Gwendolen "Gwen" John was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Her paintings, mainly portraits of anonymous female sitters, are rendered in a range of closely related tones. Although in her lifetime, John's work was overshadowed by that of her brother Augustus and her mentor and lover Auguste Rodin, awareness and esteem for John's artistic contributions has grown considerably since her death.
She attended the Slade School of Art. Gwen was taught by Frederick Brown and Henry Tonks. Other students at the Slade at the time included Ambrose McEvoy, Ursula Tyrwhitt, Ida Nettleship and Gwen Salmond. She lived with her brother, August John. He later recalled in his autobiography, Chiaroscuro. "It wasn't long before my sister Gwen joined me at the Slade. She wasn't going to be left out of it! We shared rooms together, subsisting, like monkeys, on a diet of fruit and nuts. This was cheap and hygienic. It is true we were sometimes asked out to dinner, when, not being pedants, we waived our rule for the time being."
Gwen John exhibited for the first time in the spring of 1900 at the New English Art Club. In March 1903 she and Augustus John had a joint exhibition at Carfax & Company. However, she worked very slowly and contributed only three pictures to her brother's forty-five. Michael Williams has argued: "Their relationship was non-competitive and highly affectionate. Although critical of Gwen's evident unconcern about her health, Augustus was foremost in appreciating her art. What his own work owed in technical mastery, he felt that Gwen's pictures more than compensated in interior feeling and expressiveness."
John stopped exhibiting at the NEAC 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. Quinn's support freed John from having to work as a model, and enabled her to devote herself to her work. In 1913, one of her paintings was included in the seminal Armory Show in New York, which Quinn assisted in organising.
About 1913, as an obligation to the Dominican Sisters of Charity at Meudon, she began a series of painted portraits of the founder of their order. These paintings, based on a prayer card, established a format-the female figure in three-quarter length seated pose-which became characteristic of her mature style. She painted numerous variants on such subjects as Young Woman in a Spotted Blue Dress, Girl Holding a Cat and The Convalescent. The identities of most of her models are unknown.
John exhibited in Paris for the first time in 1919 at the Salon d'Automne, and exhibited regularly until the mid-1920s, after which time she became increasingly reclusive and painted less. She had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime, at the New Chenil Galleries in London in 1926.In that same year she purchased a bungalow in Meudon.
John's last dated work is a drawing of 20 March 1933, and no evidence suggests that she drew or painted during the remainder of her life. She died on 18 September 1939.