Jones, Nancy (Esperanca) Wynne- (1922–2006), painter, was born 10 December 1922 at Penmaenucha, Dolgellau, north Wales, youngest child among two sons and one daughter of Charles Llewellyn Wynne-Jones (c.1891–1974), landowner, and his wife Sybil Mary Gella (née Scott) (c.1889–1975). Her mother, daughter of a Manchester stockbroker, was of mixed English and German ethnicity, but was reared on the Welsh estate owned by her mother's family for several generations. Nancy's father, of ancient Welsh stock, resigned his commission as a cavalry officer to manage the 8,000-acre Penmaenucha estate when it was inherited by his wife on her father's death. Throughout Nancy's childhood and youth, the family, of the 'Anglo-Welsh country class' (Fallon, 21), spent half of every year at Penmaenucha, where her father enjoyed shooting and fishing, and half the year at Thornhill, Stalbridge, near Sherborne, in Dorset, where her father could hunt.
Owing to her delicate health, Nancy was educated at home by a governess, whose instruction was supplemented by grinds in preparation for the schools certificate. Adept at drawing and painting from early childhood, at age nine she began receiving lessons in Sherborne from an illustrator of children's books, under whose tutelage she painted watercolours of flowers, outdoor scenes, and animals from live models. She was introduced to the concept of abstract art by her youthful reading of Herbert Read's Art now (1933), which deeply influenced her ideas about art for many years. Her interest in literature and the arts was encouraged by the family doctor, at whose suggestion she began to compose music and to study the violin, receiving lessons in Bournemouth with the first violinist of the symphony orchestra (1938–9), and continuing in Aberystwyth after the outbreak of war. She studied violin and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London (1940–43), showing more promise as a composer than as a musician. She experienced the London blitz, and served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, before volunteering for full-time war work as a draughtswoman at the Ordnance Survey (1943–5), where she helped prepare maps for military purposes of locations in France.
Deeply distressed by her wartime experiences, especially the deaths of both her brothers on army service in north Africa in 1941–2, by war's end Wynne-Jones was emotionally and creatively depleted, unable to paint or compose. After working in several bookshops to gain experience, she bought and managed a bookshop in Fulham, west London (1946–50), but failed to succeed financially. (A handsome allowance afforded her freedom over the years to pursue varied interests and changes of direction.) Selling the shop and resuming her painting, she studied at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, London (1951–2), where she first worked in oils, and as a non-degree student at Chelsea School of Art (1952–5); her prevalent style was an abstract formalism. Captivated by the brilliant southern light she encountered on travels to Portugal and Italy, in the former country in 1954 she painted naturalistic landscapes with watercolour sticks. Leaving the Chelsea school on the retirement of her chief instructor, for two years she painted independently in the house she owned in Chelsea.
Her Portugal watercolours having germinated the idea of painting landscape in an abstract manner, she followed the suggestion of her former lover, the English painter Derek Middleton (1928–2002) – with whom her 'tenuous kind of affair' (Fallon, 38) had ended unhappily – that she develop the idea by studying under the renowned Cornish painter Peter Lanyon (1918–64). Arriving in St Ives in spring 1957, she enrolled for a fortnight's study in Lanyon's informal art school, St Peter's Loft; seduced by the informal camaraderie and creative fellowship she found within the St Ives artists' colony, she remained in Cornwall for the next fifteen years. She learned much under Lanyon's tutelage about the technical craft of painting, and benefited especially from his unorthodox, experiential and liberating teaching methods: practical exercises intended to stimulate a visceral feeling of space, and to free visual artists from received conventions of perception. Though Lanyon avoided imposing a style on his students, encouraging them to represent how they individually perceived the world, his charisma wove a spell over Wynne-Jones (as over many of his students), inducing her to emulate, with mixed results, his style of landscape-based abstract expressionism. Only rarely executing a Lanyonesque landscape to her own satisfaction, she encountered technical difficulties in handling Lanyon's system of spiral space, and a more fundamental incompatibility between her own artistic temperament and Lanyon's project of creating landscape images that represented not a single view but a synthesis of an entire region, incorporating vistas from multiple viewpoints, and expressing the entire experience of being in a place, being invested with multiple layers of historical, mythic, and personal meaning. By contrast, Wynne-Jones was instinctively drawn to paint particular places, and to capture within an abstracted image the actual shapes and colours and textures that her eyes beheld. Her finest paintings of the period resolve the conflict by tending toward single viewpoint, as in 'Levant' (1959), an unsparingly expressionist depiction of a disused coastal copper mine. Several early attempts to 'twist' a landscape in Lanyon's spiral manner resulted in abstract images that could be interpreted as both landscape and portraiture, as in her large portrait head of Lanyon (1957), the features of which also suggest a coastal headland, cliffs and beach. She worked mostly in oils, on either canvas or board.
