Woman in Hat and Scarf is one of the small-scale drawings that Gwen John made in her local church in Meudon. It depicts the back view of a woman and a young girl in church. The figure of the child is partially cropped from view at the right-hand edge, with only the head and upper back visible. The same composition was used in two other drawings by John. An initial pencil drawing—possibly made from life in church or copied from a life drawing—was subsequently overlaid with transparent and semi-transparent washes of watercolour and bodycolour, probably in the artist’s studio. The vivid silhouette of the figures and the restricted range of colour reflect John’s appreciation of Japanese graphic art, which played an important role in the formation of her limpid, schematically simplified idiom in the nineteen-tens and twenties. The use of absorbent paper was key to the success of her drawings. She explained in 1925: ‘I had a little Japanese paper […] it is so exquisite for my drawings. The colour doesn’t run into each other. The paper absorbs the colour and each touch of the brush has to be final, no retouching can be done.’ Regarding the date of this and other comparable works, the art historian Mary Taubman wrote: ‘The hundreds of studies made by Gwen John in church cannot be dated with precision.’

Gwen John was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1913 and from that time many of her subjects were connected to the church—whether intimate scenes of prayer or singing during services or portraits of the local Dominican sisters of charity. In 1927, John wrote a draft letter to her friend and neighbour Véra Oumançoff explaining her desire to make these small-scale pictures of congregants in the church:

"[…] I’m going to continue to draw at Vespers, evening services and retreats […]. Like everyone else I like to pray in church, but my spirit is not able to pray for a long time at a stretch. Now those moments where it looks at exterior things have become so long that not much time is left for prayer. The orphans with those black hats with white ribbons and their black dresses with little white collars charm me, and the others charm me in church. If I cut off all that there would not be enough happiness in my life."

In her letters and writings, John consistently referred to works on paper—whatever their medium—as ‘drawings’. She also once referred to them as ‘little drawings in colour’, and at one point instructed herself to cease ‘drawing in colour’. She held these works in high regard and bridled in 1916 when her patron John Quinn suggested that the drawings were ‘not such serious work as [the] paintings’. As John wrote, ‘the truth is they are quite as serious!’ Later her drawings apparently attained divine sanction. In a private memorandum, she wrote: ‘Je suis l’enfant de l’Enfant Jésus. He has told me to do my drawings and not to trouble about people.’

Woman in Hat and Scarf was in the possession of Gwen John at the time of her death. Her estate was represented by Matthiesen Gallery, London, between 1940 and its closure in 1963, and that gallery catalogued her work. Paintings and drawings were ascribed P.J. and E.J. numbers respectively. Woman in Hat and Scarf was catalogued as E.J. 918, which number is inscribed on the reverse of the sheet. Anthony d’Offay represented the artist’s estate from 1977 and he sold this drawing to Jessica Clarke-Hall in 1982.