Gwen John: Strange Beauties exhibition, 2026, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK.
Gwen John: Strange Beauties is a once-in-a-generation landmark art exhibition, bringing together rarely seen works from museums, galleries, and private collections from around the world to celebrate the artist’s 150th birthday anniversary. Gwen John is one of the most significant artists of the early 20th century. Born in Wales, she spent most of her life in Paris, France. The exhibition is at Amgueddfa Cymru (Museum Wales) in Cardiff until June 28, 2026.
Gwen John, Self-Portrait, 1902, Tate, London, UK.
An art retrospective is a comprehensive exhibition, showcasing an artist’s entire career. It will usually cover the basic chronology of an artist’s life, gather together important paintings and sketches, and reflect on their contribution to art history. This Gwen John retrospective is a fascinating and celebratory event, with more than 200 paintings, drawings, watercolors, sketchbooks, and letters.
Gwen John’s notebook, exhibition view of Gwen John: Strange Beauties, 2026, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK. Photograph by the author.
The exhibition offers a fresh perspective and new insights into Gwen John’s painting processes. The artist defies conventional art history categories. She had a total disregard for the traditional hierarchies between painting and drawing. She produced images in oils, watercolors, and pencil. John was meticulous in her note-taking, recording color mixing ideas and exploring harmonies of color. She was prolific and experimental.
Exhibition view of Gwen John: Strange Beauties, 2026, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK.
What is truly remarkable about Strange Beauties is that it sets a new standard for curation and catalog production. This exhibition is a passionate female-led collaboration, a labor of love, carried out with rigorous and exacting skill. What we have here is a female team exploring a major female artist, and it is exceptional! Galleries and museums will look to this as professional best practice for years to come.
Gwen John, A Lady Reading, c. 19010–1911, Tate, London, UK.
Women curators are showing us new ways to look at female artists, foregrounding the woman and her work unapologetically. All credit goes to the team at Amgueddfa Cymru (Museum Wales) for this brilliant exhibition, including Lucy Wood, Senior Curator; Kath Davies, Director of Collections and Research; Fiona McLees, Paper Conservator; and Jean Richardson, Chief Executive. This is an experiment in how to present a female artist who lived deliberately for herself, in her own way. And, wow, it really delivers!
Gwen John, The Japanese Doll, c. 1920, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff. By permission of Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales
When we explore female artists, it is usually from a biographical perspective. Who did she love or marry? Who was her teacher? Whereas men’s artistic practice is often portrayed as the singular genius, their biographical details come second—a man’s work stands alone. In fact, we are sometimes actively encouraged to ignore some of the horrifying and destructive biographical stories behind some artists (like Pablo Picasso or Paul Gauguin) and “focus on the work.”
It’s a different story for women. Painter Frida Kahlo is rarely mentioned without reference to her ill-health, chronic pain, and her relationship with Diego Rivera. You will be lucky to find information about Lee Krasner that does not reference her husband, Jackson Pollock.
Gwen John, Mère Poussepin Seated at a Table, 1913–1920, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK. By permission of Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales
Some years ago, I visited a major exhibition on Georgia O’Keeffe, where a whole section of the gallery space was set aside for the work of her lover Alfred Stieglitz, as if she only made sense with reference to him. But here, with Strange Beauties, finally, the focus is purely on the artist herself. Gallery space is not given away to the works of lover, Auguste Rodin (although we see a portrait of him sketched by John), nor her brother, Augustus John (although he appears as a figure in one of her paintings of her life in London). They take a back seat as we tour the unique world of Gwen John.
Exhibition view of Gwen John: Strange Beauties, 2026, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK. Photograph by the author.
Entering the gallery space is a joy. Yes, the paintings are incredible and immersive, but the exquisite attention to detail is astonishing. The gallery walls have been painted in tonal shades chosen specifically to echo Gwen John’s palette. These paints have been produced in partnership with Little Greene, a Welsh paint company. At first, we bask in pinky mauve, soft and womblike. Then on through a huge room that feels like a church, with blues like the robes of the Virgin Mary. And then on to cool meditative green, reflecting a woman at peace and in nature.
Gwen John, Girl in a Blue Dress, c. 1914–1915, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK. By permission of Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales.
Gwen John, Letter to Museum Wales, 1935, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK. Photograph by the author.
This is one of a series of eight paintings of the same model.
It is 90 years since the Museum Wales first bought this Gwen John painting for £20.
This handwritten note expressing the artist’s thanks to the museum for buying her painting is the first thing we see when we walk into the Gwen John: Strange Beauties exhibition.
An additional delight can be found just before you enter the gallery space. Irish fashion designer, creative director of Christian Dior, and huge Gwen John fan, Jonathan Anderson has created a series of five cornettes—an elegant, starched headdress worn by Dominican nuns. A powerful symbol of female spirituality, these occur repeatedly in Gwen John’s work. Created using different fabrics and colors, this contemporary counterpoint responds to John’s sensitivity to texture, color, and pattern.
Jonathan Anderson, Cornette design, 2026. Press materials.
