Percy Gray - "View of San Francisco Bay from San Mateo 1913"
Painting, Oil on Canvas, 19" x 37".
This painting has been sold.
Percy Gray was a talented American painter whose career spanned over forty years from 1906 to 1952. During these years of modernist turmoil in American art, Gray adhered to a single artistic goal -- to extract poetic reverberations from California's natural beauty.
Percy Gray was born in San Francisco in 1869 to a family with a rich artistic and literary heritage. Gray's father emigrated from England to Australia, married and moved to San Francisco, where he thrived in the insurance business. Percy grew up in the young city, which harbored ambitions to become a major cultural center. During a childhood illness, he discovered a talent for art. He attended the California School of Design from 1886 - 1888 and began a career as a newspaper illustrator, ending up with a job at the "New York Journal" in 1895.
Gray spent the next eleven years as a newspaper artist in New York City but also found time to study at the Art Students League and with William Merritt Chase. Gray's first paintings, exhibited in 1907, depicted stretches of ocean with waves breaking against headlands. Gray soon began to explore other subjects, including landscapes with eucalyptus trees swaying in the fog, their indistinct outlines full of ghostly suggestiveness. His ability to extract emotional responses from real California scenery was praised in the press.
Gray's work became popular, and his paintings, exhibited at various San Francisco galleries, were sought after. In 1915, his watercolor, Out of the Desert, Oregon, won a bronze medal at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. For most of the time between 1912 and 1923, Gray lived in Burlingame while maintaining a studio in San Francisco. In 1939, the Grays sold their Monterey home and returned to San Francisco. In 1941, they settled in the quiet village of San Anselmo in Marin County, about fifteen miles north of San Francisco near the base of Mount Tamalpais. Gray was in his seventies but continued to paint with considerable virtuosity. After his wife died in 1951, he moved back to San Francisco and set up a studio where he died of a heart attack while at his easel on October 10, 1952.
Subject: Coastal Back to Previous Page
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