Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux

Elizabeth Eyre was born on March 20, 1894, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, into a well connected family. She was educated at Miss Hazen's School in Pelham Manor, New York, and then studied art at the Art Students League of New York in 1912 and again from 1914 to 1915, under teachers including Robert Henri, George Bridgman, Edwin Dickinson, and Charles Hawthorne.

After marrying the French diplomat Pierre de Lanux, she moved to Paris following the First World War and, from the professional name Eyre de Lanux, built a career spanning painting, decorative arts, and later writing. In Paris from 1919 to 1920 she continued her training at the Academie Ranson under Maurice Denis, at the Academie Colarossi under Paul Serusier, and at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. She also studied engraving with Demetrius Galanis.

Through the 1920s she became known in Paris for lacquered Art Deco furniture and abstract, geometric rugs, working within the same avant garde design circles as Eileen Gray. In New York, an earlier exhibition of her portraits of women drew favorable notice from critics. Later in life she worked as an illustrator, including for children's books, and her career was the subject of a rediscovery in the American press in 1989 and of a dedicated retrospective in Paris in 2013.

Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux died on September 8, 1996, in a Manhattan nursing home in New York, at the age of 102. (Some archival sources give only a month, August 1996, for her death; the day specific date of September 8, 1996, is the version most consistently corroborated across independent reference sources and is used here.)

Eyre de Lanux drew attention early in her career for a New York exhibition of portraits of women, which a 1921 New York Sun review treated as a notable showing. Her design work of the 1920s situates her, in later art historical writing, as a contemporary of Eileen Gray and a forerunner to designers such as Charlotte Perriand, though she worked in a smaller and less publicly documented circle. A 1989 New York Times profile treated her as a designer being rediscovered after decades of obscurity, and a 2013 Paris gallery retrospective revisited her furniture and drawings for a new audience, underscoring how much of her output survives only in a small number of unique pieces and photographic records.

The best documented auction result for Eyre de Lanux is a pair of armchairs sold at Christie's in 2007 for USD 73,000; published sources confirm the price and the house but do not give the precise sale date or saleroom location. Design market commentary since her death describes her sculptural and furniture lots as regularly reaching the tens of thousands of dollars, with drawings typically selling in the low thousands, but no auction result higher than the 2007 armchairs has been documented. Her market is thin by volume, with relatively few tracked lots, so any single sale should be read in that context rather than as evidence of a broad trend.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Eyre de Lanux, and current gallery or estate representation is not clearly documented, so provenance research and direct engagement with specialist dealers and auction houses matter more than usual when evaluating a work. Her auction history is short and dominated by design objects rather than paintings or drawings, and the highest confirmed result, the 2007 Christie's armchairs at USD 73,000, lacks a fully documented sale date, which is a reminder that even headline figures for lesser documented artists can carry real gaps. Her market rewards careful attribution given the overlap between her design work and that of better known contemporaries.