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Ruth Vance
Ruth Vance

Ruth Vance, 1929–2007. The estate holds the majority of the surviving work.

1929–2007 · British

Ruth Vance

Ruth Vance was born in Salford in 1929 and moved to London in 1951, taking a studio above a printworks in Bermondsey that she kept for the rest of her life.

She painted figures in rooms. Almost never landscapes, almost never groups. A single body, held inside a drawn armature, on a ground of one flat colour — a format she arrived at around 1958 and did not substantially leave for fifty years.

Vance worked from photographs rather than from life, and from her own reference files rather than commissioned sittings. She rarely titled a work beyond its subject and a number, and she destroyed a great deal. The catalogue raisonné compiled by the estate lists 214 surviving paintings.

She showed infrequently and sold reluctantly. The estate was established in 2009 and holds the majority of the surviving work.

Selected exhibitions

  • London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Ruth Vance: Paintings, 1961.
  • London, Whitechapel Gallery, Six Painters, 1966.
  • Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Ruth Vance: Figures in Rooms, 1978.
  • London, Serpentine Gallery, Ruth Vance: A Retrospective, 1994–1995.
  • New York, The Estate of Ruth Vance, Ruth Vance: The Late Rooms, 2019.

Provenance and due diligence

All works in this catalogue have been checked against the Art Loss Register and the FBI National Stolen Art File. Works with an incomplete chain of custody across 1933–1945 are withheld from publication pending clearance.

“I am not interested in what a face looks like. I am interested in what it does to the room it is in.”