Notes

In 1985, Mary Taubman’s monograph on Gwen John was published, and Jane was given a copy by her daughter, Jinny, two years later.

John’s small, quiet paintings struck familiar notes with Jane, both in terms of their modest subject matter, their mood of melancholy solitude, and their technique.

From her early student days in England, Jane retained an interest in, and concern for, the unglamorous figures of the everyday world. From the starving miners of the North of England, to the cold and clumsy militiamen marching the back roads during WWII, to the dignified but unseen women who laboured as domestic workers, Jane had an acute and compassionate eye.

Jane’s girlhood had been spent in Cumberland, and she was witness to local miner’s strikes and their brutal consequences. Both she and her husband Jack Heath were socialists as students, and they came to adulthood during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini. Oswald Mosely and the Blackshirts were a regular spectacle on the streets of London, as were the poorest of the poor, made desperate by the Great Depression.

The present lot, Woman in a Red Hat, depicts a woman that we have all seen, many times, particularly in South Africa’s apartheid past. She is dignified, reserved and courageous. She probably lived alone in a backyard room on her employer’s property, far from her own children and her ancestral home. She is anonymous, perhaps because we cannot remember her real name.

The solid, simplified forms hark back to the influence of Stanley Spencer, who was a Visitor to the Royal College and who was very positive about Jane’s work. The Spencer influence is a reminder of the revival of interest in Giotto and the Italian ‘Primitives’ at the time, which stood in powerful contrast to the Academy and Victorian and Edwardian painting.

Jane did not sign this work because she seldom signed a work unless it was leaving her studio for exhibition. She painted for the love of painting and to learn more, and this is one of the many works that she did not part with during her lifetime. It has never been exhibited.

It says much for her attitude, as modest as Gwen John’s, that in her late seventies she remained open to new influences and fresh possibilities of paint.

Jinny Heath, 30 January 2020.

Provenance

The Heath Family.