Winifred Coombe Tennant: A life through art

An exhibition of works from the collection of Winifred Coombe Tennant, one of Wales' most significant art patrons of the twentieth century. The exhibition is curated by Peter Lord and includes works by Evan Walters, Kyffin Williams, Gwen John and John Elwyn from both private and public collections.

Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874–1956) was more closely involved with the evolution of Welsh visual culture than any other patron of the twentieth century. This exhibition celebrates Winifred’s love of pictures, artefacts, and the painters and craftspeople who made them. Most of the works come from her own collection, to which have been added others acquired for public collections through her good offices, and some comparative material. Almost all the works were made by artists whom she knew personally, as the quotations from her diaries and letters, which accompany many of them, demonstrate.

Winifred’s patronage of painters and craftspeople was fundamentally important in her life. Nevertheless, she was a complex person, involved in a wide range of activities. Winifred was a political activist. She campaigned for women’s suffrage and for Welsh home rule, and she took a radical position in public on many social issues. After the Great War, during the last years of the coalition government of David Lloyd George, she was a frequent visitor to 10 Downing Street, and she stood for parliament in 1922. She was active in the movement for international peace, and represented Britain as a delegate to the League of Nations. She was among the first women magistrates to be appointed.

Side by side with her public life, Winifred’s inner world was truly remarkable. It was dominated by religious experience. She was a devout Christian, much attracted to the practice of the Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox churches, but also with a sincere respect for Nonconformist tradition. Furthermore, she was a spiritual medium, who experienced vivid trance-like states which led her to believe firmly in the continuity of the life of the individual after death.