John Wells was born in 1907 in Ashtead, Surrey, and trained first as a medical doctor at University College Hospital in London. Alongside his scientific studies, he developed a deep and enduring commitment to painting, dividing his time between medicine and art throughout the 1930s. In 1939 he moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where he became closely associated with the community of artists that gathered there during the war years, including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. He married the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in 1949; the marriage was later dissolved, but Cornwall remained central to his life and work.
Wells’s early paintings were rooted in landscape, particularly the coast and granite formations around West Penwith. Over time his work moved between representation and abstraction, informed both by the structure of the Cornish landscape and by his analytical training as a doctor. A member of the Penwith Society of Arts, he was part of the development of British modernism in St Ives, contributing to a language of painting that balanced formal clarity with a strong sense of place. Throughout his career, Wells maintained a thoughtful dialogue between observation and construction, the physical world and the inner logic of form.