The Wilfrid de Glehn estate is represented by
David Messum Fine Art Ltd.
London
England
 |
                          |
Oswald von Glehn, fl. 1858-1903
Oenone, 1880
In Oswald von Glehn’s Royal Academy exhibits of 1879 and 1880, Boreas and Orithyia and Oenone, the highly-finished surfaces were essentially in line with Victorian high-classical norms, and he displays a thorough knowledge of the classical sources of his paintings, going so far as to include lengthy citations along with each of them in the catalogue. The degree to which Wilfrid knew and approved of his Uncle Oswald’s subject matter and manner of painting must remain a matter of speculation, though the two men did exhibit works together at a number of New Gallery Summer Exhibitions. Oswald’s general degree of cultivation seems to have been common to much of the von Glehn family but perhaps it was Oswald’s example in particular that led Wilfrid to regard classical literature with such great affection throughout his life. It was in 1917 that the entire von Glehn family changed their name by deed-poll to the less German-sounding ‘de Glehn’.
The Monod family, to whom Wilfrid was related on his mother’s side, was equally artistic and was of French/Swiss Huguenot origins. Lucien Hector Monod, his cousin, was an exquisite draughtsman greatly interested in the prints and drawings of eighteenth-century France. Wilfrid and he shared a flat while the two were students in Paris, and during this time they both spent any spare money on drawings and prints by Watteau and Boucher, then available for very modest prices. The two cousins shared an exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1899 where Lucien’s work was praised for its delicacy. Lucien and his wife, a Scottish-American called Charlotte (Sharlie) Todd Monod, moved to Cannes with their children in 1917, where Wilfrid and Jane visited them on many occasions. Their son, Jacques-Lucien Monod, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, said of his father that he “mixed artistic sensitivity with a prodigious erudition and a passionate concern for intellectual affairs”.
