Later Binchy recalled that despite her illustrious career in France, Gray simply refused to tell her about all the great and famous things she had done in her life. She was much more interested in ‘what I (Binchy) thought of County Wexford, and who were the bright young designers in Ireland’.22
Despite her grandfather being Irish, Gray was a young lady from an aristocratic Protestant-background family. Her family belonged to a faith which had always been a minority one in Ireland, and which symbolised wealth and power. Gray benefited from growing up in a politically secure Ireland and in a period of cultural optimism. As was usual as a member of her class Gray’s formal education came from governesses and a period of study at a boarding school abroad, in her case in Dresden. Local newspapers in Wexford reported frequently on the art world in London and Paris, advocating the new improved approaches to art education.23 The fashionable art schools that proliferated during this period in London were widely accepted as suitable finishing schools for young ladies before they married. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, for artists to achieve recognition or status, they had to go abroad to gain experience and education. This was partly due to the social, political and economic situations then prevailing in Ireland. They went to London and mainland Europe, most notably Paris, many returning once they had honed their craft and technique.
Eileen Gray, 1897, black and white photograph © NMI
By the 1890s Gray was a very striking and fashionable young woman.24 As a young lady from an aristocratic Anglo-Irish Protestant background she was seemingly destined for marriage to an eligible bachelor. During her lifetime there was no shortage of suitors, many of them quite famous.25 Gray’s intentions for art school were delayed after the loss of her father and later her brother Lonsdale in the Boer War in 1900.26 After a brief diversion with her mother to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, Gray enrolled in the Slade School in London in 1900 and remained registered as a student studying fine art until 1902. English schools were full of young ladies from the upper and middle classes. The choice of school was important, and social propriety was paramount. Gray’s choice was quite unconventional as the Slade was considered ‘advanced’.27 From its creation in 1871, the school had admitted women. Initially, women were only permitted to work from the draped model and the antique. By the 1870s rules were relaxed to the extent that students could have access to the partially draped living model. By 1901, the practice of separating the sexes was no longer enforced, except in life drawing classes. Models and students were strictly forbidden to converse, and communication was restricted to short words of command.
1.16 Slade School, Class of 1905 © Slade School of Fine Art
One of Gray’s contemporaries Randolph Schwabe (1885-1948) who attended fine art classes at the Slade the same years as Gray did observe that the teaching of female students had progressed from the days when the Slade Professor of Fine Art could not be seen with students in the women’s Life Room while a nude female was posing. Women students had to file out when he came in, and he then could enter, write his criticisms, in their absence, around the margins of their drawings.28 Gray was one of 168 women students in a class of 228.29 Classes varied from antique drawing to life classes. Attendance at these classes was granted to the more proficient artists. However, while women from the working or artisan classes were accepted into schools for the applied arts, the study of fine art was yet to be recognised as a suitable profession for them. Fine Art was regarded as the preserve of the middle and upper class that were looking for a suitable pastime. Upper middle class women who showed talent in fine art in the state-sponsored system were steered away from pursuing art as a profession, as public education was regarded as charity for the poor. During its early years the Slade School, with over half of the student body being taken up by women, had been at the centre of the debate in relation to the rights of professional female artists and in the rights of education for women.30
The ‘Sladers’ had a somewhat flamboyant, bohemian character with a disregard for reputation. Slade women were described as ‘new women’. However, Eileen Gray remained unimpressed with the academic approach of the teachers. Her professors were renowned painters of the period, Wilson Steer (1860-1942), Henry Tonks (1862-1831) and Frederick Brown (1851-1941). Steer had been influenced by the Impressionists, especially Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Edgar Degas (1834-1917), during his Paris sojourn in 1882, and he had attended the Académie Julian, Paris, in 1882. Yet he insisted on structural drawing and emphasis on the old masters. Brown and Tonks were influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and the writings of Ruskin. Brown avidly advocated the return to the practice and draughtsmanship among the old masters including Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Brown destroyed many paintings that did not satisfy him – Gray later would continue his practice, destroying almost all of her early student works. Students did charcoal diagrams and sketches continuously on drawing paper. Brown emphasised drawing more so than painting enforcing his motto ‘action, construction, proportion’. Gray worked mostly in charcoal or sanguine in his classes. Brown was renowned for recognising talent and promise with female students, having himself become an admirer of and patron of the work of Ethel Walker (1861-1951). Tonks emphasised faithful reproduction to scale in drawing and sketching. He set high standards for his pupils continuing a Slade tradition of pre-eminence in drawing. He was described as ‘dour and irascible ... an unfortunate development that cut him off from the more gifted of his pupils’. He also berated students and was noted for his sarcasm. However, it was recorded that in one of Gray’s classes ‘a certain woman student used, when she considered herself unjustly bullied, to reason gravely and firmly with him, and this from her, he tolerated’.31 Tonks’s paintings were noted for their dryness of technique, known as ‘Tonking’. It consisted of soaking up the absorbent material with excess material. This technique Gray used later in many of her collages. Steer’s area of expertise was painting – especially watercolour. But Steer was criticised for not taking a lively interest in his teaching, so if a student persisted in questioning him, his acute judgement and great knowledge would be brought to bear.32
Gray’s frustration with the Slade School may have stemmed from the fact that students seldom spent more than a day on one drawing, where hours were spent in the crowded Antique Room until four o’clock. Then from four until five o’clock students drew short poses in the Life Room.33 There were also stories of students never moving from the Antique Room to the Life Room, drawing with unabated zeal for three or four years.34 Her dissatisfaction with the Slade School was apparent from her lack of attendance. She recorded that she first met Dean Charles in 1901, in Dean Street, Soho in London. Charles was a furniture restorer and was the first to introduce Gray to lacquering techniques.35 Whilst at the Slade Gray solicited lessons from the firm in traditional Asian lacquer techniques, making numerous notes. She remained friends with Charles for years afterwards.36 Dean Charles used mostly coloured European