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    Gwen John Biography

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    Andrea Valle Gracia
    Gwen John was a Welsh painter born in 1876. She studied art in London and Paris, developing a style of intimate portraits and scenes of women and children. She had a significant relationship with sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris, producing some of her best work during this period. Later, American art collector John Quinn became her patron and encouraged her career. Although she painted less after Quinn's death, a 1926 retrospective in London helped establish her reputation. John lived much of her life in Paris, drawn to its artistic community, until her death in 1939.

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    Gwen John Biography

    Uploaded by

    Andrea Valle Gracia
    85 views4 pages
    Gwen John was a Welsh painter born in 1876. She studied art in London and Paris, developing a style of intimate portraits and scenes of women and children. She had a significant relationship with sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris, producing some of her best work during this period. Later, American art collector John Quinn became her patron and encouraged her career. Although she painted less after Quinn's death, a 1926 retrospective in London helped establish her reputation. John lived much of her life in Paris, drawn to its artistic community, until her death in 1939.

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    Gwen John was a Welsh painter born in 1876. She studied art in London and Paris, developing a style of intimate portraits and scenes of women and children. She had a significant relationship with sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris, producing some of her best work during this period. Later, American art collector John Quinn became her patron and encouraged her career. Although she painted less after Quinn's death, a 1926 retrospective in London helped establish her reputation. John lived much of her life in Paris, drawn to its artistic community, until her death in 1939.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    85 views4 pages

    Gwen John Biography

    Uploaded by

    Andrea Valle Gracia
    Gwen John was a Welsh painter born in 1876. She studied art in London and Paris, developing a style of intimate portraits and scenes of women and children. She had a significant relationship with sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris, producing some of her best work during this period. Later, American art collector John Quinn became her patron and encouraged her career. Although she painted less after Quinn's death, a 1926 retrospective in London helped establish her reputation. John lived much of her life in Paris, drawn to its artistic community, until her death in 1939.

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    of 4

    Gwen John (1876-1939)

    Gwendolen Mary John was born on July 22nd, 1876 in Haverfordwest, Wales1. She was the
    elder daughter and the second of the four children of Edwin William John and his wife,
    Augusta Smith. Her father was a solicitor and her mother, an amateur artist 2. Coming from
    a middle class family, she was encouraged to develop her interest and talent in painting
    very early in her life by her mother who continued drawing and painting to some extent
    during her marriage. Johns mother died when she was only eight years old 3. After that,
    Gwen John was educated first at home by governesses and subsequently at Miss Wilson's
    academy in Tenby and Miss Philpott's educational establishment in London. The
    atmosphere in which she and her siblings grew up was loveless and claustrophobic. The
    household in Tenby was a sombre one, and all four John children escaped its repressions at
    their earliest opportunity4. During the holidays, Gwen John, together with her sister
    Winifred and her two brothers: Augustus, who also became also a very well-known painter
    and Thornton, would roam the coastal places around Tenby, where they sketched on the
    sand. Gwen would make rapid drawings of beached gulls, shells and fish on stray pieces of
    paper, or sometimes in the margins of the frontispiece of the book she was reading5.
    In 1895 she moved to London where she attended the Slade School of Art. Gwen
    John was taught by artists like Frederick Brown and Henry Tonks. She lived with her
    brother, Augustus John who also studied there6. Gwen John exhibited for the first time in
    the spring of 1900 at the New English Art Club. Then, in March 1903 she and Augustus
    1 Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings,
    Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964. I.
    2 John Simkin. Wales 1400-1960: Gwen John. Spartacus Educational.
    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTjohnG.htm

    3 Maria Tamboukou. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen Johns Letters


    and Paintings. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010. 4.
    4 John Simkin. Wales 1400-1960: Gwen John. Spartacus Educational.
    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTjohnG.htm

    5 Maria Tamboukou. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen Johns Letters


    and Paintings. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010. 4.

