Gwen John valuation
Painted quiet women in quiet rooms in close, chalky tones, and spent most of her working life in France.
Gwen John was born in Haverfordwest in 1876 and grew up in Tenby.
What a work by Gwen John is worth
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Bio
Gwen John was born in Haverfordwest in 1876 and grew up in Tenby. She studied at the Slade School of Art from 1895 to 1898 under Henry Tonks, alongside her younger brother Augustus, won the Melvill Nettleship Prize for figure composition in her final year, and then studied briefly with Whistler in Paris. From 1904 she lived in France, working as an artist's model, among others for Auguste Rodin, who became her lover. She settled at Meudon, became a Catholic, and painted for the Dominican nuns there a series of portraits of their founder, Mère Poussepin. Her paintings, mostly single women seated in interiors and many of them variations on one pose, are built from a narrow range of closely related tones. She died at Dieppe in 1939.
Her output was small and much of it is in public collections, notably National Museum Cardiff and Tate, so paintings are scarce. Drawings, watercolours and gouaches of women, cats, children and church congregations make up most of what appears. Attribution is checked against the literature, chiefly Cecily Langdale's catalogue raisonné, and a work with an unbroken history is preferred.
The Slade, Meudon and Strange Beauties
Her patron from 1910 was the American collector John Quinn, who bought much of what she made and paid her an allowance until his death in 1924.
Gwen John: Strange Beauties, at National Museum Cardiff in 2026 for the 150th anniversary of her birth, travels to the Yale Center for British Art in 2027.
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