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Walter Gay specialized at a very early stage in his career in the depiction of interiors, for which he was already highly esteemed, both in his native country and elsewhere in Europe, during his lifetime. He was readily inspired in style and technique by 18th-century French taste, which he encountered at every turn in Paris, his adoptive home. Even his apartment in the city center accorded with this environment.
Tradition holds that the collector’s salon represented here, with a vast number of small-format pictures on the walls and porcelain birds, so tonally emphasized on the chimney, depicts one of the rooms in this apartment.
The first commemorative exhibition for the artist took place in 1945 at the Wildenstein Galleries in New York. Since then, several American museums have acknowledged Walter Gay’s oeuvre with individual exhibitions.