Gwen John: 164 Colour Plates E-Book

Maria Peitcheva

• Herausgeber: Maria Peitcheva
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Gwendolen Mary John was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. She is noted for her still lifes and for her portraits, especially of anonymous female sitters. John was an artist's model for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. John exhibited in Paris for the first time in 1919 at the Salon d'Automne, and exhibited regularly until the mid-1920s, after which time she became increasingly reclusive and painted less. She had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime, in London in 1926. In that same year she purchased a bungalow in Meudon. In December 1926, distraught after the death of her old friend Rilke, she met and sought religious guidance from her neighbor, the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. She also met Maritain's sister-in-law, Vera Oumancoff, with whom she formed her last romantic relationship. Gwen John's last dated work is a drawing of 20 March 1933, and no evidence suggests that she drew or painted during the remainder of her life.

Leseprobe

Gwen John

164 Colour Plates

By Maria Peitcheva

First Edition

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Gwen John: 164 Colour Plates

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Copyright © 2016 Maria Peitcheva

Foreword

Gwendolen Mary John (1876 – 1939) was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. She is noted for her still lifes and for her portraits, especially of anonymous female sitters. John was an artist's model for (and later the lover of) the sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Gwen John was born in Haverfordwest, Wales, the second of four children of Edwin William John and his wife Augusta (née Smith). The children's interest in literature and art was encouraged. Following the mother’s premature death in 1884, the family moved to Tenby in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Although she painted and drew from an early age, Gwen John's earliest surviving work dates from her nineteenth year. From 1895 to 1898, she studied at the Slade School of Art, where her younger brother, Augustus, had begun his studies in 1894. Even as a student, Augustus' brilliant draughtsmanship and personal glamour made him a celebrity. He greatly admired his sister's work, but urged her to take a "more athletic attitude to life" and cautioned her against what he saw as the "unbecoming and unhygienic negligence" of her mode of living. She refused his advice, and demonstrated throughout her life a marked disregard for her physical well-being. In 1898 she made her first visit to Paris with two friends from the Slade, and while there she studied under James McNeill Whistler at the Académie Carmen. She returned to London in 1899, and exhibited her work for the first time in 1900, at the New English Art Club (NEAC).

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. 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 Auguste Rodin, and became his lover. Her devotion to the much older Rodin, who was the most famous artist of his time, continued unabated for the next ten years, as documented in her thousands of fervent letters to him.

During her years in Paris she met many of the leading artistic personalities of her time, including Matisse, Picasso, Brâncuşi, and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1910 she found living quarters in Meudon, a suburb of Paris where she would remain for the rest of her life. As her affair with Rodin drew to a close, Gwen John sought comfort in Catholicism, and around 1913 she was received into the Church. Her notebooks of the period include meditations and prayers; she wrote of her desire to be "God's little artist" and to "become a saint." In an often-quoted letter of ca. 1912, she wrote: "As to whether I have anything worth expressing that is apart from the question. I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life".

She stopped exhibiting at the NEAC in 1911, but 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. As an obligation to the Dominican Sisters of Charity at Meudon, she began a series of painted portraits of Mère Marie Poussepin (1653–1744), who founded their order. These paintings, based on a prayer card, established a format—the female figure in three-quarter length seated pose—which became characteristic of her mature style. She painted numerous variants on such subjects as Young Woman in a Spotted Blue Dress, Girl Holding a Cat, and The Convalescent. The identities of most of her models are unknown.

In Meudon 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 effect 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 famous brother.

John exhibited in Paris for the first time in 1919 at the Salon d'Automne, and exhibited regularly until the mid-1920s, after which time she became increasingly reclusive and painted less. She had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime, in London in 1926. In that same year she purchased a bungalow in Meudon. In December 1926, distraught after the death of her old friend Rilke, she met and sought religious guidance from her neighbor, the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. She also met Maritain's sister-in-law, Véra Oumançoff, with whom she formed her last romantic relationship, which lasted until Oumançoff terminated it in 1930.

Gwen John's last dated work is a drawing of 20 March 1933, and no evidence suggests that she drew or painted during the remainder of her life. On 10 September 1939, she wrote her will and then travelled to Dieppe, where she collapsed and was hospitalized. She died there on 18 September 1939.

Paintings

Portrait of Mrs Atkinson, 1897-1898

Detail

Interior with Figures, 1899

Self Portrait, 1902

Detail

The Student, 1903

Detail

Dorelia in a Black Dress, 1903-1904

Detail

Chloe Boughton Leigh, 1904-1908