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Gwen John

Gwen John. Artist of the Month at Griffeen Valley Educate Together. Early Life.

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Gwen John

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  1. Gwen John Artist of the Month at Griffeen Valley Educate Together

  2. Early Life • Gwen John was born in Wales, the second of four children. At an early age she realised that boys were treated differently to girls. Her younger brother Augustus was sent to boarding school and then to the Slade School of Art while she was expected to stay at home and learn how to be a lady. However she was a determined girl and finally persuaded her father to allow her to follow her brother to art college. From 1895 to 1898, she studied at the Slade where Augustushad begun his studies in 1894.

  3. Art College • Gwen loved art college. She made friends with lots of other girls who were students there and for the first time felt she could be taken seriously as an artist.

  4. Travelling in France • In the autumn of 1903, she travelled 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.

  5. An Artist in Paris • In 1904 the two went to Paris, where John found work as an artist's model; in that same year, she began modelling for the sculptor AugusteRodin, the most famous artist of his time. • During her years in Paris she met many of the leading artistic personalities of her time, including Matisse and Picasso. • She 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.

  6. Solitude • In France she 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 affect me beyond reason." She wished also to avoid family ties, and her decision to live in France after 1903 may have been the result of her desire to escape the overpowering personality of her brother Augustus who by now had become a famous artist.

  7. Art Subject Matter • Gwen John's work consists almost entirely of small-scale portraits and still lives. Her portraits (usually of anonymous sitters) favored seated women in a three-quarter length format, with their hands in their laps. She preferred painting of reduced tone and subtle colour relationships, in contrast to her brother's far more vivid palette. • She also made many sketches of her cats. Aside from two etchings she drew in 1910, she made no prints.

  8. Dahlias In A Grey Jug

  9. Interior

  10. Self Portrait

  11. The Convalescent

  12. Young Woman Holding A Black Cat

  13. Gwen and Augustus • 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."

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