4.1 Eileen Gray, 1896, black and white photograph © NMI
4.2 Eileen Gray, late 1910s, early 1920s, black and white photograph © NMI
Gray was also exceedingly interested in the Aesthetic, Decadent and Symbolist movements having a number of key publications in her library. These movements emphasised the use of symbols, sensuality and the correspondence between words, colours and music, which defined Gray’s ideas of synaesthesia. Lacquer was an ideal medium which encompassed all of these movement’s ideas of engaging with the senses, providing the user with a refined sensuous pleasure. It was a craft whereby touch and sight were actively engaged from the beginning of the creative process through to the end result.
4.3 Room installation, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, James McNeill Whistler, 1876-1877, oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, and wood © Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, Gift of Charles Lang Freer
By the 1880s the Anglo-Japanese style had become a major influence in these movements culminating in Whistler’s Peacock Room.1 Gray owned The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 1908.2 In this publication Gray saw images and read the story behind the commission for Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room – Whistler’s masterpiece of interior decorative mural art. He had painted the panelled room in a rich and unified palette of scintillating blue-greens with an over-glazing of metallic gold leaf. Painted in 1876-77 the interior became an example of the Anglo-Japanese style. The mural decoration of this room dominated the architectural interior and its features. Gray’s instinctive reaction against the luxury and exuberance of the room would culminate in her eventual conviction that ‘architecture must be its own decoration’.3 However Whistler’s palette in The Peacock Room would later reappear in Gray’s lacquer work from 1908 onwards, as she strove to faithfully create and perfect the recipe for blue lacquer.
While attending the Slade School in London in 1900 Gray serendipitously encountered the medium of lacquer.4 During her lunch hour Gray saw the Asian lacquer displays at the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum. She also wandered around Soho looking at shops. By chance she passed a furniture restoration shop on Dean Street belonging to Dean Charles.5 Offering her services to become a pupil, she was invited to study the materials of lacquer screens that he had been restoring. Charles was an Asian screen and furniture restorer and he used mostly European varnishes to repair the screens but had some varnish from China. When Gray returned from her art studies in Paris for a two-year spell in 1905 she resumed her education in lacquer from Dean Charles, and they remained friends for many years. She continued to ask his advice about colours and she also ordered supplies from him long after she had established herself as a reputable designer in Paris.6 ‘Lacquer always fascinated me’, Gray claimed many years later.7
It is not clear if Gray purchased the book A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, 1688 by John Stalker and George Parker, prior to her tutelage with Dean Charles or upon his recommendation, however this publication became important in her instruction. She readily stated that she always had an interest in lacquer. This seventeenth-century book became one of the main manuals on lacquer and japanning not only of that period but for generations afterwards.8 This publication had been extremely popular in England during the latter part of the seventeenth century, especially amongst women who were encouraged to learn Japanning as a pastime. The book was intended to assist not only amateur decorators, but also professional cabinetmakers. It contains instructions on the use of colours on Japanning and gilding, and the staining or varnishing of wood. The reader not only became a chemist familiarising themselves with proportions, ingredients, quantities and the reaction of chemical precipitates, but also an alchemist, transforming raw materials into textures, which when applied to an object created a work of art. It was similar to magic, appealing to the senses by touch, sight and smell. Wood stain could also turn vile substances into pure colours, almost like a magical art. For example Brazil wood had to be mixed in stale urine or water impregnated with pearl-ashes to produce a bright red colour. Pale red was obtained by dissolving an ounce of a red gum called dragon’s blood in a pint of spirit of wine and brushing over the wood with tincture, until the stain appears to be as strong as desired. The Treatise advocated the purchase of a wide selection of colours from druggist’s premises, or at that time from colour shops. Gray would eventually import all of her pigments from China. The colours which were popular in the manual included ivory black, lampblack, verdigris, umber, indigo or yellow ochre. The manual advocated the use of only the best varnish which also could be used for varnishing light colours such as white, yellow, green, sky, red, silver or gilded. A black ground was advocated, though grounds could also be, though rarely, white which in the seventeenth century imitated porcelain.
4.4 Lacquer samples, 1910s, wood, pigment, lacquer © NMI
Red lacquer was popular in the seventeenth century and Gray would avidly use it in her screens such as Le Destin (The Destiny) and domestic ware, placing it into a contemporary context. The technique as advocated in the Treatise consisted of applying coats of heavily pigmented coloured varnish that was initially blended with oil resin formulation, also known as spirit varnish, such as turpentine or essential oil, or with dissolved resin, such as seedlac, sandarac, copal, gum elemi, mastic, Venetian turpentine, gamboge or dragon’s blood. Each layer had to be polished and allowed to dry before applying the next coat of varnish. Successive coats had to contain less and less pigment. The last coats required the application of a final white or clear varnish.
The book also provided several sets of prints mainly flora and fauna designs where amateurs could incorporate or copy the patterns or simply cut them out and paste them on the surface of a Japanned object. Advice was given on how to add colour to these cut-out patterns using gold paint. There is one example which serves as the model for painting an exotic bird with a lustrous plumage and the authors instruct the reader on how to make the Japanned pattern shine with various shades of black, silver, gold and brown. To add extra brilliance to compositions, it was recommended to add speckles of gold on the designs, however, the reader was warned to use temperance and measure, to resist the temptation of creating absurd Chinoiserie compositions. Gray added these gold speckles on the bowls and plates of her domestic lacquer ware, albeit it in an extremely abstract and minimalist manner.
For Gray to expand her fine art skills into the medium of lacquer was not unusual. In England since the seventeenth century it was considered a natural progression in the arts. In the realm of female accomplishments painting was one of the master arts, and Japanning manuals such as the Treatise urged for a sound arrangement of designs.9 Lacquer was a sensuous material, engaging the craftsman’s hands, yet it was also an arduous craft. Upon her return to Paris in 1907 she took samples of the work with her and, through Charles’s contacts, was introduced to her lacquer mentor Seizo Sugawara (1884-1937), a young Japanese student in his twenties. Gray plunged into a medium that was unconventional and not widely used at all