Famous For: Accomplished artist, sister of Augustus John.
Biography: Gwen John lived in the shadow of her famous bohemian brother Augustus, but is considered by many (even Augustus himself) to be the better artist.
Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan writes:
Of all the artists born and bred in Pembrokeshire, Gwen John and her younger brother, Augustus John, are probably the most famous. But whereas many artists Graham Sutherland, for example, or John Knapp-Fisher, Elizabeth Haines or Linda Norris have been drawn to the area and inspired by it, Gwen and Augustus John moved away. Gwen John was born in 1876 in Haverfordwest, where her father was a respectable solicitor, but the family moved to Tenby following the mothers premature death in 1884, which was a great loss to Gwen John. The atmosphere in the home then became cold and narrow-minded: her father was not very affectionate towards his children. With her mothers death the little girl also lost the encouragement she had had to draw and paint. Augusta John was a talented amateur artist in the conventional style of the time, and it was she, apparently, who gave her elder daughter her first sketchbook.
Gwen John soon realised that girls did not have the same opportunities as boys. Her brother Augustus was sent to a local secondary school and then to a boarding school near Bristol before going on to the Slade School of Art in London. Gwen, in contrast, received no schooling at all; but was kept at home to receive the second-rate, superficial education that was considered suitable for a genteel young lady. It was because of her obstinacy that in 1895, a year after Augustus reached the Slade, Gwen managed to persuade her father to permit her to follow him there. Apart from holidays during her student days, she would never return to Tenby or to Wales. Her time in London had totally changed her life. Not only did she have teachers who took her and her work seriously, but she found herself part of a peer group of talented and enthusiastic young women who supported and encouraged each other in their work. Among them was Ida Nettleship, who married Augustus in 1901. Having once tasted freedom, Gwen could not ever again the oppressive respectability of her home in Tenby.
She left Britain in 1903, in the company of a friend, Dorothy or Dorelia McNeill, Augustuss latest girlfriend. Gwen could not bear the effect this relationship was having on her sister-in-law, so she packed her bags and marched Dorelia off to the continent: they intended to walk to Rome, paying their way by painting. By the autumn, they had reached the south of France and decided to stay in Toulouse until the spring, when they moved to Paris, where it was easy to earn a living as an artists model. For Gwen John and many other creative women from the British Isles and North America, Paris at that time offered the freedom to work and an escape from restricting convention. When Dorelia eventually returned to Britain and Augustus John, Gwen stayed on in Paris, and spent the rest of her life in the city and its environs. On the eve of the Second World War she took the train to Dieppe, died there and was buried without fuss with none of her family present.
Her end was thus in keeping with her life, for Gwen John was a very private person, for whom socialising was not important, but who had very strong inner resources. She devoted her whole life to her art and she cared nothing for fame, wealth or what anyone thought of her. She was encouraged to work hard by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, for whom she was, for a time, both model and lover, and through his studio she came into contact with many other young artists who shared her passionate interest in the visual arts, which brought her opportunities for discussing ideas with kindred spirits. Her contact with the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who was Rodins secretary for a while, was particularly important to her: they respected each other as artists and shared the same artistic aspirations.
Gwen John chose to live alone, in simple rooms in Paris and later in Meudon. She was a perfectionist who worked very slowly on her deceptively simple pictures, which she prepared very carefully beforehand. She would spend a long time choosing the exact pose for the model (usually a young woman), or arranging the furniture in a particular way. One of her favourite subjects was her room and she would concentrate on one corner in particular, perhaps, or maybe on a table or chair, placing a bouquet of flowers, an umbrella, a book or a teapot to suggest the presence of the unseen occupant. She painted series of pictures on a single theme a girl reading, a girl cradling a cat, the view from the window. The oil paintings are quiet in both colour and atmosphere. With the exception of one or two of her self-portraits, they do not betray the slightest hint of the tension and sadness that can sometimes be discerned in her personal notes and jottings. The palette is a little livelier in many of the watercolours, where a touch of humour can be seen in the depiction of a self-important, middle-aged lady, for example, or a snub-nosed little girl.
After being accepted into the Roman Catholic Church in 1917, Gwen John began to define herself as Gods little artist. She came into contact with a convent in Meudon and painted portraits of the founder of the order and of many of the nuns, as well as of the girls who frequented their school, delighting in the angular folds of their head-dresses. For Gwen John painting was an act of faith, a form of worship, and that was her explanation and justification when she was chided by a neighbour for sketching in the church during mass. The artist took Saint Thérèse of Lisieux as her personal patron saint, appreciating the saints observation that every task is sacred if performed for Christ.
Although she did not seek financial success, she regularly sold her work. She would occasionally send work to exhibitions in London, and often to the Salons in Paris, and for a while in the 1920s she received a steady income from an American patron, John Quinn, in return for sending him a specific number of paintings each year. But during her last ten years, she painted less and less, most probably because of weakness and illness. She did, however, continue to sketch and paint small watercolours on a variety of themes views around her home in Meudon, worshippers in church, passengers on the train, people enjoying a cup of coffee in a café, as well as religious subjects such as Saint Thérèse or the Virgin Mary. Her mind was as sharp as ever, as can be seen in her notes, where she analyses her aims and technique as an artist, responding to what she heard in the lectures of important theorists such as André Lhote.
If Gwen John did not return to the county where she was born, Pembrokeshire nevertheless left an impression on her. She would often go on holiday to Brittany, the part of France that most closely resembles south-west Wales, and there she would wander along the shore and the cliffs, just as she used to do as a child. And as she had done in Tenby, many years before, she would paint pictures of children along the coast. As a little girl she had learned a little Welsh, mostly from the old nurse from the Preseli area who cared for the children after they had lost their mother, but Gwen John was not a linguist, hence her execrable French, which did not improve even after years of living in France. Her brother, however, maintained that she spoke English with a slight Pembrokeshire accent, an accent which, he added, she did not have as a child. But nationality was not important to Gwen John. She did not belong to France any more than she belonged to Wales, but to that inner, spiritual world of her own that is externalised in her paintings.
This article is copyright (c): Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan was raised in Caernarfonshire and educated at the universities in Oxford, Poitiers, and in Wales. She has published a wide variety of books and articles on the history of literature and the visual arts in Wales. This article originally appeared in English and Welsh on the BBC Cymru Wales Eisteddfod 2002 Arts & Crafts website - click here to read the original Welsh-language version.
