Jeanne Reynal


Jeanne Reynal was an American mosaic artist. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her personal papers from 1942 to 1968 are included in the Archives of American Art.

Biography

Reynal was born in 1903 in White Plains, New York. She was the second of five children. When Reynal was nine years old, her parents separated. She moved to Millbrook, New York with her father where she was taught by a governess. Her other siblings continued to live with her mother.
At the age of twenty-four, Reynal spent a summer to England, France, and Italy with her siblings and her mother. It was during this trip that Reynal first met the Russian mosaicist Boris Anrep. Two years later, Reynal began an apprenticeship with Anrep in Europe after assisting him with a mosaic he installed in the Bank of England. The two also became romantically involved until Anrep left Reynal for a wealthy Englishwoman. The two only saw each other once after this separation.
Reynal left Paris in 1937 and moved to California, where she worked in a potting shed in Marin County. She then moved to the High Sierras, where she built a house and studio.
In 1946, she moved to Greenwich Village, New York.
She married the painter Thomas Sills in 1953.