Gwen JOHN

This impressionistic gouache landscape is a view of the rue Terre Neuve in Meudon, the village just southwest of Paris that Gwen John moved to in 1911, taking a flat on the upper floor of a house. As a biography of the artist has noted, ‘The flat [rented by John] was the top storey of 29 rue Terre Neuve, an old house near the forest, at the top of a steep, crooked little street leading down from the Terrasse of the Observatoire to the elaborately decorated station at Meudon-val-Fleury, down past the local shops – the baker, the butcher – and the church. It offered her not only proximity to Rodin…but access to country air, trees, flowers, in dense woodland.’ John lived on the rue Terre Neuve for twenty years, until 1932, and began painting views of the town towards the end of the 1910s. Her favourite view, depicted here, was from one of the dormer windows of her attic studio, which looked out on to the rue Terre Neuve as it continued on to the terrace of the Meudon Observatory. 

The present sheet was among the works by Gwen John that were inherited by her nephew Edwin John (1905-1978) and thence passed by descent to his daughter Sara John (1946-2024).