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| - Eileen Gray CBE, (25 April 1920 – 20 May 2015) was an international bicycle racer who founded the Women's Cycle Racing Association, and was president of the British Cycling Federation. She was also mayor of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames and Olympic torchbearer for the 2012 London Olympics. More information on the Wikipedia page [1].
- Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray (9 August 1878 – 31 October 1976) was an Irish furniture designer and architect and a pioneer of the Modern Movement in architecture.
- Eileen Gray was born on 9 August 1878, into an aristocratic family near Enniscorthy, a small market town in south-eastern Ireland. Gray was the youngest of five children and the family was wealthy, owning several homes. Her parents, Eveleen Pounden Gray and James Maclaren Gray were of Scottish/Irish descent. Gray’s father, James, was a keen amateur painter and encouraged his daughter to paint too. He took his daughter on painting tours of Italy and Switzerland which was where some of her approach to design evolved. Gray spent most of her childhood living in family homes, either in Ireland or South Kensington in London.
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| - Eileen Gray CBE, (25 April 1920 – 20 May 2015) was an international bicycle racer who founded the Women's Cycle Racing Association, and was president of the British Cycling Federation. She was also mayor of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames and Olympic torchbearer for the 2012 London Olympics. More information on the Wikipedia page [1].
- Eileen Gray was born on 9 August 1878, into an aristocratic family near Enniscorthy, a small market town in south-eastern Ireland. Gray was the youngest of five children and the family was wealthy, owning several homes. Her parents, Eveleen Pounden Gray and James Maclaren Gray were of Scottish/Irish descent. Gray’s father, James, was a keen amateur painter and encouraged his daughter to paint too. He took his daughter on painting tours of Italy and Switzerland which was where some of her approach to design evolved. Gray spent most of her childhood living in family homes, either in Ireland or South Kensington in London. Courtesy of her father, in 1898 at the age of twenty, Gray attended classes at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she studied painting. She was one of the first women to study there. Whilst enrolling, she made acquaintances with Jessie Gavin and Kathleen Bruce. In 1900 (the year of her father’s death), Eileen Gray and her mother went to Paris to experience the Exposition Universelle; this was Eileen’s first visit to Paris. The Exposition Universelle was a world’s fair that celebrated the achievements of the past century and hoped to encourage the new work in the next. The main style there was Art Nouveau. Gray was a fan of the work that Charles Rennie Mackintosh had exhibited there. Soon after, Gray moved to Paris alongside her friends from the Slade School; Gavin and Bruce. Eileen Gray continued her studies at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi. For some four of five years after the move, Gray moved back and forth from Paris to Ireland to London, and then in 1905, she settled back in London as her mother took ill. Eileen Gray made use of her time in London and rejoined the Slade, but found that her drawing and painting courses were becoming less satisfying. Gray came across a lacquer repair shop in Soho where she asked the shop owner whether he could show her the fundamentals of lacquer work as it had taken her fancy. The owner had many contacts from the lacquer industry and when Gray moved back to France in 1906, to the relatively large apartment in Paris where she remained for most of her working life, she met one of them; Seizo Sugawara (or Sugawara-san). He came from an area of Japan that was known for its decorative lacquer work. She found after working with Seizo for four years that she had developed the lacquer disease on her hands, however she persisted in her work and it was not until she was thirty-five that she exhibited her work. When she did, however, it was a moderate success. In 1914, when World War I broke out, Eileen and Seizo Sugawara moved to London together where their lacquering was not successful and they relied on her family’s financial support. As the end of the war neared, they returned to Paris and Gray was given the job of decorating an apartment on rue de Lota. She designed rugs and lamps for the house and furnished it with lacquered panels and her self-designed furniture. It was reviewed by several art critics and most thought it was innovative and described it as de luxe modern living. Given a boost from the success of the apartment on rue de Lota, Gray opened up a small gallery in Paris solely for exhibiting and selling her work. As she was too timid to be there herself, she made sure every aspect of the place looked as good as it could be, so there would be some presence of her there anyway. In 1923, she designed the Bedroom-Boudoir for the Monte-Carlo, at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, a design show, but the reviews were terrible. However, she contributed to the design of the Salon d'Automne and that was praised by Le Corbusier and by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens. Around this time, she focused on architecture and furniture design. She designed many houses and buildings that looked abstract and then she often designed the furniture for the interior. An architecture critic said “Eileen Gray occupies the centre of the modern movement”; she was slowly starting to become recognised as an established designer and architect. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Gray was involved with the Union des Artistes Modernes which had well-known members. However, Gray was becoming more and more solitary and was involved in little social activity. She designed and furnished herself a new home, Tempe à Pailla, after four years of architectural study and remained there for most of her time and continued her work with keen interest. In 1937, she agreed to assist Le Corbusier in his pavilion at the Paris Exposition, where Gray exhibited her design for a holiday centre. As World War II broke out, Gray remained at her own home for the first year of the war until she was forced to evacuate. She moved inland and after the war discovered that her flat in Saint-Tropez, where she kept all her prized possessions, had been blown up and that Tempe à Pailla had been looted. After the War, Gray returned to Paris and led a very reclusive life and seldom made contact with anybody except her small group of close women friends, whom she knew from before the war. Now and then, she would begin work on a new project, but nothing major. She was almost forgotten by the design industry. When she was around seventy, she started to lose her sight and hearing, yet when she was eighty, she transformed an old hay-barn into a summer home; she soon moved there and continued to work. Shortly before her death, Gray’s work was shown in an exhibition in London and her work was remembered fondly by the public. At the age of ninety-eight, Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray died in her apartment on rue Bonaparte in Paris. Throughout her career she had been independent and did not often work alongside others. She was quite unusual in her life as there were very few female designers around. It was not until after her death that her work was truly appreciated.
- Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray (9 August 1878 – 31 October 1976) was an Irish furniture designer and architect and a pioneer of the Modern Movement in architecture.
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