Her indoors…
This early self-portrait by Gwen John is typically self-contained. It set the tone for the many paintings she would create where women are posed indoors, seated with their hands neatly folded.
It’s not you, it’s me…
John’s paintings might all be seen as self-portraits of a kind, with the artist placing women in attitudes she favoured. They are by turns reserved, serene and troubling, with the subject’s inner life shown most keenly in its confinement.
This life…
Readings of John’s work tend to the autobiographical and psychoanalytical. She had an isolated childhood and a close relationship with her brother, the painter Augustus John, an obsessive affair with Rodin, then a conversion to Catholicism and hermit-like latter years.
The bold type…
Shortly after this work, she and her brother’s mistress Dorelia set off on foot across Europe, sleeping in fields and paying their way by painting portraits. While it offers no trace of that risk-taking bohemian, it is a picture of a bold woman demanding to be taken seriously.
Part of Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired By Her Writings, Tate St Ives, to 29 April