The first public exhibition of Wynne-Jones's work was in a group show (1957) at the Pasmore Edwards Gallery, Newlyn, where she exhibited regularly till 1972. She was represented in an exhibition of eleven St Ives artists at the Jefferson Place Gallery, Washington, DC, USA (1959), and in an exhibition of twelve Cornish painters in Falmouth (1960). Her first one-person show was at the New Vision Centre, London (1962), followed by one-person shows in Florence (1963), Dolgellau (1964), and again at the New Vision (1965). After her painting 'Lazarus' was purchased by the Arts Council of Great Britain, she was included in an exhibition, 'The Arts Council as patron', in the council's London gallery (1962). Throughout the 1960s she was represented in other group shows in Britain, Italy, Belgium and Germany.
After living and working alone in the Battery, an isolated former coastguard station that she rented from 1958 on the Island of St Ives, in 1962 she bought Trevaylor, a large, rambling country house with outbuildings on ten acres of gardens and woods on the edge of open moorland near Penzance. Living and working on the property, she provided accommodation and studios, at low or no rents, to other artists, including the Irish painter Tony O'Malley (qv). An especial recipient of her hospitality was the indigent Scottish poet W. S. 'Sydney' Graham (1918–86), who lived rent-free with his wife in the Trevaylor lodge house, and afterwards till his death in a house bought for him by Wynne-Jones (who also provided him anonymously with a weekly allowance). Graham's being an open marriage, he and Wynne-Jones were intermittent lovers till the mid 1960s. In 1964, O'Malley was visited at Trevaylor by a young Irish artist, Conor Fallon (qv). Emotionally devastated by Lanyon's coincidental death following a gliding accident, Wynne-Jones found consolation in Fallon's empathetic company. The following year Fallon moved to Trevaylor, and the couple married in 1966. Wynne-Jones executed a series of expressionist landscapes based on oil-pastel drawings that she made during their honeymoon in Provence. In 1970 they adopted two young siblings, a boy (aged three) and a girl (aged one).
In the decade after Lanyon's death, Wynne-Jones pursued a lengthy search for a personal artistic style, experimenting with different subjects, materials and techniques. She worked briefly in the mid 1960s with both spray-gun painting and egg tempura, before adopting acrylics, which became her dominant medium for the rest of her career, the fast-drying property of acrylic relative to oil paints suiting her predilection for incessant reworking of a painting. She did a series of large, figurative abstracts based on classical and Celtic mythological subjects. All the while she painted small, spontaneous landscapes in either watercolour or oil pastel, but regarded such quickly executed and largely representational pieces as incidental to her central concerns as an executor of large, carefully considered, and meticulously worked abstract compositions. At her first one-person show in Ireland, at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin (1970), she exhibited large works on mythological and literary themes in a gaunt, sombre style influenced by German expressionism (none of which sold), and some fifty small, unframed pastel landscapes in a fresh, direct painterly manner (all of which sold).
In 1972 she moved with her family to Kinsale, Co. Cork. For a period both before and after the move she worked primarily in still life, a genre amenable to a domestic-bound lifestyle dominated by caring for young children. Inspired initially by patterns on Persian tiles (as seen in reproduction), she executed flat compositions in high colours, moving from wavy and striped patterns to cubistic treatments, her subjects being flowers, domestic objects and musical instruments. She exhibited such works at her first two shows after moving to Ireland, at the Emmet Gallery, Dublin (1975 and 1977).
