Gerald Murphy

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Gerald Clery Murphy (March 25, 1888 – October 17, 1964) was a Boston-born American artist who was active as a painter in Europe from 1921 until 1929. He is known for his hard-edged still life paintings in a Precisionist, Cubist style. Murphy was an heir of the family which owned the Mark Cross Company, sellers of fine leather goods, and he served as president of the company from 1934 to 1956.

Educated at Yale, Murphy was a member of the fraternity DKE and the society Skull & Bones. He befriended a young freshman named Cole Porter (Yale class of 1913) and brought him into DKE. Murphy also introduced Porter to his friends, propelling him into writing music for Yale musicals. Murphy's daughter, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, participated in a retrospective of Cole Porter's life on public television in 1992.

With his wife Sara, he moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century, where they became the center of a large social circle of artists and writers of later fame in the 20th century. Gerald died October 17, 1964 in East Hampton, New York.

Calvin Tomkins's biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy Living Well Is the Best Revenge was published in 1971. Amanda Vaill's biography of the couple, Everybody Was So Young, was published in 1998. The characters Nicole and Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald) are widely recognized as based on the Murphys. Ernest Hemingway's couple in Garden of Eden is not explicitly based on this pair, but given the similarities and the setting (Nice), there is clearly some basis for such an assumption. Interestingly, guests of the Murphys would often swim at Eden Roc, an event emulated in The Garden of Eden.