NATIONAL MUSEUM EXHIBITION: Irish designer Eileen Gray only found recognition here in her later years - it was the creative freedom on offer in France that shaped her vision, writes Robert O'Byrne.
From late next week in the Collins Barracks premises of the National Museum, it will be possible to see work by two Irish designers who worked contemporaneously but quite differently.
From the late 19th century until his death in 1936, James Hicks was undoubtedly the most popular furniture maker in Ireland, his workshops on Dublin's Lower Pembroke Street constantly trying to catch up with abundant orders and the list of his clientele ranging from members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy to the Irish Free State.
Eileen Gray, on the other hand, although her period of greatest creativity overlapped with that of Hicks, was scarcely known during those years in Ireland, where she had been born and raised. It was only in her very old age that she received any recognition and only now, more than a quarter century after her death, that an exhibition devoted to Gray will open in this country.
Hicks, meanwhile, has never fallen out of public favour. Whenever items of his furniture come up for sale at auction, they fetch exceptionally good prices; at the James Adam salerooms in Dublin late last month, for example, a Hicks-made dining table sold for €25,000.
This may not seem an exceptional sum of money; however James Hicks specialised not in original work but in reproductions. Using fine wood and elaborate techniques, such as marquetry, these pieces invariably demonstrated the highest standards of craftsmanship but they were, nevertheless, skilful copies of designs produced in the last quarter of the 18th century by the likes of Sheraton and Hepplewhite. Hicks furniture, even when first produced, was hopelessly anachronistic and its enduring popularity is a testament to Irish conservatism and a preference for the familiar.
The success of James Hicks ought to be considered, because it provides the explanation for why Eileen Gray not only left her native country to train abroad, but also for why she stayed away and made her home in France where innovation was much more likely to be cherished.
Had she remained in this country, the likelihood is that her career would have been very different and that the furniture and architectural designs for which she has become famous would never have been produced. Ireland in the first half of the 20th century was a place which, in the field of design, the greatest value was placed on tasteful reproductions of Georgiana.
Eileen Gray's early life reads like a story by Somerville and Ross. Someday, there is a book to be written on the role of the Irish Protestant woman in the promotion of modernism, with an opening chapter devoted to the place of a rural upbringing. Gray was born in 1878 and raised near Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, in house called Brownswood. Her father, James Maclaren Smith, was a painter, her mother the scion of aristocracy who in 1893 inherited the title Baroness Gray - hence her youngest daughter's surname.
It was also in the 1890s that the family's old, comfortable Georgian home was revamped into what a local newspaper called "a magnificent specimen of Elizabethan architecture" and what anyone with discernment would now describe as a hideous instance of late-Victorian over-embellishment. Eileen Gray hated what had happened to Brownswood. In its original form, the house was simple, honest, unpretentious and entirely functional: all qualities which would be the hallmarks of her own design work. Once overhauled, however, Brownswood became fussy and replete with unnecessary decoration. It is possible to see E.1027, the house Gray designed in the south of France at Roquebrune, as being her 20th century Mediterranean interpretation of those plain 18th century houses such as Brownswood or indeed Bowenscourt, the now-vanished home of another Irishwoman who for so long remained under-appreciated in her own country.
Like so many well-bred Protestant girls from Sarah Purser onwards, Gray studied art in London and Paris but unlike the majority of them, she chose to remain in the French capital. In 1907, she moved into an apartment on the rue Bonaparte and lived there until her death almost 70 years later.
She was fortunate in having family money that allowed her to take time to work out the course of her career, but while always slow in reaching decisions, Gray was never self-indulgent. In 1906, she apprenticed herself to a young Japanese man called Sugawara who specialised in lacquerwork, an art every bit as complex and specialised as the marquetry produced by James Hicks and his team back in Dublin.
All of Gray's lacquer tools - the fine brushes, powdered pigments, palette knives and incising implements - are now owned by the National Museum, part of her archive purchased by that institution for €1.142 million in June, 2000.
