The kids from Number 9

A busy day of domestic duties has left me no time for commenting - apologies. I know I lose so much when I fail to visit other journals. However a shopping trip to our county town provided this opportunity for a blip.

Here in Victoria Place was the family home of Edwin John, solicitor of Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire. Gwen was born here in 1876. Her brother Augustus arrived two years later although, due to an outbreak of scarlet fever, their mother moved to nearby Tenby for the birth. Both children grew up here along with several other siblings. Both showed a talent for drawing from an early age and both went to study at the Slade School of Art in London where they shared humble lodgings and a frugal subsistence diet. Thereafter their trajectories diverged in a way that is all too familiar across the gender divide.

Augustus after a slow start became a star pupil, won major prizes and emerged as a flamboyant, charismatic, bohemian figure with several wives and mistresses and numerous offspring ('I always pat children on the head in case they're mine'.) Models queued up to be painted and bedded, celebrities to be portrayed by the famous society artist. He became rich and ridiculous and lived to the age of 83. His artistic reputation did not survive him long although he painted some fine pictures.

Gwen John's existence was shadowy even without comparison to her brother's limelight. She was early on drawn to study in Paris and spent most of her life in France, living a solitary, impoverished life and painting mainly interiors, her cats, and the local women and children she came into contact with. She was frequently penniless and got by selling her drawings and modelling. Thus she met the sculptor Auguste Rodin, several decades her senior: their short love affair ended in rejection but she remained passionately attached to him. Gwen avoided contact with her own family but when she fell ill in 1939, aged 63, she attempted to return to Britain, reached Dieppe but collapsed and died there in a public institution. It is not know where she was buried. Her brother's honest acknowledgement that Gwen was the superior artist has been born out by subsequent opinion.

Two siblings, two directions. More recently there have been attempts to re-unite brother and sister with joint exhibitions and biographies. See for example here and
here.

Absolutely nothing to do with the above except that I happened upon it when checking the details is this poignant clip of an old Byelorussian woman playing the blues. Her creativity and survival in straightened circumstances seem to chime in with Gwen John's.