John 2011

GWEN JOHN FEBRUARY 8 - MARCH 12, 2011

GWEN JOHN will consist of 23 works on paper, many of which have just been released by the artist’s estate, which Davis & Langdale represents. They range in date from about 1903 to 1933 and include watercolors and drawings of women and children; several studies of cats, for which Gwen John is well known; portraits of Dorelia McNeill and the poet and critic Arthur Symons; landscapes; and still lifes.

GWEN JOHN (1876 – 1939) is one of the foremost British artists of the twentieth century. Born in Wales, she was the sister of the also famous Augustus John. After studying at the Slade School in London, she spent her entire adult life in France. The celebrated collector John Quinn (1870 –1924) was her patron, and since her lifetime she has been seriously collected in America and Britain. Her work is represented in virtually every major museum in Britain, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In America, her pictures are in such public collections 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; the Art Institute of Chicago; and both the Yale Art Gallery and the British Art Center, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Works are also in public collections in Canada and Australia and at the Musée Rodin, Paris.

She and her brother were subjects of the show Augustus John and Gwen John at Tate Britain, London, 2004, which Cecily Langdale, partner in Davis & Langdale Company, co-curated. 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.

A catalogue of twenty-three color illustrations is being published for this exhibition; it will be available at Davis & Langdale Company, Inc.