Gwen John: A life - Review

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2001

Gwen John: A life. Sue Roe. Chatto & Windus. [pound]25.00. 364 pages. ISBN 0-701-16695-9. In the earlier days of feminism it was fashionable to assert that the wife, mistress or sister of a famous man was actually more important than the man himself. The claim was made for Augustus John's sister, Gwen.

This has made less trendy reviewers somewhat sceptical when new studies or biographies of these 'repressed women' were published. In Gwen John's case, however, it was not so much her brother but her brother's reputation and legends that submerged her own artistic achievements. In this biography Sue Roe argues that Gwen John has always been a mysterious and shadowy figure within the history of British painting, obscured by the fame and energy of her famous brother. Far from being a recluse hidden away in Paris and a dispirited failure, Gwen John was one of Rodin's lovers and a part of the art world of Paris. She exhibited and sold her paintings and lived 'a busy, daring and eventful life in the French capital be tween 1903 and her death in 1939. She was a woman 'with strength of character, sensitivity, daring and originality', all of which went into her drawings and paintings. This sensitive biography, based on the best sources a biographer can have - unpublished and unedited letters - gives us the best life we have yet had of this all too easily forgotten artist.