This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Rebecca Minch. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 9 August 1878, Ireland
Died: 31 October 1976
Country most active: United Kingdom, France
Also known as: Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith
Gray, Eileen (1878–1976), furniture designer and architect, was born 9 August 1878 at the family home, Brownswood House near Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, youngest child and third daughter of James McLaren Smith , son of Richard Smith of Hazelgreen and his wife Eveleen, only child of Capt. Jeremiah Lonsdale Pounden of Brownswood and Lady Jane Stewart, daughter of the 10th earl of Moray. During her childhood the family divided their time between Ireland and their house in South Kensington, London. On occasion she accompanied her father, an amateur painter, on his travels in Europe. While she was still a young child her parents separated and her father settled in Italy. In 1893 her mother inherited the title of Baroness Gray. Subsequently, her father changed his name by royal licence to Smith-Gray and their children took the name of Gray.
In 1901 she enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, where she studied under Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer. The following year she moved to Paris, where she continued her studies at the École Colarossi and the Académie Julian. Her circle included the artists Gerald Kelly, later president of the Royal Academy, and Wyndham Lewis. In 1904, while recovering from typhoid fever at Hyères in Provence, she developed her lifelong love of the south of France, where she later realised a number of architectural projects. By this time she had also travelled in Tunisia and Spain. She returned to London in 1905. It was at this time that her interest turned to the decorative arts as she began to study the technique of lacquer, to which she devoted herself on returning to Paris the following year. There she worked with the Japanese craftsman Sugawara and so began a long collaboration as Gray established herself as a designer of lacquered furniture. She is acknowledged as the greatest western exponent of lacquer. One of her masterpieces in the technique, a four-panel screen entitled ‘Le destin’ (1914), was purchased by her first important patron, the leading couturier and collector Jacques Doucet. In 1913 she exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs.
In 1915 Gray left Paris for London, where she lived for the next two years. She received her first commission to design an interior, that of the apartment of Mme Mathieu-Levy on the rue de Lota, in 1919. With this project she began to develop what was to become a key aspect of her approach to design, the aim to create a total environment. This would ultimately lead her towards architecture, allowing her to conceive her designs for furniture as an integral part of a building. In 1922 she opened the Galerie Jean Desert on the rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris, as a retail outlet for her furniture. Though never financially successful, it attracted a notable clientele, particularly for carpets and rugs with abstract designs by Gray. It was around this time that her work attracted the attention of leading figures within the Dutch avant-garde such as the architect J. J. P. Oud. The ideas of the Dutch De Stijl movement were to exert an important influence on her. In 1924 a special issue of the Dutch journal Wendingen was devoted to her work.
In the mid 1920s Gray turned to architecture, working with the Romanian architect and critic Jean Badovici in the beginning of a long association. He was closely involved in the design and building of her first house, ‘E1027’ at Roquebrune near Monte Carlo (1926–9). It was for this house that she designed one of her best-known chairs, the ‘Transat’. In 1930 she showed the plans for this house at the first exhibition of the Union des Artistes Modernes in Paris. Between 1932 and 1934 she designed her own house, which she called ‘Tempe a Pailla’, at Castellar in Provence. With these projects she moved away from the luxury of her earlier furniture design to embrace the functionalist aesthetic central to the work of architects such as Le Corbusier, whose work proved to be a key influence for Gray. However, she fundamentally disagreed with his view that a house should be designed as a ‘machine for living’. Her architectural designs are characterised by a detailed attention to human needs and she took particular satisfaction in finding ingenious solutions to problems such as the arrangement of space, storage, and lighting. She was invited by Le Corbusier to contribute to his ‘Pavillon des Temps Nouveau’ at the Paris Exposition Internationale in 1937, where she showed a model for a communal holiday centre. This ambitious project, one of many from the later part of her career that were never realised, typified her growing belief in the importance of the social aspects of architecture. The following year Le Corbusier began a series of murals in ‘E1027’, then owned by Badovici, to which Gray was utterly opposed, seeing them as a complete violation of the design concept.
At the outbreak of war in 1939 Gray was living in her house at Castellar. In 1941 she was forced as a resident alien to move inland. She lived first at Lourmarin and later at Cavaillon in the Vaucluse region. With the bombing of the port of Saint-Tropez in 1944 she lost a considerable number of plans and items of furniture, which she had stored in a flat she kept there. This loss was compounded by the discovery on her return to Castellar that ‘Tempe a Pailla’ had been looted and badly damaged. She returned to Paris, where she began work on her last large-scale architectural project, a cultural centre, which was never built, as well as designing a stage set for a production of a play, ‘The Irish epic’, to be performed at the centre. She was also concerned at this period with the question of postwar reconstruction.
From this time she became increasingly reclusive as her sight and hearing deteriorated, though she continued to work rigorously. Between 1954 and 1958 she built another house for herself near Saint-Tropez, which she named ‘Lou Perou’. Throughout her career her innate shyness had always inhibited her socially and professionally. This, and her deep dislike of self-promotion, contributed to her fading from public view over the next three decades. In 1972, with the sale of the Doucet collection where her lacquer screen ‘Le destin’ set a record price for twentieth-century furniture, and an exhibition of her work at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, her work began to attract unprecedented interest. In the same year she was awarded the distinction of ‘Royal designer for industry’ in Britain. She was elected an honorary fellow by the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland in 1973. She died unmarried in Paris on 31 October 1976. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was held in 1979 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 1980 the sale of her collection of furniture was held by Sotheby’s in Monte Carlo. The National Museum of Ireland acquired her collection of furniture, models, and personal effects from her Paris apartment in 2000.