since 1999

Eileen Gray was born to an aristocratic family in Enniscorthy, a small market town in south-eastern Ireland, and spent her childhood years there. As a young adult, in order to develop her artistic sensibilities, she entered the Slade School for Fine Arts in London and from there moved to Paris where she would spend most of her working life. Paris at the turn of the century was a creative mecca for visual and performance artists, writers, scientists and philosophers. She was strikingly elegant in appearance with a tall lithe stature and auburn hair. Pictures of her, taken in her late teens and early twenties show her dressed in a Victorian style with thick tresses of dark hair piled on top of her head. In these pictures she seems a timid and slightly sad young woman with a hint of disdain in her expression, which may have been the fashion at the time for young people of her class. Later, in a 1926 photograph by Berenice Abbott she appears as a strong sophisticated woman with a lot of style, a little bit mannish perhaps – a tendency among the bohemian set at that time – but with a lot of womanly beauty. By the time she was photographed by Abbott (according to Gray’s biographer Peter Adams, to be ‘done’ by Abbott who was a student of Man Ray ‘ meant you were rated as somebody’) she had begun to come into the fulness of her creative energy and had created opportunities for herself to explore her talent.