September 24, 2020 49

teenth Baroness Gray after the death of
an uncle whose ancient Scottish peer-
age could pass to female descendants,
unlike the English men- only practice.
Thereupon the Smiths assumed a new
surname, and the youngest daughter
was restyled the Honorable Kathleen
Eileen Gray, though she never used
her first name or courtesy title. The
new Baroness Gray’s social elevation
prompted a thoroughgoing remodeling
of Brownswood House from a gracious
but unpretentious Georgian country
seat to a pompous Elizabethan Revival
pastiche, which the aesthetically sensi-
tive Eileen lamented for the rest of her
life.
The family divided its time between
Brownswood and its London mansion
at No. 14 The Boltons, a fashionable
garden square near the South Kensing-
ton Museum (later renamed the Victo-
ria and Albert). The museum’s peerless
collection of decorative art was a lode-
star for Gray, especially its exquisite
examples of Chinese and Japanese
lacquer. The material so enthralled her
that she persuaded the proprietor of a
Soho furniture repair shop to teach her
the rudiments of lacquer making, and
she later undertook an arduous appren-
ticeship with the expatriate Japanese
lacquer master Seizo Sugawara, which
extended into a fruitful twenty- year
collaboration.
In 1898 she was presented as a debu-
tante at Buckingham Palace, a coveted
royal ritual that marked an upper- class
girl’s formal entry into London society
and the marriage market. Gray, de-
scribed by one female friend as “fair,
with wide- set, pale blue eyes, tall and
of grand proportion, well- born and

quaintly and beautifully dressed... the

most romantic figure I had ever seen,”

had many suitors, and one male ad-

mirer described her shoulders as “the

most perfect I ever saw.”

Yet she was also shy, stubbornly inde-

pendent, skeptical of accepted opinion,

and rather than feeling any urgency to

find a suitable husband was more avid

to learn the techniques of art. London’s

Slade School of Fine Art, the best in

Britain at the time, was deemed a suit-

able finishing academy for young ladies

of her caste, and she enrolled there in

1900. After two years Gray moved to
      Paris to continue her art studies. She
      liked the city so much that in 1907 she
      bought an apartment in an eighteenth-
      century Left Bank hôtel particulier on
      the rue Bonaparte that remained her
      home until her death seven decades
      later.
      She soon fell in with two distinct co-
      teries of young avant- gardists: the Irish
      expatriate community of experimental-
      minded artists and writers who found
      the French capital a more congenial
      creative climate than that of their con-
      servative homeland (Joyce arrived in
      1920), and a multinational circle of les-
      bians who gravitated to Paris because
      of its sophisticated tolerance, the most
      famous couple among them being the
      San Francisco Bay Area natives Ger-
      trude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Gray’s
      romantic life has been the source of
      considerable speculation, but even
      though she always conducted herself
      with an aristocrat’s disregard for the
      opinions of others, she was extremely
      discreet, and thus little is known about
      her erotic affairs.
      In those youthful days she enjoyed

going out with a female friend who

dressed in male drag with a fake mous-

tache and promised, “I can take you

to places where you can’t go without

a man.” But Gray was also courted by

numerous men, including the English

occultist and writer Aleister Crowley,

who dedicated his 1904 poem “Eileen”

(“the eyes/Of melancholy wind; The

voice serene/Of the love- moved wind”)

to her.

One of Gray’s most serious same-

sex relationships was with a theatrical

manager known professionally as Gab

Sorère, the lover of Loïe Fuller, the

American- born modern dancer whose

celebrated Serpentine Dance—a cho-

reographic tornado of billowing silk—

inspired fin- de- siècle artists as varied

as Toulouse- Lautrec, Rodin, and the

Lumière brothers. According to Cloé

Pitiot in the Bard catalog, Sorère, who

dressed like a man, was enlisted by

Gray to run Galerie Jean Désert, the

Right Bank retail shop that she opened

in 1922 to sell her furniture and rugs

but closed in 1930 during the Great

Depression. However, the architectural

historian Tim Benton has disputed

Sorère’s involvement in the business

based on his archival research, another

example of dissent among even the

most knowledgeable Gray experts.

After Fuller’s death in 1928, Sorère

took up with Gray’s female roman-

tic partner of several years, the chan-

teuse réaliste Marie- Louise Damien,

called Damia, whose doleful persona

was copied by the younger, better-

remembered Édith Piaf. (Damia’s pet

name for Gray was Panachot, after

the male title character in Panachot

Gendarme, a popular military vaude-

ville.) Who knows what this bisexual

version of La Ronde actually entailed

and in what sequence Gray’s possible

coupling, uncoupling, and recoupling

with Sorère, Damia, and Badovici oc-

curred? As Pitiot writes about part of

that complex equation:

We leave it up to other writers to

determine if Gray and Badovici

were lovers. The conjoining of

their names [in E.1027] suggests a

close connection, but the level of

intimacy is unknown and its actual

direct relevance to the architec-

ture questionable.

4.

A perceptive and wholly plausible

reading of the protagonist’s conflicting

emotions is to be found in an extraor-

dinary graphic novel, Eileen Gray: A

House Under the Sun, written with sen-

sitivity and tact by the French architect

Charlotte Malterre- Barthes and illus-

trated with complementary wistfulness

by the Polish graphic artist Zosia

Dzier ŧawska. It rings true not only in

its factual aspects, but especially in its

poignant acknowledgment of Gray’s

essentially divided nature. The book

skillfully intercuts flashbacks that jux-

tapose aspects of Gray’s inner life in

illuminating ways. For example, her

neglectful Irish upbringing is depicted

not as the prelapsarian paradise the ar-

chitect recalled, but more like one of

the Gothic ordeals in Edward Gorey’s

Gashlycrumb Tinies. Her immersion in

the giddy lesbian demimonde of 1920s

Paris is no less vividly portrayed, as in

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