Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1875 Ghent, Belgium

Died: 1937 Deurle, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium

Year of Migration to the UK: 1914

Other name/s: Jeanne Montigny

Biography

Impressionist painter Jenny Montigny was born in Ghent, Belgium on 8 December 1875 to a Belgian father and a mother of English descent. From 1895 she took lessons in painting from Émile Claus. Although he was already married and many years her senior, they began a relationship that lasted until his death in 1924. In 1902 Montigny first exhibited at the Ghent Salon, followed by shows in Paris. In 1904 she was a founding member of the Vie et Lumière, an artists’ group which would lend its name to the Luminist movement of the early twentieth century which combined Impressionism and pointillism to create a particular feeling of light within landscape painting. In the same year she left Ghent to seek an independent, yet uncertain existence in Deurle.

Shortly after her father’s death, and at the outbreak of the First World War, Montigny moved to London, where she registered as an artiste-peintre in the Central Register of Belgian Refugees on 29th November 1914. It is often erroneously reported that she deliberately followed Claus end his wife to England, although they both arrived in London in the following month, remaining there only for a few weeks before travelling to Wales. However, Montigny and Claus would most certainly meet in the following year, as suggested by a sketch of Claus made by Montigny on Hampstead Heath. Montigny’s London years were crucial for her further artistic development. She settled in Carlyle studios, on King’s Road in Chelsea, occupied by a number of international artists, including the Canadian, Florence Carlyle. Montigny became a member of the Women's International Art Club, founded in 1900 with the aim of offering women the chance to exhibit their work in annual exhibitions of paintings and sculpture, and showed under their auspices at the Grafton Galleries.

While in England, Montigny primarily painted near Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. She also produced engravings of park scenes, as well as sketches and drawings of wounded Belgian soldiers and medical personnel at King Albert’s Hospitals. The year after her arrival, she participated in the War Relief Exhibition of the Belgian Section in Aid of Belgian Artists at the Royal Academy of Arts. Illustrations of her paintings were included, alongside those of other Belgian refugee artists, in A Book of Belgium's Gratitude (1916), comprising literary articles by representative Belgians and published with the aim of expressing their thanks to the English nation. An exhibition of the paintings illustrated in the book was held at the Knoedler Galleries in the same year. Montigny also exhibited at the Dowdeswell Gallery (known for presenting impressionist works), the Camera Club and the New English Art Club (NEAC).

Montigny returned to Deurle in 1919. Her years in London, as she later declared, cost her a ‘fortune’ and in 1920 she was forced to sell her house, ‘Rustoord’, to move to a modest cottage on the banks of the Lys river in Deurle. After the unexpected death of Emile Claus in 1924, her life became more difficult, especially financially. In a 1927 letter to art critic and friend, Sander Pierron, she described the emotional and artistic isolation she was experiencing: ‘I feel it all the more because, for the first time, I face the public on my own responsibility and the death of my master leaves me very distraught’ (Jenny Montigny website). Although she held a number of individual exhibitions in Brussels and took part in the exhibitions of the local Cercle Artistique et Littéraire, she was unable to find buyers for her paintings and continued to face material uncertainty. Jenny Montigny died of cancer, in her cottage in Deurle, France on 31 October 1937. In the UK public domain her work is represented in the print collection of the V&A, London.

Related books

Martin Hopkinson, Belgian Prints in Britain During World War I, Print Quarterly Vol. 33, No. 4 (December 2016), pp. 415-426
Denis Laoureux, Véronique Carpiaux and Barbara Caspers, Femmes Artistes: les Peintresses en Belgique (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2016)
Marie-Hélène Wibo, Jenny Montigny 1875-1937: Lumières Impressionnistes (Charleroi Musées des Beaux-Arts, 1997)
'A Book of Belgium's Gratitude', The Times, 21 December 1915, p. 8

Public collections

Related organisations

New English Art Club (exhibitor)
Women's International Art Club (exhibitor)

Selected exhibitions

Knoedler Galleries, London (1916)
War Relief Exhibition of the Belgian Section in Aid of Belgian Artists, Royal Academy of Arts, London(1915)
Women's International Art Club, Grafton Galleries, London (c. 1915-19)
Camera Club, London (c. 1915-19)
Dowdeswell Gallery, London (c. 1915-19)
New English Art Club, London (c. 1915-19)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jenny Montigny]