Major Gwen John retrospective at National Museum Cardiff announced

A landmark exhibition celebrating the life and work of one of Wales’s most acclaimed modern artists, Gwen John, will open at National Museum Cardiff next year, marking the 150th anniversary of her birth.

Gwen John: Strange Beauties, the most comprehensive retrospective of her work in four decades, will run from 7 February to 28 June 2026.

Tickets are on sale now for a show which brings together more than 200 works — including paintings, drawings, watercolours, sketchbooks, letters and archival material — from collections across the UK and the United States.

Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, which purchased its first Gwen John painting Girl in a Blue Dress in 1935 for £20, now holds the world’s largest public collection of her work and will host the exhibition before it travels to Scotland and the USA.

The retrospective will reunite some of John’s most important oil paintings with rarely seen works on paper preserved directly from her studio.

These include delicate landscape sketches, intimate figure studies and vivid still lifes that reveal the breadth of her artistic experimentation. Loans come from major institutions including Tate, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Yale Center for British Art.

Born in Haverfordwest in 1876, Gwen John trained at the Slade School of Art, one of the first British women to receive formal art education. She later moved to Paris, establishing herself within its vibrant artistic community.

Though often overshadowed during her lifetime, John forged a distinct artistic identity characterised by muted palettes, quiet interior scenes and an introspective, modern sensibility.

‘Strange beauties’

The exhibition title draws on John’s own words: she described herself as “a seer of strange beauties,” a sentiment reflected in her meticulous attention to atmosphere, colour and harmony. Visitors will see how John repeatedly returned to the same subjects, reshaping them through changes in mood, technique and meaning.

Highlights include a major new technical research project examining her experimental approach to building compositions, a study of her colour use based on a recovered historic paint chart, and a survey of works showing her process from early sketches to finished paintings. Gallery spaces will be painted in tonal shades inspired by John’s palette, in partnership with Welsh paint company Little Greene.

Gwen John’s influence continues to resonate across contemporary culture. Designers Jonathan Anderson and Phoebe Philo cite her restrained aesthetic as inspiration, while the painter Celia Paul and musicians such as the Manic Street Preachers have reflected her impact in their work.

Lucy Wood, Senior Curator of Art at Amgueddfa Cymru, said the exhibition aims to foreground John’s artistic ambition rather than her biography: “This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter anew the depth and rigour of John’s vision and her focused pursuit of strange beauties.”

Dr Kath Davies, Director of Collections & Research, described John as “a trailblazer,” adding that many works in the exhibition have never before been displayed.

Supported principally by the Colwinston Charitable Trust, the retrospective will be accompanied by two new publications and a BBC Cymru Wales documentary to be broadcast in 2026.