Albany Fine Art : Biography of Jane DE GLEHN

Jane Erin Emmet DE GLEHN

American, 1873-1961

DE GLEHN

Jane de Glehn
by John Singer Sargent, 1904
Private Collection

Stylish figurative and portrait painter and a member of the important Emmet family of American artists

Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1873, into a cultured, upper class family of Irish descent, Jane Erin Emmet de Glehn was the youngest of William Jenkins Emmet and Julia Colt Pierson Emmet’s ten children.

Jane was the youngest of three very talented sisters, all of whom become successful artists: Rosina Emmet Sherwood (American, 1854-1948), Lydia Field Emmet (American, 1866-1952). Her first cousin Ellen Emmet ‘Bay’ Rand (American, 1876-1941) was also a successful artist, Henry James, the great American novelist, was another cousin, and the prominent playwright, Robert Emmet Sherwood, her nephew.

She studied at the Art Students League in New York where both William Merritt Chase (American, 1848-1916) and John Henry Twatchman (American, 1853-1902) were teaching and then travelled to Europe to study the work of the Grand Masters, followed by further study in Paris. Following her return to America, she met her future husband, the important English post-impressionist painter Wilfrid Gabriel von Glehn RA (British, 1870-1951) who had been studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was in America with John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), the most successful portrait painter of his era and referred to as "the van Dyck of our times", to assist with the installation of Sargent’s monumental Triumph of Religion murals at the Boston Public Library. The three became lifelong friends.

A 1902 New York Times article described a New York exhibition of “half a hundred portraits and townscapes by Miss Jane Erin Emmet, drawn in charcoal and colored crayons, which give a high idea of the young artist’s power to produce a likeness with a minimum of strokes. Miss Emmet has studied the line and knows how to be wisely economical of color. Her drawings of little children and babies are particularly successful; but … prove that she can portray men of full years and middle age with a fine strength and simplicity… She draws the likenesses of her family and relatives and personal friends with great skill, giving them the stamp of good breeding which is so hard for artists to render, no matter how well favored in that respect the sitters may be. She is a very acceptable addition to the portrait makers of the city, and may go far in the use of pastels, which have a richer and more painty quality than crayons, along with the peculiar brilliancy that belongs to them”. The article concluded, “The tendency of the Emmet family in the present generation toward the fine arts is a very remarkable fact. One thinks of the artist families in Europe during the middle ages and down to the present time in Japan”. (New York Times, 18 April 1902).

Following their marriage in 1904, the couple moved to London where they set up home in Chelsea. Jane continued to draw and paint, largely in the mediums of chalk, pastel and charcoal, and exhibited work at the New English Art Club, the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy.

Jane and Wilfrid held an important role in Anglo-American art circles and were friends with such prominent cultural figures as the painters Francis ‘Frank’ Davis Millet (American, 1846-1912) and Julian Alden Weir (American, 1852-1919), architects Stanford White and Charles McKim, the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton. Between 1905 and 1914, Jane, Wilfrid and Sargent toured much of Europe together, and America either on their own or in the company of their artistic and literary friends and acquaintances. The de Glehns and Sargent frequently painted alongside each other and often depicted each other in their work.

Following the outbreak of the First World War, both Jane and Wilfrid joined the staff of the British Red Cross in France in 1915 and, in 1917, Wilfrid was commissioned in the Artists’ Rifles and sent to the front in Italy. After the war they changed their surname from ‘von Glehn’ to ‘de Glehn’ and settled in England where they would spend their summers in Cornwall and winters in France, ultimately settling in Wiltshire.

Like her sisters and cousin, Jane preferred to work in portraiture but, unlike them and her husband, she was not a prolific artist. After 1913 she usually shared exhibitions with her husband. During the 1930s and 1940s she set up a studio in New York and, in 1940, she shared an exhibition with her sister Lydia. After her husband's death in 1951, she spent much of her time sketching the members of her extended family and her social circle. Jane de Glehn died in 1961.

In 2007, the Arden Galleries in New York held an exhibition of the work of five generations of the Emmet women's paintings.