Gray's first pieces of furniture produced in the years leading up to the first World War were lacquerwork panels, one of which is also in the museum's collection. In these years, lacquer began to enjoy a vogue in Paris, and she was commissioned to design some furniture for an apartment belonging to the couturier Jacques Doucet.
Other work followed and by the 1920s, Gray started to act almost as an interior decorator, especially after opening a shop, Jean Désert, which was co-owned with a friend. The business eventually failed, but it further helped to raise her profile in design and architectural circles, and meant that she was invited to participate in Paris exhibitions where she showed everything from chairs to rugs and vases.
There is a photograph of Gray from this period which has come to epitomise her sharp sense of style. Taken by Berenice Abbott in 1926, it shows the Irish designer in profile with sharply bobbed hair and dressed in a chic, mannish fashion with well-tailored wool jacket - the satin piping around its lapel a concession to femininity - and white shirt. She looks the very embodiment of youthful style, but in fact was aged 48 at the time.
After the death of her mother in 1919, Eileen Gray seems never to have visited Ireland again. In any case, by then the circumstances of her life were such that she would scarcely have felt comfortable here. Like many very shy people, she was prone to moments of emotional intensity and among the great passions of her life was a stage performer called Damia, one of a circle of well-connected lesbians in post-war Paris.
But a more significant influence on her work would be the Romanian Jean Badovici, who she met in France around the start of the 1920s. The editor of a magazine called L'Achitecture Vivante and primarily a theorist, his ideas found their expression in Gray's work. The two collaborated on the design of E.1027. That house now tends to be credited almost exclusively to Gray, but it is important to stress the joint nature of the project and the impossibility of distinguishing clearly what was the contribution of each partner.
Finished in 1929, by which time she was 51, the house was built for Badovici and he would spend more time there than did she; in 1932, Gray began to built a property in the south of France for herself alone, a much less celebrated project called Castellar. E.1027 remains the building with which she will forever be most closely associated because she spent years working out every detail of both exterior and interior.
It was for the latter that she produced some of her most important furniture designs such as the E.1027 table in steel and glass and the Transat chair.
Examples of both will feature in the National Museum's new exhibition, the chair being on loan from London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
Gray's reticent nature and her slow working methods meant she completed relatively few schemes, although there are plans for many buildings both private and public. By the time the second World War began, she was 60 and beginning to appear almost misanthropic in her shyness.
Following the war, she and her work were all-but forgotten. Like that photograph by Berenice Abbott, Gray's designs were closely associated with the modernist optimism of the 1920s and so must have looked terribly dated a quarter of a century later.
It was really only during the 1970s, a decade in which the 1920s were once more celebrated, that Eileen Gray's achievements again became admired. Looking through press coverage, is was astonishment that she should still be alive and a rush to quiz her about what now seems a long-vanished world of design when she knew the likes of Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Robert Mallet-Stevens.
In 1975, the year before her death, the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland made Eileen Gray an honorary fellow and in those last years also art critic Dorothy Walker was in correspondence with the designer about the possibility of her carpet designs being woven in this country.
Since her death, the value of Gray's work has risen enormously, in part due to its scarcity; in 1989 a black lacquer screen she made for Badovici sold at auction for $374,000. The price paid by the National Museum for her archive two years ago therefore seems extremely good value, especially since it contains so many of Gray's working drawings, models and sketches, as well as items of furniture, workshop equipment, correspondence and personal possessions.
Still, it has to be asked, if Eileen Gray were starting her career today, would she necessarily want to work in Ireland or would she gravitate abroad? The furniture she produced in the 1920s is today classified as antique and however stylish they may believe themselves to be, owners of reproduction Gray tables and chairs should realise that they are no different to those who collect James Hicks's work.
Their reputation assured, Gray's designs are now part of the canon of 20th century design. But by celebrating her career, do we risk failing to give support to a latter-day equivalent. Someone who, like Eileen Gray, will only receive posthumous acknowledgement in this country?
The Eileen Gray exhibiton opens at the Nation Museum at Collins Barracks, Dublin, from Friday.