Walter and Matilda Gay in Paris and the country

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2000 by William Rieder

Like many people who entertain extensively, the Gays discovered that their happiest days in the country were often those free of guests. As Matilda recorded:

Lovley day all alone with W.G....In the afternoon we sat among the wheat sheaves in the fields, and drank in their blond colour, the blue of the sky, the deep green of the park, and the chateau in the distance, looking like an illustration for a story-book....These are golden days, the days when we are by ourselves.

On the day they purchased Le Breau in 1907, Matilda wrote: "It will certainly be a lovely place to end one's days in." But in fact it was not. During World War II it was occupied by German officers who stomped about the parquet floors in their jackboots plotting the destruction of the country the Gays so loved. Matilda died, virtually a prisoner in her own house, in 1943.

The chateau was torn down in 1971, although the twin entrance pavilions and stable blocks still stand. Across the road, in the field where the Gays liked to sit among the wheat sheaves at sunset, looking at their chateau bathed in golden light, there now stands an indescribably hideous shopping center.

WILLIAM RIEDER is a curator in the department of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His book A Charmed Couple: The Art and Life of Walter and Matilda Gay has been published recently by Harry N. Abrams.

(1.) July 15.

(2.) Walter Gay: Paintings of French Interiors, ad. A. E. Gallatin (New York, 1920), p. 5. An article about Gay's paintings appeared in Gary A. Reynolds, "The spirit of empty rooms: Walter Gay's paintings of interiors," The Magazine ANTIQUES, March 1990, pp. 676-687.

(3.) This and all other quotes by Matilda Gay are from her unpublished diary in the collection of Arthur T. Garrity Jr. I am grateful to Mr. Garrity for permission to quote from this diary.

(4.) Memoirs of Walter Gay (privately printed, New York, 1930), p.57.

(5.) Mrs. Winthrop R Chanler, Autumn in tire Valley (Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1936), p. 116.

(6.) Margaret Terry Chanler to Matilda Gay, December 21, 1905 (Walter Gay papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., no. 105).

(7.) Undated [1913] (ibid., no. 112).

(8.) May 31, 1914 (ibid., no. 123).

(9.) The Reef (1912; Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1965), p. 337.

(10.) May 31, 1914 (Gay papers, Archives of American Art, no. 123).