‘Intensely brave’: A new exhibition and biography aim to upend the traditional view on Welsh painter Gwen John:
In Gwen John’s hazily beautiful we see a solitary, contemplative woman seated in a small room, a cat curled on a wicker chair opposite her. Interior scenes were all the vogue at the time, with French artists like Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard among the leading practitioners. But John did something wholly unique with the genre, making it about a woman’s experience and needs rather than a depiction of the domesticity in which contemporary society would like to see her confined.
“It’s quite a seductive image, the archetypal artist in a garret,” says art historian Alicia Foster, author of a new biography of John and curator of anat the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, England, which both aim to challenge the myths that have built up around her. However, as Foster laughingly points out, “if you want to be a recluse, there are better places to go than London in the 1890s or Paris in 1904.”, oil on canvas.
In the years immediately afterwards, John painted her first great works, both self-portraits . In the first, painted around 1899, John stands with her hand on her hip, haughtily meeting the viewer’s gaze, an uncompromising take on the Grand Manner style. The second, painted around 1902, sees her portraying herself with the intensity of an Ibsen heroine. “The fact that she was so assured and playing with these ideas of who she was so early on is fascinating,” Foster says.
Money was as always short, and to make ends meet John worked as an artist’s model, a career choice which would have been unthinkable in London, and one which—even in Paris—took significant courage. Yet John ended up working for the most famous sculptor of the era, Rodin, becoming not only a favored model, but also his lover.
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