The picture presumably appealed to the Gays’ love of eighteenth-century French art. It is not known when the Gays might have acquired this version of Ducreux’s painting, of which several replicas and copies are known to exist. Its twenty-first-century fame is due largely to a 2009 internet meme called “Archaic Rap,” in which images of Ducreux’s paintings captioned with slangy one-liners and Britishisms were widely tweeted and shared on Facebook. When Interior of the Artist’s Apartment was exhibited at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, in 1949, five years before it was accessioned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the portrait was listed as “probably by Goya or one of his followers.” Today, it is recognized as a self-portrait by the French painter Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802).
The portrait hangs above a bright blue settee and is surrounded by a cluster of five small landscapes. Prominently featured in this corner of the room is a large portrait of a man, grinning and pointing at the viewer. Interior of the Artist’s Apartment, made sometime after 1910 by the American painter and watercolorist Walter Gay, shows a narrow view of a sitting area in Walter and his wife Matilda’s Paris apartment at 11 Rue de l'Université, where the couple had moved in May 1909.
