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Reginald Gray had a remarkable and very bohemian career as an artist, mainly in Paris, and his work is still highly regarded today. Yet his upbringing was decidedly middle class, in Blackrock, Co Dublin.
The family home was comfortable; his father had a management job in the Guinness brewery. Reginald himself, born in 1930, started off along the conventional educational route, beginning with a local national school, All Saints, and progressing to the old technical institute in Blackrock.
After a short period at the National College of Art & Design, his career took an unconventional swerve; he remained unfettered for the rest of his life. At the age of 19, he joined a small group of Dublin artists in the Dublin Atelier group and he was much inspired by the work of a then contemporary French painter, Bernard Buffet. He was also taken under the art tuition wing of Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, whose daughter Beatrice married Brendan Behan in 1955.
Studio
When the two got married in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook at the ungodly hour of 7.30am, Gray was the best man. By the time Gray was in his early 20s, he had his own studio on Leeson Street.
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Some of his early artistic forays were into theatrical set design and the first set and costume designs he did were for a UCD production of The King's Threshold by WB Yeats. The lead part in the play was given to a young actor and poet called John Jordan; Gray painted his portrait, which now hangs in the Dublin Writers' Museum. It was his first portrait in the long series of celebrity portraits he did over the years.
Gray moved on to doing set design for the Pike Theatre, including for the highly controversial production in 1957 of The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams. Allegations that a condom had been dropped on the stage led to highly charged reverberations that lasted for years, but shortly after that particular production, Gray had decided he'd had enough of Dublin's small, often closely intertwined artistic set, and left for London.
One of the famed portraits he produced in London, in 1960, was of Francis Bacon, the Dublin-born painter. It now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. But by 1963, Gray was on the move again; he had got married in London in December, 1958, but by 1963, the marriage was failing, so he decided to move to France.
He had planned to settle in Paris, but en route, he stopped off in Rouen, where he spent about a year. The sales of his paintings were not good there, so he became a pavement artist and also got a lot of work as an extra in the mostly operatic productions of the Théâtre des Arts de Rouen. Eventually, he made it to Paris, in 1964, and went to live in l’Académie de Feu, on the rue Delambre in Montparnasse, where he lived for three years, sharing accommodation with about 15 sculpture students. After three years at the academy, Gray moved on, living in various left bank ateliers.
Fashion photography
Then came another big work change, when he became a copy editor at the old International Herald Tribune newspaper. He often sketched portraits of personalities being interviewed, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Brel and Alberto Giacometti.
He switched career again, moving into fashion photography and then became a cameraman, filming some of the Paris fashion collections. In 1975, he also directed the first of his two feature films.
Gray had a decade-long break in his Paris sojourn, when he lived in a château 80km north of Paris, where he brought up his second daughter and his son. But throughout his career, he kept painting portraits, very poetic in style, still highly regarded today.
His subjects included writers such as Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett, Günther Grass, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter and Ted Hughes, other personalities like Garech de Brún and Yves St Laurent, as well as actors such as Juliette Binoche and Helena Bonham Carter. He even produced the unlikely portrait of a French banker. He was always contemporary in his choice of subjects; in 2008, he painted a portrait of Tracey Emin.
He reached the apex of his artistic career in the 1990s and was honoured by Unesco in Paris with a large retrospective exhibition of his work. The quality of Gray’s considerable artistic output continues to be well recognised. He died in 2013, aged 82, survived by his three children and his second partner, Doina, whose portrait he produced in 2004.