WILFRID GABRIEL DE GLEHN PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY

WILFRID GABRIEL DE GLEHN

British, 1870-1951

BIOGRAPHY
Wilfrid Gabriel de Glehn was born in Sydenham, south London, the son of Estonian coffee merchant Alexander von Glehn. He attended Brighton College and the Government Art Training School, South Kensington before 1890, when he moved to Paris and enrolled at the École des Beaux Arts. There he studied with the artists Robert Delaunay and Gustave Moreau.

He met John Singer Sargent in the early 1890s and was asked to assist, along with Edwin Austin Abbey, on the murals for the Boston Public Library, commissioned by the architects McKim, Mead & White. De Glehn “had accompanied Sargent to Boston,” writes Laura Wortley, “to assist with the installation of the second phase of the murals in 1903, but remained on his own working in America for nearly eighteen months. Having already met various members of the New York-based Tile Club at Fairford and on an earlier trip to America in 1895, de Glehn accompanied Frank Millet and Sargent to J. Alden Weir’s home in Branchville, Connecticut, for a few days camping before Sargent sailed for Europe in June. De Glehn returned to paint with Weir in Branchvelle in July … [and] encountered the Emmets, a family of painters related both to the architect Stanford White and to Henry James. James’s niece Ellen Bay Emmet had studied in Giverny with Frederick MacMonnies, while her cousins Lydia Field Emmet and Rosamund Sherwood were associated with William Merritt Chase and Shinnecock Long Island summer school. Their younger sister, Jane, had studied for several years at the Art Students League in New York before going to New York for six months… With an exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s New York gallery to prepare for the following spring, 1904, de Glehn spent August and September painting at Ellen Emmet’s home, Barack Matif Farm in Connecticut, from where he wrote to Sargent announcing his engagement to Jane. After the wedding at the Emmet’s home in New Rochelle, New York, in May 1904, and a short honeymoon at her brother Temple’s house on Long Island, they sailed to Cornwall.”

“Jane not only brought a new dimension to de Glehn’s relationship with Sargent, she chronicled it in her letters. From her arrival in Cornwall in June 1904, she recorded her impressions of people and places as she furnished their new home in Chelsea, London’s fashionable artists’ quarter, and gradually extended her circle of acquaintances beyond their close neighbors, the Harrison family, Philip Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks, Sargent’s sister Emily, and his mother, to de Glehn’s French relations and Sargent’s friends, the Curtis family, at the Palazzo Barbara in Venice.” [Laura Wortley, Wilfrid Gabriel de Glehn: John Singer Sargent’s Painting Companion (exhibition catalogue), Spanierman Gallery, New York, 1997, p. 8]

The friendship with Sargent blossomed in the early years of the century as the de Glehns accompanied Sargent on sketching trips abroad. Many of his works from this period show the strong influence of Sargent’s plein-air impressionist approach to landscape painting. De Glehn exhibited his work to considerable acclaim at the New English Art Club, the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the Paris Salon. The first of many solo exhibitions was held at the Carfax Gallery in 1908.

Kenneth McConkey writes that, at times, “the sheer dynamism of handling in [de Glehn’s] paintings ... transcends all possible precedents and rivals the expressive urgency of the early Fauve painters. The essential contrast in de Glehn’s work was similar to that in [Philip Wilson] Steer’s. At one level, he produced canvases which aimed at a decorative, eighteenth-century synthesis of nudes and formal gardens, while at another level, he responded to ‘women in fairy-white dresses’ entering ‘into the life of a summer’s day’. These seemingly contradictory worlds coexisted in de Glehn’s imagination and to some extent, they fed upon one another as they did with Renoir.” [Kenneth McConkey, British Impressionism, Oxford, 1989, p. 133]

Museum Collections
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Atkinson Art Gallery Collection, Southport, Merseyside
Birmingham Museums Trust, Birmingham
Bishop’s Palace & Gardens, Wells
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol
Central Library, Bromley
Clare College, University of Cambridge
Guildhall Art Gallery, London
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester
National Portrait Gallery, London
Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Newport
Paisley Art Institute Collection, Paisley
Queen’s College, University of Cambridge
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Royal Academy of Music, London
Royal Society of Medicine, London
Tate Britain, London
Touchstones Rochdale, Rochdale
Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum, Burnley
University of Cambridge, Cambridge
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Warminster Museum, Warminster
West Northamptonshire Council, Northampton

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