Career
Born in Weymouth, England, Vernay immigrated to New York early in the twentieth century, and found a job as an elevator operator at a furniture store known as A.J. Crawfords. After working there briefly, Vernay started his own shop in 1906, called Vernay, Incorporated. and located at 1 East 45th Street, near Madison Avenue. There he sold antiques and decorative arts to a number of important and influential New Yorkers including Ogden Codman, Junior., Elsie de Wolfe, Sir Charles Carrick Allom, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Francis Patrick Garvan, Benjamin Altman, Solomon R. Guggenheim, William Russell Grace, as well as leading art dealerships such as M Knoedler & Company, and the design firm Tiffany Studios.
In the 1920s, Vernay grew increasingly interested in game hunting and naturalist exploration, and after offering to underwrite a museum collecting expedition led by Colonel John Champion Faunthorpe intended to enhance the American Museum of Natural History"s collection of Southeast Asian animals, Vernay joined Faunthorpe into India in 1923.
Eventually this expedition would culminate in the American Museum of Natural History"s Vernay-Faunthorpe Hall of South Asiatic Mammals, which opened in 1930 and held mounted elephants shot by the collectors in Mysore. His last expedition was to Africa in 1946.
Vernay later moved to Nassau, Bahamas, where he cultivated an orchid greenhouse, participated in environmental conservation efforts, co-founding the Bahamas National Trust. The rodent genus Vernaya was named after him.
