Davis & Langdale Company, Inc. - Gwen John: A Loan Exhibition of Painting

GWEN JOHN: A LOAN EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS

MAY 12 - JUNE 6, 2009

WITH A SELECTION OF WORKS ON PAPER

This exhibition will consist of eleven paintings by GWEN JOHN (1876-1939); four of which once belonged to John Quinn, the celebrated early 20th century collector and patron of GWEN JOHN. JOHN’s paintings are extremely rare, and are seldom seen.Ten of the paintings on loan belong to private collections, while one comes from The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The portrait from The Museum of Modern Art has not been publicly displayed since the 2004 exhibition Augustus John and Gwen John at Tate Britain, London, of which Cecily Langdale, a partner in Davis & Langdale Company, was a co-curator.

There will also be a selection of about twenty works on paper from every period of GWEN JOHN’s career, most of which have just been released by her estate, which Davis & Langdale represents. Among them are gouaches and watercolors of women and children in church, where she spent countless hours sketching; and drawings of peasant children, from a stay in Brittany. There will also be cat studies, for which JOHN is particularly well known.

GWEN JOHN is one of the foremost British artists of the twentieth century. Born in Wales, she was the sister of the also famous artist Augustus John. After studying at the Slade School in London, she spent her entire adult life in France. Her work is represented in virtually every major museum in Britain, including Tate Britain, London; the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and the National Museum of Wales. Cardiff. In America, her pictures are in such museums as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art., .New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and both the Yale Art Gallery and the British Art Center, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Cecily Langdale is the author of Gwen John: with a Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and a Selection of the Drawings, published by Yale University Press in 1987.