The Hartsville Museum celebrates the 40th Anniversary of the Museum by presenting this lecture series. The third lecture in the series was held at The Edition on November 5, 2020.
Stephen Motte, Curator of Interpretation and Collections at the Florence County Museum, discusses prolific landscape artist, Edward Gay, his art, and his connections to Hartsville, SC.
Edward Gay, who was also an artist, is the son of Duncan Gay. Duncan married one of the daughters of Major JL Coker, Jeannie Coker Gay. During his visit, Mr Motte provided the Museum with a copy of a biography of Duncan Coker written by his daughter, Susanne Gay Linville. We have reproduced it here for your enjoyment.
Biography of Duncan Gay, 1865-1948
By his daughter, Susanne Gay Linville, 1983
Duncan Gay was born in Albany, New York on June 23, 1865. His parents were Edward Gay, landscape painter and Martha Fearey Gay, daughter of Morton Fearey, shoe manufacturer and lace maker.
Shortly after his birth, his family moved to 434 South 2nd Avenue, Mt. Vernon, N.Y., which was then a rather rural suburb of New York City. I have pictures of the house surrounded by apple trees and fields. In the early days it may have had a view of Long Island Sound.
Duncan Gay was the oldest of ten children, nine of whom survived to hearty old age.
I am not sure that there was a high school in Mt. Vernon at the time he was ready for it. Anyway, the economic pressures at home were great, and he went to work for Louis Comfort Tiffany as a draftsman and designer when he was about fourteen, commuting to New York City to do so.
When he was 16 he went to St. Augustine, Florida to work on Tiffany's house. I have some delightful letters with illustrations of St. Augustine. One of the funniest pictures of the pigs in the backyard. After two years he went back to New York.
The work demanded long hours and what he thought was low pay, but nevertheless he had some ideal sounding vacations. One was a walking trip to Albany with his father. Another was a trip up the Erie Canal with a group of artists. I have some photographs of this. Unfortunately the snappy titles give neither dates nor names.
He was working on the Yale window for Tiffany in 1889 at the time his sister, Vivian married James Lide Coker from Hartsville, South Carolina.
My aunt Ingovar Gay insists that he worked for Tiffany for about thirty years and afterwards set up a studio in Mt. Vernon close to his parents' home, but I am not so sure of these dates.
But I am sure that he drove a Locomobile Steamcar from Norfolk, Virginia to Hartsville, South Carolina in 1900. He was living in Sound Beach (now Old Greenwich) Connecticut. His brother-in-law, James L. Coker, bought the car and enjoyed it during the summer. Then my father put it on a boat and shipped it to Norfolk, Virginia, then drove it over unimproved roads for four hundred miles to Hartsville, South Carolina where his sister and brother-in-law lived. The car is now in the Hartsville Museum after spending some years in the Charleston Museum.
I have a letter from my mother to her sister in 1901 saying that Duncan Gay came to take her for a ride, presumably in that car. Theirs must have been a leisurely courtship for he married Jennie Coker Jan. 1, 1908.
The economics of this marriage I have never understood. Jennie Coker had an allowance from her father of $60 a month. With this she seems to have taken some fabulous trips and with her sister bought 17 acres of land with an old house on it in Redding, Conn. for the sum of $450. She employed Duncan Gay as her architect and contractor and after their marriage it became their home. Duncan Gay was not fully employed at this time but from old accounts he seemed to have had considerable savings. They bought more land and hired a farmer - caretaker, and I believe their farm was self-sufficient.
Jennie and Duncan Gay went on a honeymoon around the world. They took the railroad across the U.S. and sailed from Seattle, Washington on October 12, 1908 on the Iyo Maru, a small Japanese boat. It was seventeen storm bounced days to Yokohama. After traveling around Japan they went on to Shanghai. Included in their trip was Singapore Malay Peninsula, Java, and later Ceylon, Egypt, Greece and on to Italy and Switzerland on July 14, 1909. Then a stay in Paris, France, and home again by September 1909.
I came along in 1910, and they then built a larger and more elaborate house and tried to expand the place as a paying farm. I do not know how this might have worked out. For my mother died suddenly in 1914 and my father embarked on a course that seemed surprising at the time. He elected to live on what money he had and to bring up his daughter himself.
He did take some vacations from his parenting, leaving his daughter with an aunt he went on a scientific expedition to Trinidad early in 1918. He was the artist for the expedition and I believe some of his botanical drawings are at Princeton University.
His mother bought some land at Crescent Beach, Florida just south of St. Augustine. He built her a house there and later he built a "tower" there. He salvaged two mahogany companionways off of the wrecked yacht "Iris" so his tower was three stories high. On a flat, windblown island it had a marvelous view, and I had a schoolroom at the top.
His sister, Mrs. James L. Coker, was wonderful to him. In fact, she always welcomed us to her big household in Hartsville, South Carolina. It became my second home, partly through her generosity and partly because it was also my grandfather's home, where everyone lived in an extended family.
I should explain that my father put himself out to be a good visitor. The clever hands that could put together Tiffany windows could also make the clocks work accurately and the doors close smoothly.
A handsome man he was ready with funny Irish stories. The children liked him, and a temperamental dog would mind him.
He would often do the grocery shopping. I remember that he once ordered a leg of lamb. When the butcher brought one out, he said "Haven't you got a better one?" The butcher went into his locker and found a really superior piece of meat and everyone was happy.
Later, my uncle James L. Coker, Jr. died, leaving my father's sister a widow.
My father took to spending the winters in her home, and they satisfied their sense of adventure by taking trips together.
It was in this way that he developed his hobby. They traveled mostly by ship and he would sketch wherever he was in the world. They often took freighters, and when he was bored with the company he retired to his stateroom and painted.
I now have well over a hundred sketches of trips, one in 1924 when he took me around the world and one in 1931 when he, my cousins and I went to Majorica, Spain. He went to the Philippines with Vivien. He went to the Middle East with Vivien twice, I believe, and he would show his sketches and talk about them the way many people show slides.
He had worked out a comfortable life for himself staying with his sister in Hartsville, South Carolina in the winter, and with my husband and myself and his two grandsons during the spring and summer and early fall. At that time we had a home in Scarsdale, New York and a summer home in Sharon, Connecticut. It was there that he died after a short illness on October 10, 1948.
