Davis & Langdale Company, Inc. - Gwen John: Works on Paper including a Selection of Drawings of Cats

Which will begin Tuesday, May 6th, and continue through Friday, June 6th, 2008.

GWEN JOHN (1876-1939) will consist of about 40 works from every period of the artist’s career, most of which have just been released by her estate. Among them are gouaches and watercolors of women and children in church, such as Rear View of Girl and Nun Sitting in Church (see above), where she spent countless hours sketching; and drawings of peasant children, from a stay in Brittany, of which Girl with Long Hair in Blue Dress: Elisabeth de Willman Grabowska (see above) is an exceptional example. There will also be a group of cat studies, for which JOHN is particularly well-known. Included in this group is Cat Crouching (see above), a drawing of her cat, Edgar Quinet, who is the subject of most of her cat drawings.

GWEN JOHN is acknowledged to be one of the foremost British artists of the twentieth century. Born in Wales, she is 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. Since her own lifetime, her work has been seriously collected in America and Britain, and she is represented in numerous public museums. Among these are, in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the British Art Center, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; the Tate Gallery, London; the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

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

GWEN JOHN: WORKS ON PAPER