In childhood, Gwen John yearned to get away from Welsh small-town life with her old fashioned patriarch father. In fact, Gwen and her sister Winifred invented a sign language to communicate at the dinner table, where he strictly insisted on absolute quiet. However, he did encourage artistic pursuits, and Gwen John later attended the radical Slade School of Art in London. She immersed herself completely in the bohemian life of London and later Paris. She had many friends, wild adventures, close and intimate friendships, and love affairs. She was a rebellious, vivid, confident, modern woman.
God’s little artist, a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, and a diligent worker.
Gwen John: Strange Beauties exhibition catalog, Ed. by Rachel Stratton, Lucy Wood, Yale University Press, 2026
Often portrayed as the pale, crazy spinster who painted nuns and cats, Gwen John lived life very much on her own terms. Her entire life was an exercise in resistance, where strangeness and beauty live side by side. In the 1920s, she referred to herself as “God’s little artist, a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, and a diligent worker”—as curator Lucy Wood points out, this was her creative manifesto. Gwen John was not forlorn or frail. Her self-contained interiority, vital to her art practice, was wrongly defined as small and lonely by the white, male arts establishment.
Gwen John, Cat, c. 1905, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK.
We have no established frame of reference for the woman living alone, exploring her own psyche. Especially in an art world where the white male aesthetic is dominant. How do we explore the female body in direct communion with the space around it, with no male intermediary? We need a new language for that, and this exhibition helps us move towards an emotional truth that we are not used to seeing or describing. This incredible exhibition and its comprehensive catalog help with this, alongside biographies such as Alicia Foster’s book Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris. They offer us an alternative view of the “female artist as recluse” myth.
Gwen John, Girl With Bare Shoulders, c. 1910, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, USA.
Women, children, and nature—that is essentially what Gwen John painted. She often painted figures clothed and then unclothed. Not sexualized nudes, simply naked women. Not reclining sensually for the male gaze, just women actively standing or sitting. This is the honest portrayal of women without performance, outside of the male gaze. Gwen John undercuts and sweeps aside ideas of how to look at women. Her sitters are symbolic and poetic yet also ordinary and everyday. When men paint women, they are often posed as muses or sexual objects. Gwen John paints women reading, learning, writing, and thinking. Women with integrity and luminous presence.
A woman painting a woman is very different to a man painting a woman because there is an understanding of the female form, there’s an understanding of emotion that is very difficult to get. I think that is why she is one of the greatest painters in British history because she changes that dynamic.
Gwen John: Strange Beauties press release, 2026.
Gwen John, Sainte Thérèse de l’enfant Jésus à Quinze Ans, 1929, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, UK. Exhibition view of Gwen John: Strange Beauties, 2026, National Museum Wales, Cardiff, UK. Photograph by the author.
A voracious reader of poetry, philosophy, and theology, Gwen John adored Edgar Allan Poe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like them, she sought imperfect, unexpected beauty to awaken the senses. She was an adventurer, walking across France with her friend Dorelia McNeill, studying as they went, sleeping rough under hedges. She was a studio model, then lover, of Auguste Rodin. He was the rock star of sculptural art, and their affair lasted over a decade. When it ended, Gwen John swapped her art god for God with a capital G, and became a Catholic.
Her later life focused on contentment and modest pleasures. She adored the modern Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the little flower girl who found holiness in all things, especially the hidden and the ordinary.
Gwen John painted an everyday physical reality… as a moment of profound religious illumination, her version brings together a two-thousand-year-old story with the utterly modern, retold with no recourse to haloes and angel’s wings.
In reference to the painting, Girl Reading at the Window (1911) in: Alicia Foster, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, Thames and Hudson, 2023.
The women in these paintings are lost in thought, yet charged with feeling and emotion. Gazing into one of her paintings, we get a real sense of stillness, but this is not passive; the viewer feels somehow connected. Gwen John returns again and again to the same subject matter – nuns, a convalescent, children in church. She sought meaning with close, attentive looking. And isn’t it quite revolutionary to insist on portraying rest and recovery, something vital for humankind, yet denigrated by patriarchal, capitalistic values? There is a devotional aspect too, not just religious prayer, but the idea of a woman attending to her soul, protecting her solitude and her self.
Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, 1907–1909, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK. By permission of Amgueddfa Cymru-Museum Wales. Purchased with the assistance of the Derek Williams Trust and the Estate of Mrs J. Green.
I am quite in my work now and think of nothing else. I paint til it is dark… and then I read about an hour and think of my painting, and then I go to bed. Every day is the same. I like this life very much.
Letter to John Quinn, 1922, Gwen John: Strange Beauties exhibition catalog, Ed. by Rachel Stratton, Lucy Wood, Yale University Press, 2026.
Gwen John: Strange Beauties is at the National Museum Cardiff, UK, until June 28, 2026.
The exhibition then goes on tour and will be presented at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK, from August 1, 2026 to January 4, 2027; and the US: at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT (from February 18, 2027 to June 20, 2027), and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (from July 30, 2027 to November 28, 2027).
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