Eileen Gray: Architect And Furniture Designer Of The Modern Age
One of the few notable female designers of the modern age, Eileen Gray is an Irish architect and furniture designer who pioneered the Modern movement in architecture and furniture design in the early 20th century.
Born on August of 1878 near the Irish town of Enniscorthy in southeast Ireland, Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray was the youngest child in a well-to-do Scottish-Irish family. Gray's father, James Maclaren Gray, was an amateur painter and often took the young Eileen with him across painting tours in Switzerland and Italy. In 1898, when she was eighteen years old, Eileen Gray was enrolled by her father at the Slade School of Fine Art of the University College London, but she later transferred to the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi when her father died on 1900. Gray continued her studies until 1905, and returned to London to take care of her ailing mother. It was during this time that Gray studied the art of lacquerwork from Seizo Sugawara, a lacquerwork restorer working at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Probably the work that Eileen Gray is best remembered for is that of the Rue de Lota apartment in Paris. After returning to Paris in 1917 at the close of World War I, Gray was commissioned by Mathieu Lévy, a wealthy hat maker, to furnish the interior of her apartment. Gray spent the next four years, from 1917 to 1921, on the apartment and furnishing everything from the rugs, wall hangings, to her famous “Block Screen” lacquered wall panels. It was also during her stay at the Rue de Lota apartment that Gray introduced two furniture designs, the Bibendum Chair and the Serpent Chair, which were both meant to complement the interior furnishings of the apartment.
When the work was completed, critics instantly praised Gray's work at Rue de Lota, calling a “triumph of modern living”. This critical success and the generous commission she received from Levy prompted Eileen Gray to set up her own studio in Paris to display her work. Gray continued to make several architectural and furniture designs until her death in 1976, which several of her designs still existing to this day.