In the late 1970s Wynne-Jones returned to landscape, developing a mature style that allowed full expression of her artistic instincts and personal vision. Distancing herself from the school of Lanyonesque Cornish abstraction and the theoretical underpinnings of her own early work, she executed large landscapes depicting one place from a single viewpoint. While driving her children to school in Bandon, she observed landscape subjects that she would depict in small, quick, on-the-spot drawings in water-based pastel on paper. In the studio she then would either paint over such a drawing in acrylic to create a finished work, or employ the drawing as a study for a large painting (usually 4 by 5ft (1.22 by 1.52 m) in acrylic on either canvas or board. Farm gates framing a drive were a recurring motif of this 'Road to Bandon' series, and revived a compositional device of her Cornish oeuvre: a road leading into a landscape, creating a sense of depth in the painting. Kinsale harbour and other south Cork estuaries were also favourite subjects. Two of her finest large paintings of the period, both highly abstracted acrylics on board, were 'Summer river' (1984) and 'The edge of the tide' (1984; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork).
Concurrent with her resumption of painting landscape, she also returned to musical composition; the two activities were creatively linked, her music being pictorial evocations in sound of specific landscapes, and her paintings being abstract lyrical renditions of landscapes, using colour and form as a composer uses notes. Two of her compositions for small orchestra were performed in the 'Peppercannister' church, Dublin, as part of the Carrolls Summer Music festival, conducted by Colman Pearce: 'Two landscapes' (1985), a piece evocative of the Kinsale estuary; and 'Dreaming in wild country' (1987), evoking childhood summers in north Wales.
For the remainder of her painting career Wynne-Jones maintained the working methods and abstract expressionist landscape style that she developed in the 1970s, her larger canvases and boards tending to be more thoroughly worked and more highly abstracted than her smaller paintings on paper. Her work was periodically reinvigorated, not by further stylistic experimentation or innovation, but by the new ideas inspired by her fortuitous discoveries of new landscapes to paint. Having artistically explored the lush, gentle valleys and indented coasts of south Munster, she moved to the mountains and woods of Wicklow, and finally to the ragged coastline and barren bogs of north Mayo. A frequent Wicklow subject was Ballinacor, a mountain visible from her studio window at Ballard House, near Rathdrum (her family home from 1987 until her death), which she rendered in different seasons, weathers, and times of day. Another recurring subject was the pond at Ballard, especially in autumn. Her palette was brightened by regular painting visits to France (1980s–90s), and to South Africa (1998).
Exhibiting during the 1980s at the Lincoln and Hendricks galleries in Dublin, from 1990 she was represented by the Taylor Galleries, where she had several one-person shows. She continued to participate in group exhibitions, in Ireland, Britain, Spain, Holland, South Africa, and the USA. A 1992 career retrospective, including work from her Cornwall, Kinsale and Rathdrum periods, opened at the Boole Library, UCC, and then toured Ireland, running concurrently in both Galway and Dublin with an exhibition of her new work.
A late bloomer, who only achieved a mature personal style in her 50s, Wynne-Jones attained her best work in her 70s, upon discovering the spacious coastal and interior landscapes of Co. Mayo. Awarded a resident fellowship by the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, she worked during parts of three successive years (1994–6) at the foundation's centre in Ballycastle, on the north Mayo coast, and in subsequent years worked in rented accommodation at Enniscoe House. Captivated by the Mayo bogs – vast stretches of flat land, multi-coloured and multi-textured, both solid in substance and ephemeral, bordered by distant mountains, and exuding a sense of immense, primeval space, 'like the beginning of the world, before man was thought of' (quoted in Fallon, 205) – she was seized by an urge to 'possess' such a terrain by capturing it in paint. Achieving a remarkable, rhapsodic synthesis of close outward observation and the painterly freedom of abstract expressionism – the broad simplification of form, the gestural brushwork that pursues its own energy and direction – she produced works that seemed to emerge organically from the landscape itself. The paintings in her acclaimed exhibition 'I sing thy praise Mayo' (2002), which included both small works on paper and large works on canvas, were described by poet Seamus Heaney as 'place and palette and spirit, all equal' (Fallon, 142).
Always an individualist, what the French would call an 'independent', Wynne-Jones devised her own original synthesis of depiction and abstraction, fully aware of all the artistic trends contemporary with her long career, but forging her own style in accord with her own vision. She was elected an honorary member of the RHA (1994), and a member of Aosdána (1996). She died 9 November 2006 at her home in Co. Wicklow, and was buried in the churchyard at Ballinatone (Church of Ireland), Greenane, Rathdrum.