Even though she may not be as popular as Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, no one could ever misbelieve that Eileen Gray is one of the greatest furniture artists of the modern period. Regarded as a chief founder of the Modern design movement, Gray’s works for furniture broke the standards of customary furniture design and gave chances or other designers to follow.

Born on August 1878 next to the town of Enniscorthy, Ireland, Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray was the youngest child of the well-to-do Scottish-Irish Gray family. Her father, James Maclaren Gray, observed young Eileen’s attraction for the arts and often grabbed her along painting tours in Italy and Switzerland. By the moment she was eighteen years old Gray was educated at the Slad School of Fine Art at the University College London but then shifted to the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi in Paris when her father passed on in 1900. Eileen Gray went back to London in 1905, and it was there that she found out lacquerwork at Seizo Sugawara, a Japanese lacquer restorer working in Paris.

Eileen Graycompleted several architectural and furniture creations in her career, but most likely the one she is best considered for would be that of the Rue de Lota apartment. In 1917, Gray was authorized by Mathieu Lévy, a boutique possessor who sold elegant hats, to rredecorate the interior of her apartment in the Rue de Lota suburb in Paris. It was during this moment that Gray made some of her seminal works, including the Block Screen lacquered wall piece, the Pirogue Sofa, the Bibendum Chair, and the Serpent Chair. By the time the work in was finished in 1921 reviewers immediately honored Gray’s work, proclaiming her designs a “triumph of modern living”. Uplifted by the critical and financial victory of her Rue de Lota project, Gray constructed her individual shop in Paris, named the Jean Desert, where she could present her [creations|styles}.

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