ARTIST: Marie Garay (French, 1861 - 1953)
TITLE: Ladies Playing Cards
MEDIUM: oil on board
CONDITION: Minor scratches/paint losses. Minor inpaintings along edges.
ART SIZE: 11 x 14 inches / 27 x 35 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed (In-House framing available)
SIGNATURE: lower right
ATTENTION: This lot is located at our Mamaroneck, NY office.
CATEGORY: old antique vintage painting for auction sale online
AD: ART WANTED: Consign, Trade In, Cash Offer
SKU#: 131755
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BIOGRAPHY:
Marie Garay was a French painter from the Basque Country. She was a student of Achille Zo and Leon Bonnat and is considered the first Basque artist to emancipate herself. She was the only woman who belonged to the Bayonne School artistic group.Marie Garay was the eldest of nine children of a teacher. Even as a child she proved to be extremely talented at drawing and as a teenager began training at the municipal drawing school in Bayonne; her teacher was the painter Achille Zo. For her drawing La mort de Roland she received a medal from Leon Bonnat in 1875.In 1881 Marie Garay's father died. To make a living, she gave lessons to girls. With the help of a three-year scholarship from the city of Bayonne, she went to Paris to continue her education. She studied there from 1882 to 1885. With the help of Zo, she was accepted into Leon Bonnat's studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. However, the school did not admit women until 1897. With Bonnat's support, she was accepted into the studio of the painter Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran. In 1883 she received a prize at the Salon des Artistes aux Champs Elysees for her painting Fleurs et Fruits (1883).In 1885 Marie Garay returned to Bayonne. She created numerous portraits, including those of her mother Catherine and her brother Paul (1864-1939), priest of the Saint-Charles church in Biarritz; The painting was donated to the Musee Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne in 2020. Through the mediation of her brother and the canon Jean-Baptiste Daranatz, she painted portraits of the bishops of Bayonne from 1885 to 1896. In memory of her stays in Spain, she created a full-length portrait of the future King Alfonso XIII. at the age of four. This work was exhibited at the Amis des Arts exposition in Bayonne in 1890. She was also active in genre painting. At the Salon des Champs Elysees in Paris in 1889, she exhibited her most famous work, La procession de la Fete-Dieu a Bidarray, an oil mural with the impressive dimensions of 1.43 x 2.82 meters. She sketched 18 color studies to work out the composition of the final painting, which depicts the diversity of a long procession from the bell tower of the church of Bidarray. The work was selected for the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 due to the pictorial originality of its spiritual theme about the then unknown interior Basque Country and its documentary and historical wealth, acquired by the Musee des beaux-arts de Pau and loaned to the Musee Basque in Bayonne.Five years later, Marie Garay painted another iconic oil painting measuring over five square meters: Leon Bonnat et ses eleves ( Leon Bonnat and his students ): a work full of contrasts, with herself as the only woman in white in the center of the picture, while masters and male students are dressed in black. The year before, Henri Achille Zo , a son of Achille Zo, had also created a painting by the group of artists from Bayonne ( Triptyque bayonnais ), in which Garay is also the only woman to be seen: her image jumps into focus when you look at it Keep an eye on her as she sits a bit apart in the front row. Marie Garay gave art lessons to young girls at the Joan of Arc institution , which three of her sisters had founded in 1895. Between 1892 and 1894 she wrote a 113-page perspective textbook to prepare her students for the Brevet elementaire (historical diploma certifying certain knowledge). Published in 1894, the work was a success and earned her a diploma and a bronze medal from the Academie des Sciences et Belles Lettres de Bordeaux.Garay died in Biarritz in 1953 at the age of 92. In Bayonne, the Allee Marie Garay was named after her. In 2022, the Musee Basque dedicated an exhibition to her.