    John had a joint exhibition at Carfax & Company. She worked very slowly and contributed
    only three pictures to her brother's forty-five, but Augustus was foremost in appreciating
    her art. He felt that Gwens pictures more than compensated what his own work lacked in
    interior feeling and expressiveness7.
    After that period she entered Whistler's School in Paris, where she continued to live
    from 1904 on. She made intimate friendships with the well-known sculptor Auguste Rodin,
    Maria Rilke and Jacques Maritain8. She fell in love with Rodin, began to model for him and
    also became his mistress during that period. It was a very intense relationship, illustrated by
    the more than two thousand letters she wrote to him. During this period she did some of her
    best work: Nude Girl (1910) and Girl Reading at the Window (1911)9.
    After Johns breakup with Rodin, her brother Augustus introduced her to John
    Quinn, the American lawyer and collector, and he provided her with a stipend and
    purchased any picture she offered. He also encouraged her to view exhibitions and enlarged
    her acquaintanceship by introducing her to his friends which included artists like Picasso,
    Braque, Matisse, Andr Dunoyer de Segonzac, Constantin Brancusi, Maud Gonne, HenriPierre Roche, and Augusta Lady Gregory. Her relationship with Quinn coincided with her
    period of greatest artistic productivity, for which he was surely at least in part responsible 10.
    Nonetheless, after Quinn's death in 1924 she painted less and, without his encouragement,
    was less eager to exhibit. Quinn died two years before Johns major retrospective exhibition
    6 Maria Tamboukou. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen Johns Letters
    and Paintings. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010. 4.
    7 John Simkin. Wales 1400-1960: Gwen John.
    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTjohnG.htm

    Spartacus

    Educational.

    8 Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings,
    Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964. I.
    9John
    Simkin.
    Wales
    1400-1960:
    Gwen
    John.
    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTjohnG.htm

    Spartacus

    Educational.

    10 John Simkin. Wales 1400-1960: Gwen John.


    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTjohnG.htm

    Spartacus

    Educational.

    at the New Chenil Galleries in London in 1926, a landmark in her living career as an
    artist11.
    When living in Paris she was of course at the heart of new artistic movements,
    experiments and innovations that would have a significant impact upon her. Her art
    techniques changed dramatically during her years in Paris; she abandoned the academic
    conventions and constraints of her former education 12. She was a painter chiefly of portraits
    and women and children, but that does not mean her art lacks complexity 13. She was able
    to create an autobiographical geography bringing together her room, the Parisian
    boulevards, cafs, and public gardens, the countryside around Paris, the river Seine and the
    coasts of Brittany. With this spatial assemblage she created a plane of analysis marked by
    displacement and movement14. What remained an interesting continuity in her life since her
    subterranean years in London was her relationship with her cat or rather the many cats with
    which she surrounded herself. John wrote many letters about and around them and made
    theoretical connections with the notion of becoming animal as a line of flight in
    subjectivities15.
    Johns lifestyle and art technique remained unique and unrepeatable and her persona
    registered as an enigmatic obscure figure in British Art History. Johns unsigned paintings
    and undated letters could be taken as her own attempt to paint so as to erase her name; have
    no face, but she was eventually unsuccessful at becoming imperceptible 16. She died at
    Dieppe 13 September 1939. Though she visited England occasionally, her work was seldom
    11 Maria Tamboukou. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen Johns Letters
    and Paintings. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010. 11.
    12Maria Tamboukou. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen Johns Letters
    and Paintings. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010. 11.
    13 Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings,
    Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964. I.
    14 Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings,
    Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964. I.
    15 Maria Tamboukou. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen Johns Letters
    and Paintings. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010. 8.

    seen until the Memorial exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery in 1946 which established her
    reputation17. Many of her paintings can be seen in the following webpage:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/gwen-john

    Bibliography:
    Chamot, Mary et al. The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture. London,
    1964.
    Simkin, John. Wales 1400-1960: Gwen John. Spartacus Educational.
    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTjohnG.htm
    Tamboukou, Maria. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen Johns Letters and
    Paintings.
    New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010.

    16 Maria Tamboukou. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen Johns Letters


    and Paintings. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2010. 8.
    17 Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings,
    Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964. I.

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