ArtistIrish
Eileen Gray
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Born Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1878, Gray came of age at a moment when women were only beginning to edge their way into the arts. She enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1898, one of the first women admitted, studying painting before discovering lacquer at a nearby workshop. That discovery redirected everything. In 1906 she moved to Paris, where she spent years studying under the Japanese lacquer master Seizo Sugawara, mastering a technique that demanded patience measured in months and years rather than days.
By the 1910s and early 1920s, Gray had built a reputation in Parisian artistic circles for furniture and lacquer screens of striking originality. In 1922 she opened Jean Desert, her own gallery on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, an audacious step for a woman at the time. The pieces she sold there, lacquered panels, rugs designed in bold geometric compositions, chairs with biomorphic curves, attracted clients including Jacques Doucet. Yet even as her reputation grew, she was already looking past decorative objects toward architecture.
With no formal training, Gray constructed her architectural education from scratch in the early 1920s: she read technical manuals, took drafting lessons, and arranged to visit building sites through architect Adrienne Gorska. Working alongside Jean Badovici, French-Romanian architect and editor of L'Architecture Vivante, she designed and built Villa E-1027 on the Mediterranean coast at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin between 1926 and 1929. The name encoded both their identities: E for Eileen, 10 for J (Jean), 2 for B (Badovici), 7 for G (Gray). The house contained roughly 300 bespoke fittings and pieces of furniture, each responding to a specific human need, screens that moved, tables whose height could be adjusted, storage calibrated to the rhythms of daily life. Where much Modernist architecture treated the body as an abstraction, E-1027 treated it as something particular and changeable.
Among the furniture Gray designed for E-1027, the adjustable side table, a tubular steel frame supporting a glass top that could pivot over a bed or chair, became one of the defining objects of twentieth-century design. The Bibendum chair, with its stacked cylindrical cushions, and the Transat chair, its slung canvas recalling a deck chair but reframed in lacquered wood and chrome, similarly fused formal intelligence with physical generosity. A second house, Tempe a Pailla near Menton, followed in the 1930s, and she continued designing and drawing into old age, though recognition largely eluded her until the final decade of her life.
The reassessment of Gray's work began in 1967 when historian Joseph Rykwert published an essay on her career. The first retrospective, Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design, opened in London in 1972. She died in Paris in 1976 at the age of 98. Her work now sits in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the National Museum of Ireland, which holds the most extensive holdings of her archive. On the auction market, a 1917-1919 lacquered Dragons armchair sold at Christie's in 2009 for approximately 21.9 million euros, then a world record for a piece of twentieth-century furniture.
At Nordic auction houses, Gray's work appears primarily as furniture, tables above all, including the E 1027 side table that has appeared at both Bukowskis Helsinki and Stockholms Auktionsverk Dusseldorf. Quittenbaum in Munich has been the most active venue for her work in this region, with four lots recorded. The Cabinet d'Architecte, a storage piece dating to around 1925, has reached 17,000 EUR at auction here. These results reflect steady collector interest in verified Gray pieces, which remain rare outside major international sales.