The character arc of Eileen Gray

Who was Eileen Gray?

They forgot her for thirty years. Then the students started ringing.

She was born on an estate in County Wexford, the youngest of five. Her father was a Scottish landscape painter who encouraged her drawing and who left Ireland when the marriage ended, when she was eleven. Her mother became a baroness in 1895 and the children took the name Gray. She was mainly taught by governesses, was presented at Buckingham Palace in 1898, and lost her brother and her father in the same year, 1900.

That year she began at the Slade School in London, one of 168 women in a class of 228, and in 1901 met a furniture restorer who introduced her to lacquer. She took lessons in Soho and then built a career in Paris out of a medium almost nobody in Europe had mastered. She showed at the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs in 1919, although her works there were not recorded, and by 1920 Harper Bazaar was writing about her lacquer walls displacing the old gods in Paris and London.

She never trained as an architect. Between roughly 1923 and 1926 she made an apprenticeship for herself: theoretical and technical books, drafting lessons, and arrangements to be taken along to building sites by the architect Adrienne Gorska. She travelled to study buildings and learned by reworking other people designs. She was involved with the architect Jean Badovici, fifteen years younger, who encouraged her and taught her.

In 1926 she began a house near Monaco. A foreigner could not own property outright in France, so she bought the land, put it in Badovici name, and became his architect on paper. It took three years and she stayed on site while he visited. It is called E-1027, a code for their two names, and it is routinely described as a masterpiece. She disagreed publicly with the avant-garde obsession with facades, writing that the interior plan should not be the incidental result of the facade, and should lead to a complete, harmonious and logical life. When it was finished Badovici devoted an issue of his magazine to it and announced himself its joint architect. A curator at the National Museum of Ireland has since found that every surviving plan is in Gray hand alone and that his role was client first and consulting architect second. Of the nine buildings and renovations she produced in those six years, four were credited to him.

Then it got worse. Le Corbusier stayed at the house as Badovici guest and in 1938 and 1939 painted murals on its walls, although Gray had asked that it carry no decoration; critics have since called that everything from vandalism to an improvement, and the argument is still running. During the Second World War she was interned as a foreign national, her houses were looted, many of her drawings, models and architectural notes were destroyed by bombing, and German soldiers used the walls of E-1027 for target practice. She built another house, Tempe a Pailla, above Menton from 1931, with furniture that folded and expanded. Renewed interest began in 1967, when the historian Joseph Rykwert published an essay about her in Domus and students began ringing at her door. In 1972 Yves Saint Laurent bought one of her screens at a Paris auction, the first retrospective of her work was held in London, and Dublin followed, where at ninety five she was given an honorary fellowship by the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland. In 1973 she signed the contract that put her furniture into production, where it remains.

The moments

Eileen Gray's timeline.

Eileen Gray: frequently asked questions

What people ask about her line.

Sources

• Eileen Gray, English Wikipedia biography.
• Jennifer Goff, curator at the National Museum of Ireland, on the authorship of E-1027.
• Joseph Rykwert essay in Domus, 1967.
• Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design, the 1972 London retrospective.
• Rowan Moore in The Observer, 2013, on the murals, quoted and not endorsed.