Born as the illegitimate daughter to the musician Nora Brownsford and the artist Augustus John, she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art and later the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Gwyneth Johnstone was born on 18 June 1915 in the Norfolk village of Coltishall;[1] she always concealed her actual birth date.
[3] Her mother gave her daughter the allusive surname of Johnstone from a tutor at Alderney and raised her with a distance relationship with her father in Norwich and London.
[4] Afterwards Johnstone was taught academicised cubism by the painter André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière,[1][4] and for a brief period in the early 1950s, she took life classes with the surrealist artist Cecil Collins at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.
[6][7][8][9] Johnson was influenced by the Virgilian woodcuts of William Blake, the intense landscapes of Shoreman's primitives and chapbooks.