Gwen John

Gwendolen Mary John (June 22, 1876 – September 18, 1939) was a Welsh artist.

Life
She was born in Haverfordwest, Wales, the second of four children of Edwin William John and his wife Augusta (née Smith). Edwin John was a solicitor whose dour temperament cast a chill over his family, and Augusta was often absent from the children due to ill health, leaving her two sisters—stern Salvationists—to take her place in the household. Despite the considerable tension in the family (who became known as "those turbulent Johns") the children's interest in literature and art was encouraged. Following the mother’s premature death in 1884, the family moved to Tenby in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Although Gwen John painted and drew from an early age, her earliest surviving work dates from her nineteenth year. From 1895–98, she studied at the Slade School of Art, where her younger brother, Augustus John, had begun his studies in 1894. During this period they shared living quarters, and further reduced their expenses by subsisting on a diet of nuts and fruit. Even as a student, Augustus' brilliant draftssmanship and personal glamor made him a celebrity, and stood in contrast to Gwen's quieter gifts and reticent demeanor. While he greatly admired her art, Augustus offered her advice which she ignored; he urged her to take a "more athletic attitude to life", and cautioned her against what he saw as the "unbecoming and unhygienic negligence" of her mode of living, but her entire life was marked by a disregard for her physical well-being. 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 the Académie Carmen. She returned to London in 1899, and spent the next four years in austere circumstances. When she exhibited her work for the first time in 1900, at the New English Art Club (NEAC), her address was a derelict building where she was living illegally.

In the autumn of 1903, she traveled to France with her friend Dorelia McNeill (who would later become Augustus John's second wife). 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. In 1904 the two went to Paris, where John found work as an artist's model; in that same year, she began modeling for the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and became his lover. Her passion for the much older Rodin, who was the most famous artist of his time, continued unabated for the next ten years, as documented in her thousands of fervent letters to him. Rodin, despite his genuine feeling for her, eventually resorted to the use of concièrges and secretaries to keep her at a distance.

Despite Gwen John's outwardly quiet manner, she was strong-willed and passionate, given to fierce attachments to both men and women that were sometimes disturbing to them. In an often-quoted letter she wrote ca. 1912 she speaks of her "desire for a more interior life", and in another undated letter she writes: "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." She wished also to avoid family ties; her decision to live in France may have been the result of her desire to escape the overpowering personality of her famous brother, although, as art historian David Fraser Jenkins has written, "there were few occasions when she did anything against her will, and she was the more ruthless and dominating of the two." While living in Paris she did not isolate herself, however, and she met many of the leading artistic personalities of her time, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

From 1910 she lived in Meudon, a suburb of Paris where she would remain for the rest of her life; in 1926 she purchased a bungalow there. She 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. As her affair with Rodin drew to a close she sought comfort in Catholicism, and around 1913 she was received into the Church. As an obligation to the Dominican Sisters of Charity at Meudon, she began a series of painted portraits of Mère Marie Poussepin (1653–1744), who founded 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.

She 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. She had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime, in London in 1926. In that same year she met Véra Oumançoff, sister-in-law of Jacques Maritain, and began a romantic relationship with her which lasted until Oumançoff, finding John's attentions oppressive, terminated it in 1930.

Her last dated work is a drawing of March 20, 1933, and no evidence suggests that she drew or painted during the remainder of her life. On September 10, 1939, she wrote her will and then traveled to Dieppe, where she collapsed and was hospitalized. She died there on September 18, 1939.

Art
Gwen John's work consists almost entirely of small-scale portraits and still lifes. Her portraits (usually of anonymous sitters) favored seated women in a three-quarter length format, with their hands in their laps. John painted slowly, often returning to a theme repeatedly. She preferred painting of reduced tone and subtle color relationships, in contrast to her brother's far more vivid palette. In addition to studio work, she made many sketches and watercolors of women and children in church. Unlike her oil paintings of solitary women, these sketches frequently depict their subjects from behind, and in groups. She also made many sketches of her cats. Aside from two etchings she drew in 1910, she made no prints.

Though she was once overshadowed by her popular brother, critical opinion now tends to view Gwen as the more talented of the two. Augustus himself had predicted this reversal, saying "In 50 years' time I will be known as the brother of Gwen John."

Legacy
John's pictures have been placed in many public collections, with some of the best examples in the National Gallery of Wales and the Tate Gallery.

Still Lives, by Candida Cave, is a three woman play about Gwen, Ida (Augustus John's wife) and Dorelia (Augustus John's mistress).