Confining herself for the most part to portraits and interiors, Gwen John was an intimist whose work neither grew nor deepened, but nonetheless possessed great painterly sophistication and psychological nuance, as is evident in Girl with a Blue Scarf. Although she had only one solo exhibition during her lifetime, her work was sufficiently well-known to be included in the 1913 Armory Show in New York and to earn her financial support from the important collector of avant-garde art John Quinn. While women contemporaries in France, Russia, Germany, and Poland were breaking away from domestic subject matter and pioneering abstraction, John quietly pursued her own path and was not alone in her generation. One of the consequences of ignoring representational painting is the exclusion from art history of a significant proportion of the most accomplished women painters of the period.