Gwendolen "Gwen" Mary John (22 June 1876 – 18 September 1939) was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Her paintings, mainly portraits of anonymous female sitters, are rendered in a range of closely related tones. Although in her lifetime, John's work was overshadowed by that of her brother Augustus and her mentor and lover Auguste Rodin, awareness and esteem for John's artistic contributions has grown considerably since her death.
Early life
Gwen John was born in Haverfordwest, Wales, the second of four children of Edwin William John and his wife Augusta (, 1848–1884). Augusta came from a long line of Sussex master plumbers. Gwen's elder brother was Thornton John; her younger siblings were Augustus and Winifred. Edwin John was a solicitor whose dour temperament cast a chill over his family, and Augusta was often absent from the children owing to ill health, leaving her two sisters—stern Salvationists—to take her place in the household.Langdale 1987, p. 3. Augusta was an amateur watercolour painter, and both parents encouraged the children's interest in literature and art.Langdale 1987, p. 4.
Her mother died when Gwen was eight years old. Regarding her mother's death and the loss of her influence, John's brother Augustus later wrote: "My mother would no doubt have been helpful, but she died when I was a small child, after, I fear, a very tearful existence."Tamboukou, p. 4.
Following their mother's premature death in 1884, the family moved to Tenby in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where governesses provided the early education of Gwen and her sister Winifred.Langdale 1987, p. 5. The siblings often went to the coast of Tenby to sketch. John said that she would make "rapid drawings of beached gulls, shells and fish on stray pieces of paper, or sometimes in the frontispiece of the book she was reading." Although John painted and drew from an early age, her earliest surviving work was made at age 19.Langdale 1987, p. 7.
Education From 1895 to 1898, John studied at the Slade School of Art, where the programme was modelled after the French atelier method with various levels of student working under a master artist.Foster 1999, p. 10. It was the only art school in the United Kingdom that allowed female students, although there was generally no mixing of men and women on the grounds, in classes, or in corridors.Tamboukou pp. 4–5. Like her younger brother, Augustus, who was enrolled there starting in 1894,Langdale; Jenkins; John 1986, p. 9. John studied figure drawing under Henry Tonks.Uglow, p. 284. During this period, she and Augustus shared living quarters, and further reduced their expenses by subsisting on a diet of nuts and fruit. She developed a close relationship with the woman who would become her brother's wife, Ida Nettleship. At this time, she also had a relationship with another of her brother's friends, Ambrose McEvoy, which turned out to be an unhappy one.Langdale 1987, p. 22. Good friends also included Ursula Tyrwhitt and Gwen Salmond.Tamboukou, p. 5. John won the Melvill Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition in her final year at Slade.
Slade students were encouraged to copy the works of old masters in London museums. John's early paintings, such as Portrait of Mrs. Atkinson, Young Woman with a Violin and Interior with Figures, are intimist works painted in a traditional style characterised by subdued colour and transparent glazes.Langdale 1987, p. 9. Even as a student, Augustus's brilliant draughtsmanship and personal glamour made him a celebrity, and stood in contrast to Gwen's quieter gifts and reticent demeanour. Augustus greatly admired his sister's work but believed she neglected her health, and he urged her to take a "more athletic attitude to life". She refused his advice, and demonstrated throughout her life a marked disregard for her physical well-being.Langdale 1987, p. 14.
In 1898 she made her first visit to Paris with two friends from the Slade, and while there she studied under James McNeill Whistler at his school, Académie Carmen. She returned to London in 1899 and exhibited her work for the first time in 1900, at the New English Art Club (NEAC).Foster 1999, p. 77. With Arthur Ambrose McEvoy becoming engaged to Mary Edwards at the end of 1900, "an awkward period ensued with Gwen living at the McEvoy family home in Bayswater", where "she had continued living", "while Ambrose and Mary moved down to Shrivenham in Oxfordshire" in around 1903.Augustus John: The New Biography (1996), Sir Michael Holroyd, loc.2961
France and early career In late 1903, she travelled to France with her friend Dorelia McNeill (who was Augustus John's lover; their daughter, Vivien John, would also become an artist). When she first arrived in France, she lived in poverty, living on a diet of mostly figs and bread.The Sphere, Saturday 14 June 1952 – https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0001861/19520614/039/0040 Upon landing in Bordeaux, they set off on a walking tour with their art equipment in hand, intending to reach Rome. Sleeping in fields and living on money earned along the way by selling portrait sketches, they made it as far as Toulouse.Langdale 1987, p. 24.
In 1904, the two went to Paris, where John found work as an artist's model, mostly for women artists. In that same year, she began modelling for the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and became his lover after being introduced by Hilda Flodin. Rodin used John as a model for a muse in his unfinished monument to Whistler. Her devotion to Rodin, the most famous artist of his time, who was 35 years older than her, continued unabated for the next ten years, as documented in her thousands of fervent letters to him. John was given to fierce attachments to both men and women that were sometimes disturbing to them,Langdale 1987, p. 15. and Rodin, despite his genuine feeling for her, eventually resorted to the use of concièrges and secretaries to keep her at a distance.Langdale 1987, pp. 31–33.
