American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Papageorge Family Collection

Note

Around 1895, Walter Gay grew tired of the large figure and genre paintings he was known for, and instead started to focus on smaller interior scenes such as the present work. This departure meant a resurged inspiration, and the exploration of a more personal theme, which Gay explored first and foremost for himself, rather than trying to please his public. Gay first started to paint pictures of his own salon, dining room and library at the Château de Fortoiseau, about 35 miles southeast of Paris, near Melun. As his wife's friend, Daisy Chanler, explained: "He knew how to give a room an intimate sense of life, to make you feel that charming people had just left it, and that rooms and furniture had belonged to other charming people long ago." That is what makes Gay's present picture so special. Far from a very cold, and architectural rendering of an interior, the oil captures the feeling of the room and its particular light, warmth, and possible smell. In many ways, it stands as a portrait of an interior, rather than a mere rendering of its contents. Gay's wife accurately described such oils as "poèmes d'intérieur." Here, everything is quiet, the fire gently crackles, about to die out. No human figure is in sight, yet we get a feeling of the owners' presence, their personality, based on the style of the interior, and the objects on display. Such props also speak to Gay's own personal tastes. As did many gentlemen of his time, Gay indeed liked 18th-century woodwork, furnishings, and fine and decorative arts. As he explained himself: "I had a sentiment for the past: it meant much to me." On display here, a magnificent Louis XV chimney, on the mantlepiece of which sits an exquisite Sèvres biscuit featuring the pastoral love of a shepherdess and her beau, modeled after François Boucher. On each side of the fireplace, by the pair of asymmetrical Caffieri-like chandeliers, hang two Aubusson tapestries. While the left one depicts the common theme of a fiddler playing for his dog, its companion piece features a group of elegant figures resting in the forest, most likely a halt after the hunt. Below them, two identical banquettes complete the so-distinctive Rococo interior and convey a sense of domestic intimacy which one feels honored to enter.

Judging from the Sèvres biscuit, also seen in La Console, now at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the present interior might very well be that of Walter and Mathilda Gay rue Ampère, where the couple rented a little hôtel particulier in which they lived for twenty years before renting, and eventually buying, the famous Château de Bréau.