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Reginald Gray is a portrait artist born in Dublin in 1930. He studied The National College of Art (1953) and then moved to London, becoming part of the School of London led by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. In 1960, he painted a portrait of Bacon which now hangs in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery (London). and has since painted portraits from life of writers, musicians and artists such as Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Derry O'Sullivan, Alfred Schnittke, Ted Hughes, and Yves Saint Laurent. In 1993 Gray had a retrospective exhibition at UNESCO Paris and in 2006, his portrait "The White Blouse" won The Sandro Botticelli Prize in Florence, Italy.

Dublin
After normal schooling at All Saints, Blackrock and The Blackrock Technical Institute, Gray studied at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin. After a short period he left to study under Cecil ffrench Salkeld ARHA. At the age of nineteen Gray joined The Dublin Atelier a small group of painters who exhibited at The Dublin Painters Gallery. Gray says that at this period "I was struck by the earlier works of the French painter Bernard Buffet who had won the Prix de la critique, in Paris in 1948 when he was just twenty years of age".


 * "This was Buffet's earlier period, between 1947 and 1957 when I believe he produced his best work and was the first post war artist to put existentialism down on to canvas. However the promise of the ten years referred to failed to arrive as his work seemed to fade into some commercial stream of over production. It was as if he had made some Faustian contract to be become rich, which he did, but the earlier poetry in his work simply vanished.  The first work I saw after this that had that same great impact on me and reminds me of the expression that "less is more" was a medium sized work by the Irish artist Patrick Swift hung if my memory is correct in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in Dublin. The work was titled "Boy with Pear"  I stood before this work for many hours feeling the intense mystery of the work and that the atmosphere around the subject was unpolluted like a Vermeer but with much greater force."

Gray had a studio on Leeson St in the early 1950s. There Gray made a wash drawing the artist Patrick Swift which he used as a base for a large canvas hommage to the painter some years later. Gray's first paid work was a commission by University College Dublin to design the setting and costumes for their production of "The King's Threshold" by W. B. Yeats. The lead in the play was given to the young actor/poet John Jordan. During the preparations and rehearsals Gray painted a portrait of Jordan which now hangs in the collection of The Dublin Writers Museum. At this point the artist Cecil ffrench Salkeld ARHA (Associate of The Royal Hibernian Academy) took Gray under his wing and gave him a room in his Dublin home where Gray studied old master techniques. Considered one of Ireland's leading intellectuals, Salkeld was was visited by writers, painters and musicians, such as Brian O'Nolan, Arland Ussher, Francis Stuart, Marten Cumberland, Kate O'Brian and John Beckett, cousin of Samuel. Gray painted John Beckett during this period and the portrait now hangs in St. Columba's College, Dublin, where Beckett had his first music lessons. Gray became a close friend of Brendan Behan and was asked to be best man at Behan's wedding. Gray designed many settings for The Pike Theatre including the production of The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams. After the success in Dublin, the play was transferred to The Grand Opera House, Belfast and Gray went travelled there to redesign and create the much larger settings need for the bigger stage. Look Back in Anger by John Osborne was at the same time running at the Opera House and Gray befriended and sketched the leading actress Jocelyn Britton. Later he designed the sets for Nekrassov by Jean Paul Sartre which was mounted at The Gate Theatre. Gray later went on a tour of Ireland with The Dublin Repertory Theatre Company designing their productions, the most important being The Wood of the Whispering by M. J. Molloy.

London
Gray moved to London in 1957 and lived near the Portobello market, sharing a flat with three Irish actors Donal Donnelly, Brian Phelan and Charles Roberts. Needing more solitude to paint, Grey moved to Bayswater. He got a job in the display department at Whiteleys department store designing and dressing their windows but still painting. In the same year he made a gouache drawing of Barkers Store on Kensington High Street showing the workmen refreshing the facade of the store. This work is now in the collection of The Museum of London.

He met Catherine Hall in November 1958 and they were married a month later in Caxton Hall, London. In 1960, Eric Holder owner and director of the Abbott and Holder Gallery invited Gray to hold a one man exhibition. This exhibition received favourable reviews especially from The Arts Review, London. The English film actor Patrick Waddington bought a number of Gray's works and arranged an exhibition for Gray and Aubrey Williams, the painter from Guyana at The Caravan Gallery, New York. Another exhibition for Gray at Abbott and Holder was programmed for the following year which had a further good reception. Alan Simpson, the Pike Theatre director, came to this exhibition and suggested that Gray should paint a portrait of Samuel Beckett. Simpson, being a good friend of Beckett, telephoned the writer at his Paris home "and the deal was done". Gray flew to Paris and worked on the portrait which was then exhibited at The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin and is now in a private Dublin collection. In the same year Gray met Francis Bacon in a Bayswater pub. Bacon was curious to see Gray's studio and while they were there Gray made a drawing of Bacon which he later turned into an egg tempera on wood portrait. The portrait was bought by the collector Aubrey Beese, who donated it to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1975, where it remains today. By 1963 Gray's marriage was not working, and he moved to Paris.

