Nancy Wynne-Jones was a British painter known for her abstract landscape scenes. Born in Wales in 1922, Wynne-Jones displayed an appreciation of the arts from an early age. A musician from a young age, she practised composition and the violin as a teenager before entering the Royal Academy of Music in 1940. During World War II, Wynne-Jones volunteered for the Ordnance Survey as part of the war effort before leaving the Royal Academy of Music. She ran the Forum bookshop in Fulham, London, after the end of the war, a personal venture rather than a financial one. In 1952, after having amassed a large library of personal art books whilst exploring the life of a bibliophile, Wynne-Jones enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art where she began her exploration of art and painting.
Allured by the freedom of abstract expressionism, Wynne-Jones moved to St Ives to continue her artistic studies under the guidance of great artists of the eponymous movement. The rugged landscape of Cornwall inspired the work of Wynne-Jones beyond compare. Her paintings, whether bright or sombre, captured the spirit of her surroundings with careful consideration despite their free flowing forms. In 1962, Wynne-Jones bought a large country house near Penzance, turning its many rooms into studios in order to provide a stimulating environment for artists in which to live and work. Many artists, painters, writers and poets alike, found solace in the house and grounds of the house named ‘Trevaylor’. After her success supporting young creatives in Cornwall, Wynne-Jones moved to County Cork, Ireland in 1972 to support her young, growing family. Following a further move to County Wicklow in 1988, the influence of the surrounding landscape was evident in her increasingly popular work. Ireland proved to be a strong influence on her work, with the changing seasons, colours and textures of the environment around Wynne-Jones inspiring her late work which combined her previous exploration of expressionism and figuration with a new desire to convey atmospheric sensations. The artist died in 2006.