Gwen JOHN

As the Gwen John scholar Cecily Langdale has noted of the artist’s late works, ‘The last colored works on paper are executed in gouache…, in a combination of gouache and watercolour…, or even occasionally in a mixture of gouache and oil…As opaque as any oil painting, they were done about the time she ceased to use oil, and may have been a substitute for her work in that medium. Earlier, her painting and drawing were separate areas of endeavor, with little specific relationship between them. Several of Gwen John’s final works epitomize the convergence of those hitherto distinct areas.’

This atmospheric study in watercolour and gouache, which may be dated to c.1925, is likely to be a view of Meudon, the village just southwest of Paris that Gwen John moved to in 1911, and where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. As has been noted, ‘Gwen John’s paintings of Meudon at night sometimes recall Whistler’s nocturnes in atmosphere, and Walter Sickert’s small-scale, close-toned Dieppe scenes. In their almost abstract nature and painterly freeness they are unprecedented in her oeuvre.’ A closely related nocturne of the same house, of similar dimensions, appeared at auction in London in 1999. Among other stylistically and thematically comparable works is a Street at Night, Meudon, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and a watercolour inscribed ‘La Rue Terre Neuve. Quelqu’un qui guet’ and dated 8 April 1929, which was sold at auction in 2015.

This drawing was among the contents of Gwen John’s studio in Meudon at the time of her death. Inherited by her nephew Edwin John (1905-1978), it was included in the retrospective memorial exhibition of 217 of the artist’s works held at the Matthiesen Gallery in London in 1946.