CORNWALL—The Cornwall Library is showing “Jenny Simont Ireland: A Painter’s View,” a selection of vividly expressive still lifes by artist Jenny Ireland (1919–2014) through Saturday, July 6. Her son, Sumner, selected the images.
Genevieve ‘Jenny’ Simont Ireland was born in France of Catalan parents and spent much of her childhood in Paris. Under the influence of her father, José Simont Guillen, a renowned illustrator and French Legion of Honor recipient, she studied art at Académie Julian and the now-defunct Studio Bornet in Paris. She exhibited at age 18 at Gallerie Charpentier, where one of her pictures was acquired by the Musée D’Auxerre in Burgundy.
She spent her early adult years living for long periods in Paris, Barcelona and New York and became fluent in multiple languages.
She painted periodically throughout her life, but never exhibited again with the exceptions of the Friends of Rose Algrant Show in Cornwall every summer since its inception in 1959, and at The Cornwall Library in 2013. When she sold a painting at the Algrant show, she celebrated by taking young Sumner and friends for Italian food and go-karting in Torrington. He remembers that this ritual was repeated most summers.
There were private sales, but the bulk of her many paintings are now adorning the homes of family and friends in places where she lived in Europe and America. She spent an extended period of time in New York beginning in 1968. There she put her proficiency in languages to use in her career managing personal shopping departments for foreign dignitaries at New York retailers including Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue.
She retired to a small house near the coast south of Barcelona where she painted for 25 years and ran a Flamenco Dance Program for castanet virtuoso José de Udaeta. She spent the remainder of her long life in Cornwall near her family. Her brother, celebrated Cornwall artist and illustrator Marc Simont, would often say that no one in their artistic family had a better sense of color than Jenny.
