When I began researching the lives of Gwen and Augustus John, the image I held in my mind was of the two of them, as very small siblings, sketching together on the coast around Tenby. For both to have escaped the narrowness of their modest provincial home, and established themselves at the heart of early 20th-century art, was a remarkable journey – and I was intrigued by what possible forces of temperament and upbringing might have driven them.
It is hard to credit, now, the scale of Augustus’s celebrity. His youthful drawings were compared to Raphael; he was briefly acclaimed as the leader of British post-impressionism, then celebrated as the pre-eminent portrait-painter of his age. And while recognition came slower to Gwen, the singularity of her vision, drawing on early expressionism and abstraction, as well as her own mystic embrace of Catholicism, earned her a significant place in the modernist canon.
But if there are early clues to the Johns’ success they aren’t simple to find, because, apart from their mother’s amateur talent for watercolours, they had no other role models. Their childhood, in fact, was unusually forlorn. When their mother died in 1884, Gwen was just eight, Augustus six and a half, and their father was so felled by anxiety and grief he had no idea how to comfort them. “I used to cry all the time,” Gwen wrote, while Augustus would recall that, along with their two other siblings, they became a farouche little tribe, retreating behind a wall “of invincible shyness”.
Yet it was misery that bred in the Johns a rebellious longing for escape – and, for Gwen and Augustus, their first and best escape was in art. They drew from the moment they were able to hold pencils, sketching portraits of the world around them. While they had only the vaguest idea of where their sketching might lead, when a teacher suggested that Augustus might do well at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Gwen insisted that she must go there too.
The Slade felt like a miracle. The Johns were learning their craft, but they were also experimenting with love, with ideas, with the rackety fun of London. They were also as close as a brother and sister could be, understanding each other as no one else could, equally hungry for lives that would fill the void of their motherless upbringing.
Yet beneath the intimacy there was also, always, an itch of sibling antagonism. At its roots lay Augustus’s childish, bullying resentment at being the younger of the two, and Gwen’s furious attempts to fight back. When their lives began to diverge, as Augustus and his work began to achieve a precocious fame, that itch could flare up again.
Part of the issue was the flamboyantly bohemian image Augustus had constructed around himself, to counteract the “invincible” John shyness. Beautiful and wild, he grew his hair long and wore hooped golden earrings. He lived in a menage a trois and had numerous affairs. When he travelled around England in a horse-drawn caravan, he had several run-ins with the police. And while the gossip columnists and most of the art critics adored him, the clamour of his success was difficult for Gwen. Even though she never doubted the value of her own work, and even though her life was no less unconventional – she went to Paris, she fell in love with both women and men, including the sculptor Auguste Rodin – she was increasingly impelled to distance herself from her brother.
Augustus was hurt by that. He was also frustrated by Gwen’s growing inclination to keep her art to herself. Her pictures were like children to her, and while she needed praise as much as any artist, she often found it hard to send her work out into the world. She knew how much better she painted without the pressure of exhibitions and sales – and, while she could be very grateful to Augustus when he tried to promote her career, her instinct was often to reject what she regarded as his despotic interference.
There was another set of reasons for this disparity in their fame. These lay, more starkly, in the fact that Augustus, as a man, had always enjoyed more opportunities than Gwen. The art world at the time was overwhelmingly male: almost all of the galleries and schools were run by men; and even at the Slade, which was unusually progressive in admitting students of both sexes, the teaching staff as well as the artists who dominated the curriculum were male. When one of Gwen’s fellow students, Edna Waugh, was told she might become “a second Burne-Jones”, she was spirited enough to reply: “I would rather be known as the first Edna Waugh.” Yet it was already clear to the women at the Slade that, once they graduated, the odds were stacked against them making professional names for themselves.
While Augustus was rapidly taken up by a network of sympathetic (male) artists and buyers, and was able to survive on commissions and sales, Gwen had to support herself as an artists’ model. The fees she earned were “ruinous” but, even at the risk of poverty, she swore never to sacrifice her independence for the security of marriage. “I think if we are to make beautiful pictures, we ought to be free of family conventions and ties,” she wrote, and she only had to look at the fates of Waugh and Ida Nettleship (Augustus’s wife) to see that most of her married friends ended up with little or no time for their art.
There were so many factors – cultural, financial and personal – that shaped the trajectories by which Augustus and his art became so famous, while Gwen remained known to a small circle of connoisseurs. But the trajectories didn’t end there because, after their deaths, the reputations of the two Johns underwent a radical volte-face.
There is no question that the quality of Augustus’s work declined during the second half of his career. Drink, combined with an incurable restlessness, corroded his talent, and so did the pressures of providing for family (he fathered at least 13 children and was, ironically, more compromised by “conventions and ties” than Gwen). After his death in 1961, his standing was further damaged by the volume of late, mediocre works coming on to the market, and by the inevitable fading of the legend that had once given such thrilling glamour (and marketability) to his name.
In fact, the behaviour that had once fed that legend, the promiscuity and the wildness, was now more likely to be disparaged than cheered. This change in the political culture was one reason why Gwen’s own stock began to rise. Her relative obscurity had continued until 40 years after her death, in 1939, when her estate was taken over by the gallerist Anthony d’Offay. While the exhibitions and sales D’Offay masterminded were crucial to the explosion of interest in Gwen, so too was the campaign among late 20th-century scholars to restore female artists to their proper place in history. Gwen, according to Augustus’s granddaughter Rebecca John, had always been regarded as a “family secret”, yet from the mid-1980s onwards, she became the subject of numerous articles, biographies and even novels.
Now, to a degree that would have flabbergasted most of her contemporaries, Gwen is the more famous John. The one person who wouldn’t have been surprised, however, was Augustus. Always the harshest critic of his own work, and the most loyal supporter of his sister’s, he once prophesied that in 50 years, he would be known “as the brother of Gwen John”. It was a prophesy uttered in a moment of gloom, but it spoke volumes about his relationship with his sister. The two of them, as siblings, might have become separated by time, circumstance and mutual exasperation, yet the bond between them was one that Augustus, in particular, was unable to break.
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell (Pan Macmillan, £30). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
