Gwen John – A Corner of the Artist’s Room

Reading Judith Mackrell’s perceptive and illuminating double biography of Augustus and Gwen John, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries recently, I came across a reproduction of this painting which seemed like such a compelling reflection of the artist’s character and sensibility that had been so insightfully described by the author. Mackerell relates how, after studying at The Slade and always overshadowed by her flamboyant brother, Gwen made her own life in Paris to escape the strait-laced and narrow-minded respectability of her Victorian upbringing in small town Tenby. In her first few years in France, she lived in relative poverty but remained faithful to her artistic calling, sensitively producing work which today has more to say to us in its quietude than her brother’s paintings do in all their gesticulative fluency. This is not to say that Gwen lived a mousy, passionless life. She ‘enjoyed’ a one-sided affair with the much older Auguste Rodin and also had intense relationships with women, deeply felt attachments which informed her work and which the book recounts sympathetically.

With Rodin’s encouragement, and after a protracted search, Gwen had moved from her room in rue Sainte-Placide in the sixth arrondissement to rue du Cherche-Midi, just a five-minute walk away. There, on one of the cheaper, uppermost floors of the imposing building, her new accommodation faced south towards the interior courtyard and would be bathed in warm sunlight. So taken was she by her new home, so happy to exist quietly there to paint and to read, to simply be herself, that it inspired her to paint two versions of the same domestic scene.

Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist’s Room (87, rue du Cherche-Midi), 1907-09, oil on canvas, National Museum Cardiff

In one, the window is open and a book lies open on the small table and a different coat is draped over the arm of the chair. In the version shown above, the window is closed and is covered by a pair of voile curtains which diffuse the light to create a nebulous softness to the interior and the lower edges of which gape further apart with their slightly untidy excess length. The composition subdivides the painting with a centrally placed vertical to the left of which we see the hefty geometry of the raking roof eaves angling into the space, below which sits a cushioned wicker chair with a parasol or umbrella propped on its side. A blue coat is also resting there. It is as if these things have just recently been discarded with their owner having just come into the room from outside. Either that, or they await her collection of them ready to go out. Either way, they silently conjure her presence so that the painting resonates as a personless portrait. This discarding of things appears casual but is anything but. When worn, that now-folded coat is suggestive of its wearer’s public presence when it would take on her bodily form. When resting unworn and disembodied, it signifies a jettison of her social identity in favour of a retreat into a private sphere.

We perceive Gwen through her absence and through these sparse belongings. To the right of the divide, we can see another building through the sheer curtain, its silhouetted chimneys appearing more mistily distant than they were in reality, like some vision of a medieval castle on a hill. A small posy of flowers arranged in a glass jar rests on the table, exquisite in its simplicity. The delicate littleness of the blossoms and their unforced beauty contrasts with the blocky, volumetric prism of the roof and the cruciform angularity of the window frame.

The flowers, although indistinctly painted, leave us with the impression of their fractal petals and it is easy to imagine the artist looking at them intently, taking contemplative pleasure from them but also appreciating the way that patterns form themselves in nature. We (and she) can also see shape-making in the tessellated honeycombed hexagons of the floor, in the triaxial Fitch work of the wicker and in the diffracted light and dark barring on the wall beside the window. The overriding feeling the painting leaves us with is a delight in order and pure form, of the freedom that solitude affords to give thought to organisation.

In many ways, the work anticipates pictorially some of the ideas of Virginia Woolf’s later essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which the writer set out the reasons why women need financial autonomy and crucially the command of their own independent space. The room should be a place at once safe, secure, and private, and free from patriarchal interference, if its occupant is to be able to create. Woolf’s imagining of a sister for Shakespeare, Judith, who, even though as equally gifted as her brother, would struggle to achieve his success because of systemic chauvinism inimical to female artistry, has echoes in the lives of Augustus and Gwen John and the respective levels of recognition they enjoyed at the time.

During her earlier years in Paris, James McNeill Whilstler had tutored Gwen at the Académie Carmen, and some of his influence can be seen in this work, particularly with its emphasis on tone. That sheer material at the window is done with ineffable, carefully worked nuance, the brushstrokes combining quite bold and confident mark-making with more delicate dabs. Ultra pale greens and mauvy pinks manage to convey transparency, graduating imperceptibly from top to bottom. The window and its gauzy curtain define a threshold between inside and out, a screen that remains see-though, but its gossamer lightness also seems to represent a sense of the divide in the artist’s psychic space, between the competing impulses towards introverted shyness or enclosure and abandonment and disclosure, between light and dark. In other words, this is an interior that is also in some ways about interiority.

Although Gwen John made relatively few fully finished self-portraits in her career, I was not left with a sense of any inclination on her part towards self-effacement in Judith Mackerell’s account of her life and career. In fact, by the standards of the time, she was defiantly adventurous and single-minded in establishing her own identity early on, and then later too, even when surrendering herself to relationships which caused her pain. And yet, in this painting, there is a determined renunciation of her appearance in it that remains mysterious. She has made a living ghost of herself, haunting her room not in an eerie way, but as if imbuing its space with something intangible: her awareness and responsiveness. This is a permeation that simply does not require her physical presence to make itself felt.

This is but a ‘corner’ of the artist’s room, a small section of an unostentatious living space in which very few unassuming possessions have soundless dominion. And yet, in the confinement of its calm reserve it somehow projects a paradoxical expansiveness that commands our respect and attention as much by what it doesn’t show as what it does. This is the by now thirty-one year old Gwen John’s new home and conveys some of the excitement felt by us all when adopting a new place in which to live, the thrill of possession, the recognition of its potential decoration and dressing, the renewal implicit in new starts, the anticipatory future-gazing into the times to come that we hope to experience in it.

Gwen John made her home in the artistic capital of the world, with all the bustling commotion that living in a major metropolis entails. She wanted to be a part of the city’s liveliness and to feel close to its avant-garde cultural community. But she also craved separateness and withdrawal, and this painting tells us something of the contentment she would have felt in her self-imposed sequestration, the personal intimacy and sense of freedom to be enjoyed undisturbed in one’s own place.