Synopses & Reviews
A revealing, animated biography of a sexual and intellectual rebel and a great painterIn 1942, at the height of his fame, Augustus John predicted that 'fifty years from now I shall be known as the brother of Gwen John'. Gwen John (1876-1939) is indeed now recognised as a great artistic innovator, yet for years her life remained shrouded in the myth of the solitary recluse. Born in Pembrokeshire, Gwen followed her brother to the Slade. Her future was bound up with Augustus, his women and his coteries, yet she was also daring and highly original, living determinedly in her own way.
Defiant yet shy, she painted and modelled amid the Bohemian circles of early twentieth-century Paris and embarked on a long, intense love affair with France's most legendary artistic figure, the sculptor Rodin. A friend of Symbolist poets and post-Impressionist painters, later she turned increasingly to religion, achieving a deep serenity which masked her inner turbulence and creating her haunting paintings, described as delicate and austere, restrained and still.
Based on her lively and passionate unpublished letters and lavishly illustrated, this vivid new biography challenges our prejudices about the ways we evaluate women artists and finally uncovers the life of this ardent and complicated personality, one of the finest artists of her day.
Review
"Consider two self-portraits by Gwen John: the first with her strong painter's hand at her waist, imperious facial expression, elegant silk dress; the second soft, even beseeching, shawl drooping, the writing and painting hand nowhere to be seen. Roe tells us, carefully and sympathetically, the story of the one woman who lived both these personae, simultaneously. John painted in Paris during the heady years before the first World War. Accepting Rodin as her long-term lover and Rilke as her friend, she nonetheless lived largely in hiding from people, even standing up
Ezra Pound during one of her lay retreats. She beseeched God to inform her imagination and her modernist experiments, and eventually converted to Catholicism. Roe tells us that she painted 'women in rooms,' and, in filling out that simple phrase, illuminates an important period in modern art, a woman's life, and the mysteries of artistic intensity and vision. Roe's excellent use of unpublished letters to tell John's story implies the need for a carefully edited volume of John's correspondence. After reading A Painter's Life, one hopes that Roe will do the job." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"Consider two self-portraits by Gwen John: the first with her strong painter's hand at her waist, imperious facial expression, elegant silk dress; the second soft, even beseeching, shawl drooping, the writing and painting hand nowhere to be seen. Roe tells us, carefully and sympathetically, the story of the one woman who lived both these personnae simultaneously. John painted in Paris during the heady years before the first World War. Accepting Rodin as her long-term lover and Rilke as her friend, she nonetheless lived largely in hiding from people, even standing up Ezra Pound during one of her lay retreats. She beseeched God to inform her imagination and her modernist experiments, and eventually converted to Catholicism. Roe tells us that she painted 'women in rooms,' and, in filling out that simple phrase, illuminates an important period in modern art, a woman's life, and the mysteries of artistic intensity and vision. Roe's excellent use of unpublished letters to tell John's story implies the need for a carefully edited volume of John's correspondence. After reading A Painter's Life, one hopes that Roe will do the job." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
About the Author
Sue Roe is a novelist, poet and critic. A former lecturer in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, she now lives in Sussex, England. This is her first biography.