During her years in Paris, she met many of the leading artistic personalities of her time, including Matisse, Picasso, Brâncuși, and Rainer Maria Rilke,Foster 1999, p. 29. but the new developments in the art of her time had little effect on her, and she worked in solitude.Langdale; Jenkins; John 1986, p. 17. In 1910, she found living quarters in Meudon, a suburb of Paris where she would remain for the rest of her life. As her affair with Rodin drew to a close, John sought comfort in Roman Catholicism, and around 1913 she was received into the Church.Langdale 1987, p. 50. Her notebooks of the period include meditations and prayers; she wrote of her desire to be "God's little artist"Foster 1999, p. 52. and to "become a saint". In an often-quoted letter of c. 1912, she wrote: "As to whether I have anything worth expressing that is apart from the question. I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life."Langdale; Jenkins; John 1986, p. 12.
Contemporary critics often remarked on the elusive nature of Gwen John's personality; writing in The Sphere in 1952, Sir John Rothenstein described her as inward facing and difficult to grasp, suggesting that her reserved character and withdrawal from artistic fashions contributed to her relative obscurity during her lifetime.The Sphere, Saturday 14 June 1952 – https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0001861/19520614/039/0040
Career
John stopped exhibiting at the NEAC in 1911, but gained an important patron in John Quinn, an American art collector who, from 1910 until his death in 1924, purchased the majority of the works that Gwen John sold.Foster 1999, p. 26. Quinn's support freed John from having to work as a model, and enabled her to devote herself to her work. Although she participated in exhibitions fairly regularly, her perfectionism produced in her a marked ambivalence toward exhibiting. She wrote in 1911: "I paint a good deal, but I don't often get a picture done—that requires, for me, a very long time of a quiet mind, and never to think of exhibitions." In 1913, one of her paintings was included in the seminal Armory Show in New York, which Quinn assisted in organising.Quinn had sent John a telegram requesting "Four (or three) Gwen John"; her reply was "One Gwen John". Schwartz 2001, p. 37.
Her attitude towards her work was both self-effacing and confident. After viewing an exhibition of watercolours by Cézanne she remarked: "These are very good, but I prefer my own."Langdale 1987, p. 1.
About 1913, as an obligation to the Dominican Sisters of Charity at Meudon, she began a series of painted portraits of Mère Marie Poussepin (1653–1744), the founder of their order. These paintings, based on a prayer card, established a format—the female figure in three-quarter length seated pose—which became characteristic of her mature style.Langdale; Jenkins; John 1986, p. 41. She painted numerous variants on such subjects as Young Woman in a Spotted Blue Dress, Girl Holding a Cat and The Convalescent. The identities of most of her models are unknown.
In Meudon John lived in solitude, except for her cats. In an undated letter, she wrote: "I should like to go and live somewhere where I met nobody I know till I am so strong that people and things could not effect me beyond reason."Langdale 1987, p. 2. She wished also to avoid family ties ("I think the family has had its day. We don't go to Heaven in families now but one by one")Schwartz 2001, p. 36. and her decision to live in France after 1903 may have been the result of her desire to escape the overpowering personality of her famous brother, although, according to the art historian David Fraser Jenkins, "there were few occasions when she did anything against her will, and she was the more ruthless and dominating of the two".Langdale; Jenkins; John 1986, p. 36.
John exhibited in Paris for the first time in 1919 at the Salon d'Automne, and exhibited regularly until the mid-1920s, after which time she became increasingly reclusive and painted less.Langdale 1987, p. 80. She had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime, at the New Chenil Galleries in London in 1926.Schwartz 2001, p. 36; Langdale; Jenkins; John 1986, p. 16. In that same year she purchased a bungalow in Meudon. In December 1926, distraught after the death of her old friend Rilke, she met and sought religious guidance from her neighbour, the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. She also met Maritain's sister-in-law, Véra Oumançoff, with whom she formed her last romantic relationship, which lasted until 1930.Langdale 1987, p. 81.
It is not known when Gwen first became involved with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, but before she died, she resigned from her position.Fleetwood Chronicle, Friday 23 September 1938 – https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0003239/19380923/164/0010
John's last dated work is a drawing of 20 March 1933, and no evidence suggests that she drew or painted during the remainder of her life.Langdale 1987, p. 116. On 10 September 1939, she wrote her will and then travelled to Dieppe, where she collapsed and was hospitalised. She died there on 18 September 1939 and was buried in Janval Cemetery. According to Paul Johnson in Art: A New History, "she appears to have starved to death".Johnson, Paul (2003). Art: A New History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p. 675.
Artistic approach
In 1916, John wrote in a letter: "I think a picture ought to be done in 1 sitting or at most 2. For that one must paint a lot of canvases probably and waste them."Foster 1999, p. 58. Her surviving oeuvre is comparatively small, comprising 158 known oil paintingsLangdale 1987, p. 122. which rarely exceed in height or width. The majority are portraits, but she also painted still life compositions, interiors and a few landscapes. John wrote: "...a cat or a man, its the same thing ... its an affair of volumes ... the object is of no importance."