Gwen JOHN

This small flower piece may likely be dated to the final decade of Gwen John’s career, when she produced a number of freely-painted gouache variants of a still-life composition of flowers in a jug. As the artist’s biographer has noted of this period in the early 1930s, ‘Flower studies…[were] repeated time and again and growing smaller. It was as if painting had become for Gwen John what saying the rosary is to others.’

A closely related composition, of identical dimensions, was at one time with the Browse and Darby Gallery in London.