There are a few better examples of the tendency to see female artists’ work through an overly biographical lens than the case of Gwen John. Her best-known paintings – quiet interiors often featuring solitary women as subjects – have fostered a myth of the reclusive artist for whom external location was irrelevant.
“The chairs and curtains and all other paraphernalia are often written about as idiosyncrasies of hers,” explains Alicia Foster, author of a new book about John and curator of the first major UK show of her work for nearly 20 years. “But artists such as Paul Cézanne, whom she adored, and Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard also adopted similar setups at the same time. And while John’s painting of a woman in a room is supposedly indicative of a lonely female artist who doesn’t go out much, the work of Cézanne and the others apparently says all sorts of interesting things about art. It’s a lazy reading. John was active in two of the great centres of art when they were at their most vibrant. What is actually important about her work is not her isolation, it is her connections.”
Foster’s book, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, and the show of the same name at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, bring together a comprehensive selection of work from John’s 40-year career plus other artists she operated alongside. There is her elder brother, Augustus, and lesser-known female artists from her time at Slade School of Fine Art as well as the more famous men in her life such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who taught John, and Auguste Rodin, for whom she modelled and with whom she had a 10-year affair.
Born in 1867 and brought up in Tenby, Wales, Gwen followed Augustus to London and art school when she was 18. Although a talented student who won prizes, she told her brother that her life in London felt somehow “subterranean” and it wasn’t until she later went to Paris that she “came into the light”. There she mixed with other artists and absorbed contemporary thinking and practice. She was also certain of her talent and was remarkable for the time as a woman who didn’t come from great wealth but who nevertheless built a a career in art, largely on her own terms. Towards the end of her life she embraced an ardent Catholicism, dying in 1939.
“Of course, being Rodin’s lover is not uninteresting,” Foster says. “But the relationship between their work, especially their drawings, is also fascinating. Placing her in the context of what was going on among her contemporaries, the people she knew and admired, opens up connections that cast light on her work. She was part of the art world and can be read in terms of art history rather than the product of someone working in isolation. If Gwen John had ever wanted to be a reclusive artist, there were better places to go than turn-of-the-century London and Paris.”
Portraits from an artist: four works by Gwen John
Woman Dressing, c1907
The interior was a fashionable subject of the time, redolent of symbolism and ideas about the interior life. The model is Hilda Flodin, a Finnish artist. Here, Foster says, John places Flodin firmly in the room. “The weight of the table is echoed by her dark skirt; there’s a tonal harmony, with the body and the environment reflecting each other.”
Landscape at Tenby With Figures, c1896/7 (main picture)
This painting, the earliest oil in the exhibition, was painted during a return visit to Tenby when John was on holiday from her studies. The tall girl in the hat in the foreground is her sister Winifred. The painting’s shadowy tonal composition is an early indication both of John’s awareness of contemporary trends as well as her precocity.
Autoportrait à la Lettre, c1907-9
Many of John’s paintings feature books, and writing was important to her, including a series of letters to Rodin in which she adopted an alternative persona. John gave this painting to Rodin and here she brings together her writing life and her painting life to in effect declare: “This is me.”
Mère Poussepin, 1915-20
This portrait of a nun who founded a religious community in the 17th century was copied from a prayer card. Foster says John was “always searching for grandeur. She had that grandeur in her personal life with Rodin, she had it in her art, and eventually she found it in her spiritual life, too.”
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 13 May to 8 October. Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris by Alicia Foster is published by Thames & Hudson.
