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"View Slideshow\n\nBefore photography became the dominant medium to record the world around us, homeowners of a monied milieu\u2014kings, nobles, landed gentry\u2014relied on meticulously detailed paintings, particularly watercolors, to portray their rooms . This was especially true in the 19th century, as Mario Praz\u2019s An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration (Thames and Hudson, 1964) colorfully attests, with some 400 antique images depicting everything from Yorkshire dining rooms to Mitteleuropean salons. Such depictions, Praz observed with an understandable swoon, \u201Cseem to me vibrant with expectation, still animated by human warmth, like a bed only recently abandoned by the man who slept in it.\u201D Design aficionados can experience a bit of the Italian scholar\u2019s reverie in two new exhibitions devoted to examples of this captivating genre\u2014which still look better framed in gilt-wood than most photographs of the same subjects.\n\n\u201CImpressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay,\u201D which recently opened at the Frick Art &amp;amp; Historical Center in Pittsburgh, includes dozens of paintings by the American expatriate artist, who spent much of his life in France, swanning in and out of the finer ch\u00E2teaus and h\u00F4tels particuliers and capturing their boiseried glories on paper and canvas. Gay (1856\u20131937) also chronicled chic private homes furnished in the ancien r\u00E9gime French styles popularized at the turn of the century by Francophiles such as interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and novelist Edith Wharton, two of the many stylish friends of Gay and his wife.\n\nLoaned to the Pittsburgh venue by museums, art galleries, and private collectors\u2014interior designer Charlotte Moss and society doyenne K. K. Auchincloss among them\u2014the paintings are romantic likenesses of elegant salons and bedrooms outfitted with carved woodwork, silk brocades, and furniture stamped by leading \u00E9b\u00E9nistes of the 18th century. (Gay could dash one off in a couple of hours.) Included are views of De Wolfe\u2019s house in the French village of Versailles, as well as Henry Clay Frick\u2019s mansion in New York City and the Gays\u2019 own Gallic hideaways, including Ch\u00E2teau du Br\u00E9au, near Rambouillet, and Ch\u00E2teau de Fortoiseau, in Villiers-en-Bi\u00E8re.\n\nOn the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, selected paintings of interiors by contemporary artist Isabelle Rey can be seen at the Fondation Pierre Berg\u00E9 \u2013 Yves Saint Laurent in Paris on two select nights, November 29 and January 10.\n\nArguably heir to the mantel of Alexandre Serebriakoff, mid-20th-century Europe\u2019s Rembrandt of room portraits, Rey is widely admired for exceptionally detailed, almost photographic images that have won her commissions from grandees such as fashion designer Oscar de la Renta and the late philanthropist Dodie Rosekrans.\n\nThe 11 Rey works exhibited include depictions of the Ch\u00E2teau Gabriel, the Normandy country house that Berg\u00E9 and Saint Laurent shared for decades, which was decorated by tastemaker Jacques Grange in a pattern-on-pattern, fin-de-si\u00E8cle mode that could be called High Proust. Especially transporting, given the chilly weather ahead, is the artist\u2019s record of the jardin d\u2019hiver, a sunny, tile-floored space where Victorian armchairs and a crystalline chandelier are all but subsumed by a jungle of potted plants.\n\n\u201CImpressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay\u201D runs through January 6, 2013; thefrickpittsburgh.org.The Isabelle Rey works are on view November 29 and January 10; fondation-pb-ysl.net.\n\nClick here to see a slideshow of some of the beautiful interior paintings included in these two exhibitions."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/frick-pittsburgh-walter-gay-isabelle-rey>