Rouen
Gray travelled from London by train and boat, aiming for Paris but when the train was nearing Rouen he saw from the carriage window the Gothic spires of Rouen Cathedral and alighted to pass a few hours in the city. On walking around he came across Le Cour d'Albane, a small art gallery near the Cathedral. The director of the gallery Andre Goupil suggested that Gray should hold an exhibition and bring works over from London. Gray agreed to this proposition and a month later had first French exhibition. In spite of good reviews, sales were not as good as they had been in London. He found a cheap room without heat or running water on the Rue des Fosses Louis V111 and passed a severe winter there. He became a pavement artist, copying Raphael, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and other Florentine masters on the ground. A year later conditions improved when he got long periods of work as an extra in the Théâtre des Arts de Rouen, mostly in Opera. In spite of the rough life Gray exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Normands at The Musée des Beaux-Arts for three successive years before he eventually moved on to Paris.

Paris and Ravenel
Having felt that " he had exhausted Rouen and that Rouen had exhausted him", Gray arrived in Paris with little money, in mid 1964. In this year his eldest daughter Eleonore was born. Gray came to live at l'Academie de Feu on the rue Delambre, run by the Hungarian sculptor, Laszlo Szabo. About 15 young sculpture students lived and worked there under the supervision of the master. The sculptor with the aid of six of his students built Gray a small room in the studio from wood, plaster and resin with running water and electricity. In the second year that Gray lived at the Academy, Szabo mounted a large exhibition of Sculpture and Painting entitled "Le Monde apres les Buildings", buildings referring to the modern high rise blocks that Szabo hated. The English sculptor Henry Moore and the Italian Marini exhibited also at the exhibition. During this period Gray exhibited at the Daniel Casanova Gallery at the Palais Royale. After three years at the Academy Gray moved from time to time to small ateliers on the left bank such as Rue Descartes and Rue des Saints Peres Gray worked as a copy editor at the Paris edition of The New York Times and later drew portraits of people being interviewed by the paper's writers. The subjects included philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, singer Jacques Brel, and sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Grey went on to work at Fairchild Publications. He worked as a fashion photographer for over five years, covering collections in Paris, Milan, Rome and London. He also worked as cameraman filming the fashion collections for German Vogue and Swedish Television. Gray directed his first full length feature in French titled "Jeu" (Game), starring Laurent Terzieff, Dirk Kinnane, Pascale de Boysson and Bibi Hure. Gray then lived in the Chateau de Ravenel, 50 miles north of Paris and raised his second daughter Deirdre and son Terence there during a stay that lasted ten years.

From 1993, Gray taught painting at The Irish College in Paris. In 1996, Gray directed and designed the setting for Letters from Ireland by Belgian playwright Philippe Alkemade, opening at The Wexford Festival and touring Ireland. In this later period he had many one man exhibitions in Paris Galleries such as Galerie Marie d'Holmsky, Gallerie de la Grande Chaumierre, The Atelier Visconti, and shared an exhibition with the late American artist Gregory Masurovsky. He has exhibited frequently at the Salon de Montparnasse 14eme. UNESCO Paris mounted a large exhibition of Gray's works in 1994. Gray's recent works include a portrait of the poet Ted Hughes now in the collection of the Bankfield Museum, Halifax, Yorkshire and two portraits of the, Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, one in the collection of The Royal College of Music, London and one in The Russian Academy of Music also a small portrait of the writer Harold Pinter in 1998 not long before Pinter's death in 1999, Gray's 1960 portrait of Francis Bacon was hung in the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1995.

Collections


Some of the public collections in which Gray's work appears are:
 * National Portrait Gallery, London
 * Museum of London
 * Royal College of Music, London
 * Holy Cross church, St Pancras, London
 * Bankfield Museum, Halifax
 * National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
 * Saint Columba's College, Dublin
 * Dublin Writers Museum, Dublin
 * Brunei royal family