Rebecca John

UK

Born 1947

Rebecca John was drawn into painting plants thanks to her research on still-life paintings for three books by Elizabeth David, a collaboration that inspired her to pursue botanical subjects. She started painting these in 1984, later attending a course taught by Anne-Marie Evans at the English Gardening School in 1994. In 1996 she was curator of a magnificent touring exhibition of her grandfather Augustus John's drawings; she also wrote a biography of her father, Admiral Sir Caspar John (1987). Rebecca John lives in London and spends time in her studio in mid-Wales where she likes to paint wild subject matter from the landscape: tree branches covered with lichens, bracken, grasses and fungi. In a masterly introduction to her first solo exhibition of botanical paintings at the Lefevre Gallery, London, Grey Gowrie compared her work with that of Rory McEwen. Rebecca has exhibited widely in the UK, US, Japan and Italy and her work is represented in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and in private collections worldwide. In 2020 her book 'Thinking The Plant' was published by Pimpernel Press.