antique furniture....It does one good to buy pretty things. And how dreary it is when the bill comes in!!"

The neighborhood around their apartment in the rue de l'Universite, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was then and still is filled with antiques shops where the Gays found most of their furniture and objects. They enjoyed nothing more than an afternoon browsing in what they called the bric-a-brac shops.

On rare occasions, dealers were invited to see their apartment. About one of these visits Matilda wrote:

Mme. Guirand and her son, the antiquity dealers, came to visit our collection and were very complimentary, most gratifying from people of their experience. The son, who doubted one or two or our chairs, was completely taken in on the authenticity of a console, which is more than half modern. Tout le monde se trompe! [Everyone is mistaken!] even sharp dealers.

The Gays almost always shopped together, except, of course, before Christmas and birthdays. On Matilda's fifty-fifth birthday in 1910 she happily reported "W.G. gave me a lovely pair of Louis XVI andirons for my bedroom in the apartment followed up by a bunch of red roses."

Shopping for antiques together was one thing, but doing so with a friend could be awkward, as they discovered when they went with their downstairs neighbor Roffredo Caetani (1871-1961), principe di Bassiano, to visit Madame Langwell, a famous specialist in Oriental art. As Matilda described it:

Madame Langwell herself is a character, or type as they say in French, of an excellent commercante, self-respecting, dignified. She does the honors of her collection so well that one forgets it is a shop. The jades, the porcelains, the vases...the lacquer furniture, and last, but foremost in temptation, were the magnificent Coromandel screens.

Matilda coveted one of these, which was covered with scenes of domestic life: a series of interieurs by some Japanese Walter Gay. But alas! we've no place for such treasures....When one loves these beautiful things passionately, one does not need to buy them. The memory is the best possession of which no one can rob you.

Five days later the Gays went downstairs to visit the Bassianos, "who showed us a Coromandel screen, the very one I wanted so hard at Madame Langwell's the other day." That one did not need to buy beautiful things suddenly seemed less true. "As long as I can't have it, I am very glad that they can," Matilda wrote unpersuasively. In fact she was not glad at all, and she continued to think longingly about the beautiful coromandel screen in the apartment below her feet. When the Bassianos moved several years later, they asked if the Gays might be able to house a few of their precious things. "Perhaps the Coromandel screen," answered Matilda, who managed to find a place for it--actually quite a prominent place in one of their salons where, once installed, it stayed (see Pl. I). Somehow their friendship with the Bassianos survived.