Gwen John was born on June 22, 1876 in Haverfordwest, Wales, United Kingdom. She was the daughter of Edwin William John, a solicitor, and Augusta (Smith) John, an amateur artist. Gwen has three brothers — Thornton John, Augustus John, a painter, and Winifred John.
Since 1895 to 1898, Gwen studied at the Slade School of Art (present-day UCL Slade School of Fine Art), where she learned figure drawing under Henry Tonks.
Some time later, Gwen John moved to Paris, where she attended Académie Carmen.
In 1899, Gwen moved to London, where she exhibited her work for the first time in 1900, at the New English Art Club.
In the autumn of 1903, she traveled to France with her friend Dorelia McNeill. 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, mostly for women artists. In that same year, she began modelling for the sculptor Auguste Rodin and became his lover. During her years in Paris she met many of the leading artistic personalities of her time, including Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi and Rainer Maria Rilke, but the new developments in the art of her time had little effect on her, and she worked in solitude. In 1910, the artist settled down in Meudon, a suburb of Paris, where she would remain for the rest of her life.
Gwen stopped exhibiting at the New English Art Club 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.
After the end of her relationship with Rodin and her subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism about 1913, John created many portraits of nuns at a local convent in Meudon, including a commissioned series of pictures (1913-1921) of the convent’s founder, Mère Marie Poussepin. Using an image of her on a prayer card, John created at least eight three-quarter-length portraits of the nun, who had died some 200 years earlier. Quiet, but expressive interiors and portraits continued to be the subjects of her paintings and drawings. She exhibited a handful of times in Paris, including multiple times at the Salon d’Automne, beginning in 1919. John’s creative output is said to have decreased after 1924 when her patron, Quinn, died.
In 1926, she had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime at the New Chenil Galleries in London.
It is commonly thought, that the artist stopped painting entirely after 1933 and took up gardening.
The Student
Young Woman Wearing a Large Hat
The Precious Book
A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris
Girl with Bare Shoulders
Untitled
Nude Girl
Dorelia in a Black Dress
Self Portrait
Study of Marigolds
Girl Holding a Rose
Chloe Boughton Leigh
The Convalescent
Woman with Hands Crossed
Portrait of the Artists Sister Winifred
Woman Sewing at a Window
Untitled
Girl With Cat
Two Women
The Little Interior
The Japanese Doll
A Lady Reading
Portrait of Chloe Boughton-Leigh
The Pilgrim
Portrait of Mrs Atkinson
Mère Poussepin And The Catholic Church
Rue Terre Neuve, Meudon
Mother Marie Poussepin
Girl in a Mulberry Dress
Marie Poussepin Seated at a Table
Little girl wearing large hat
A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris
Self Portrait with Letter
Girl with a Blue Scarf
Nuns and schoolgirls standing in church
Flowers
Girl in Profile
Young Woman Holding a Black Cat
The Brown Tea Pot
Girl Reading at the Window
Black Cat on Blue and Pink
The Cat
Interior with Figures
Untitled
Quotations:
"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."
"I paint a good deal, but I don't often get a picture done — that requires, for me, a very long time of a quiet mind, and never to think of exhibitions."
"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."
Throughout her life, John was attracted to people of both sexes. Although August Rodin was her great love, she had a number of same-sex relationships. Whilst at Slade, she developed a passion for an unnamed woman.
