Died 23 August 1949 | ||
Isabel luce collaborative portraits gertrude des clayes and montreal s anglophone elite
Gertrude des Clayes (1879 – August 23, 1949) was a Scottish-born artist who lived in England and Quebec, Canada. Des Clayes was best known as a portrait painter.
She was born in Aberdeen and studied at the Bushey School of Art and at the Académie Julian in Paris with Tony Robert-Fleury and Jules Lefebvre. She lived in London from 1906 to 1912 and received a medal from the French Salon in 1909. In 1911, she became a member of the National Portrait Society (founded in 1910). Des Clayes moved to Montreal in 1912. In 1914, she was named to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. One of her portraits appeared in The Fine Arts in Canada (1925) by Newton MacTavish. She returned to England in 1936.
Des Clayes painted a portrait of railway entrepreneur Sir William Mackenzie's mother Mary using photographs taken of her sisters and by studying Mary's daughters and granddaughters; no photographs were available of Mary Mackenzie herself who had died 27 years before des Clayes was born.
Des Clayes died in London in 1949.
Her sisters Berthe (1877-1967) and Alice (1890-1968) were also artists.
Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.