In the Picture: The Paintings of Jane Emmet de Glehn (1873-1961)
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Jane de Glehn deserves to be seen not simply as Wilfrid de Glehn’s wife, nor only as a figure in John Singer Sargent’s orbit, but as a painter of rare sensitivity whose work grew out of an unusually rich artistic inheritance. She came from the remarkable Emmet family of New York, a wide circle of accomplished women artists whose lives joined professional discipline to travel, study and cultural ambition. Trained first at the Art Students’ League in New York and then in Paris, Jane entered adulthood already formed by a transatlantic artistic world, one in which work and movement were inseparable.
Tourrettes-sur-Loup, oil on panel, 30 x 41 cm | £4,850
When Wilfrid met Jane in the United States in 1903, following his long association with Sargent and the Boston Public Library murals. Their marriage in 1904 brought Jane into the Anglo-American circle in which Sargent moved, but she was never a passive addition to it. From their first painting trips together in Venice, she became one of the most important presences in the travelling life she shared with Wilfrid and Sargent. Her letters from gondolas, gardens and hotels reveal not only companionship, but work: she drew, painted, observed and absorbed. Sargent responded to her as an artist, placing her in pictures at Frascati, Corfu, the Generalife and San Vigilio; Wilfrid, too, found in her both a partner and an artistic equal with a keen eye for light and her ability to produce portraits with a deft sense of intimacy.
What makes Jane especially compelling now is partly the rarity of her paintings. She never exhibited as prolifically as Wilfrid, and after the Great War she showed less often, which has left her work comparatively little known. Yet the surviving pictures demonstrate an artist of real independence: direct in touch, alert to atmosphere, and especially gifted at turning inhabited settings into something poised but unforced.
The Terraced gardens at Versailles and Parc de Saint-Cloud
Her landscapes are among the clearest evidence of that independence. At Versailles, Jane joined Wilfrid in the uneasy pause after war, when he was serving there as an interpreter. Even in that suspended atmosphere, she continued to draw and paint, and the period opened into brief leave on the Côte d'Azur, where light and work began again. In the south of France, she responded to places around Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and Vallee du Var such as Tourrettes-sur-Loup and Saint-Cassien as lived settings: the morning light on a hill town, afternoon shadows in a garden near Cannes, the stillness of a house or path held in heat.
At Clos St-Jacques, where she and Wilfrid stayed with Lucien and Sharlie Monod, she painted the house itself, as well as nearby gardens, showing how naturally architecture, enclosure and companionship entered her art. The same instinct appears in Cornwall, where Jane and Wilfrid returned to a coastline shaped less by spectacle than by familiarity: the rustic cottages at St Anthony-in-Meneage above the Helford Estuary, the lanes and fields around Traboe, and the coves, creeks and inlets they knew so well from repeated stays with Wilfrid’s sister and her nieces. Here, as elsewhere, place was not simply viewed, but inhabited and worked through.
Jane’s paintings remain rare, then, not because they are minor, but because they have long been overshadowed by the men beside whom she worked. Look closely, however, and something else emerges: a painter for whom intimacy was not limitation but strength, with a distinctive eye that favoured quiet presence over theatrical display. If Sargent helped shape the world in which she moved, and Wilfrid the life she shared, Jane still made from both something unmistakably her own.
A fully illustrated catalogue for our exhibition, In the Wake of Sargent – The de Glehn and Monod Painting Circle is available to buy online and from our gallery in St. James's
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