Evelyn Wyld

Evelyn Wyld made carpets part of modern interiors, working where design required both an image and the knowledge of how wool could be dyed, knotted, and woven. The Getty authority identifies her as a British designer active in France. Much of her surviving public record appears within accounts of better-known collaborators, making the distinction between making, designing, and sharing an atelier essential to recovering her own work.

With Eileen Gray, Wyld explored weaving in Morocco around 1908–1909. The Centre Pompidou’s exhibition dossier records their subsequent Paris workshop on rue Visconti, opened in 1910, and the sale of its production through Gray’s Jean Désert gallery from 1922. This history links textile knowledge acquired through travel to a workshop and a market. The identities and contributions of Moroccan craftspeople remain to be researched, rather than disappearing behind the European designers’ names.

A wool rug attributed jointly to Jean Dunand and Wyld supplies a particular surviving object. Sotheby’s catalogue dates it around 1927, records its exhibition at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs that year, and traces its provenance through the Dunand family. The catalogue also identifies contemporary published illustrations. Those references offer a route toward determining the division of design and execution; the joint attribution should not be silently simplified into sole authorship.

Wyld’s professional circumstances changed in 1927. The Museum of Modern Art’s Eileen Gray catalogue states that she left Gray and began designing as well as making carpets, subsequently working with Eyre de Lanux. It cautions that the surviving Jean Désert accounts end in 1927, preventing a complete assessment of the business consequences. An interruption in the records is therefore a limit on what can be claimed about money, not evidence that the departure had no financial importance.

The Smithsonian’s de Lanux biography identifies collaboration from 1927 to 1933, appearances in major Paris exhibitions, and the opening of Décor in Cannes in 1932. Sara Shields-Rivard’s thesis explicitly identifies Wyld and de Lanux as romantic partners as well as collaborators. Their professional association consequently has a documented intimate dimension, although particular letters and the full chronology remain to be examined. [5,6]

Wyld’s route to Natalie Clifford Barney runs through de Lanux, whom the Smithsonian American Art Museum identifies as one of Barney’s lovers. No Wyld–Barney affair is asserted. Nor does the shared workshop establish an erotic relationship with Gray. Within the Constellation, Wyld makes visible the craft and business structures sustaining women’s artistic lives: materials, working partnerships, clients, exhibitions, and the uneven allocation of historical credit. Her carpets require an individual catalogue alongside the recovery of her relationships. [2–6]