View of House from Window
Gwen John (Haverfordwest 1876 - Dieppe 1939)
Category
Art / Drawings and watercolours
Date
circa 1920 - 1930
Materials
Pencil and gouache on paper
Measurements
220 x 180 mm
Order this imageCollection
Mottisfont, Hampshire
NT 769752
Caption
‘I am quite in my work now & think of nothing else … Every day is the same. I like this life very much,’ wrote Gwen John in a letter to the collector John Quinn in March 1922. Welsh by birth, Gwen John made her first visit to Paris in 1898, at a time when it was the crucible of modern European painting. Her training at James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Académie Julian led directly to two of her great self-portraits (National Portrait Gallery and Tate), the latter acquired by her Slade School of Art tutor Professor Fred Brown. Women were given unprecedented access to the life room at the Slade, where Gwen John studied in 1895–8, winning two prizes – a certificate for figure drawing and, in her final year, the Melville Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition. The portrait by Augustus John of his sister in a fashionable cape (NT 769753) illustrates how style-conscious she was. Augustus greatly admired his sister’s work, predicting that, ‘fifty years from now I shall be known as the brother of Gwen John’. Gwen returned to Paris in the winter of 1903 and lived there and in nearby Meudon until her death in 1939. Her Parisian circle of women friends included several Slade-trained artists. She was influenced by the work of her contemporaries and kept notebooks in which she wrote about their works. Her paintings of interiors, sometimes empty or occupied by a lone female figure, can be seen as part of wider developments in contemporary art. ‘At the moment I am doing some things which I see in the woods and the meadows and the roads around Meudon’, John wrote in 1927. The gouache of Meudon, an area that she came to know well, illustrates her interest in landscape and townscape, and was a place she also painted at night, recalling the nocturnes of her early tutor, Whistler.
Summary
Gouache and pencil on paper, View of House from Window by Gwen John (Haverfordwest 1876 - Dieppe 1939), circa 1920-30.
Provenance
Estate of the artist until 1982 (number EJ 914); Anthony d'Offay, London from whom purchased by Derek Hill (1916 - 2000), 1982, by whom presented to the National Trust for Mottisfont Abbey through The National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) in 1996
Credit line
Mottisfont Abbey,The Derek Hill Collection (presented to the National Trust through the National Art-Collections Fund in 1996)
Makers and roles
Gwen John (Haverfordwest 1876 - Dieppe 1939), artist
References
Conroy, Rachel, Women Artists and Designers at the National Trust, 2025, pp. 166-169