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Je suis bizarre

Sarah LeFanu: Gwen John, 6 September 2001

Gwen JohnA Life 
by Sue Roe.
Chatto, 364 pp., £25, June 2001, 0 7011 6695 9
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... The self-portrait by Gwen John hanging in the National Portrait Gallery was painted in 1899 or 1900. She is dressed in the formal costume of the period: a tight-waisted blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a big black bow at the neck. Her hair is tied back and her hands are on her hips. She is slightly turned away from us, so only one hand is visible ...

About to be at Tate Britain, or Meanwhile in Cork Street

Peter Campbell: Gwen and Augustus John, 7 October 2004

... painter is entirely of one kind or the other, and fate clearly has a hand in the matter. Augustus John, who was generally of the first sort, had ambitions beyond the marketable portraits which sustained him and his reputation in the latter part of his life. His early drawings persuaded some critics that a great painter was about to emerge, but his figure ...

Wood Nymph

Robert Melville, 18 March 1982

Gwen John 
by Susan Chitty.
Hodder, 223 pp., £9.95, September 1981, 0 340 24480 1
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... surprises began when the owner of the château asked her if she had ever heard of an artist named Gwen John. She had indeed, and, like many others, considered her work to be of a more consistently high quality than that of her famous brother. The man at the château had never heard of Augustus, but on hearing that ...

At Pallant House

Alice Spawls: Gwen John, 21 September 2023

... October​ 2012, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester put on an exhibition of works by the painters Gwen John and Celia Paul. What now seems obvious was then inspired. The comparison diminished neither. Two artists, distinct but in obvious affinity, spoke across their different periods and each made the other more necessary, more triumphant. It was as ...

Diary

Celia Paul: Painting in the Dark, 17 December 2020

... The painter​ Gwen John suffered from jealousy in her relationship with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. She was 27 when she started to model for him. He was 63. Rodin slept with a lot of women during his lifetime and the women he slept with also posed for him. John was jealous of Rodin’s other women ...

One’s Self-Washed Drawers

Rosemary Hill: Ida John, 29 June 2017

The Good Bohemian: The Letters of Ida John 
edited by Rebecca John and Michael Holroyd.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £25, May 2017, 978 1 4088 7362 5
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... shut behind her. Such, more or less, is the story of Ida Nettleship, the first wife of Augustus John, who died of puerperal fever at the age of 30 in 1907 and was soon lost to view. In John’s unfinished mural Lyric Fantasy, painted soon after her death, Ida stands to one side of the group of women and children who make ...

From the National Gallery to the Royal Academy

Peter Campbell: The Divisionists and Vilhelm Hammershoi, 17 July 2008

... definition of Post-Impressionism includes other painters who treat the viewer in this way – Gwen John, for example. Hammershøi, who looks back to Vermeer (he made his own version of a Vermeer letter-reader) and to Caspar David Friedrich’s woman at a window, painted in subdued greys, blacks, browns that owe something to Whistler. ...

Pleasing himself

Peter Campbell, 31 March 1988

Rodin: A Biography 
by Frederic Grunfeld.
Hutchinson, 738 pp., £30, February 1988, 0 09 170690 4
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... buildings. Then there are his relations with the mistress-models (Rose Beuret, Camille Claudel, Gwen John, Claire de Choiseul and others) whose faces and bodies figure as prominently in his sculpture as their feelings for him did in their lives. And there are details of studio practice. The stages whereby a malleable clay face or figure metamorphosed ...

At Dulwich Picture Gallery

Eleanor Birne: ‘A Crisis of Brilliance’, 12 September 2013

... became known as the ‘Slade cropheads’. They wore baggy smock dresses modelled on Augustus John’s gypsy drawings and found themselves written about – in both admiring and satirical terms – in the college magazine. For all her later fame in the close orbit of the Bloomsbury set, Carrington had a modest upbringing as the daughter of a railway ...

The One-Eyed World of Germaine Greer

Brigid Brophy, 22 November 1979

The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work 
by Germaine Greer.
Secker, 373 pp., £12.50, November 1979, 1 86064 677 8
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... of attractive works of art. The count would rise to eight if his taste ran to the work of Gwen John, or even to a dozen if he were indulgent. The remainder of the illustrations, some 94 per cent of the total, could serve equally well as the illustrations to a book called Dreary Painting Through The Ages. Ms Greer tries to upgrade some of these ...

‘If I Could Only Draw Like That’

P.N. Furbank, 24 November 1994

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies 
by James McNeill Whistler.
Heinemann, 338 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 434 20166 9
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James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth 
by Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval.
Murray, 544 pp., £25, October 1994, 0 7195 5027 0
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... Victorian Britain; and as for his direct influence, as one observes it in Sickert, Wilson Steer, Gwen John and Victor Pasmore, it is hard not to think of it as beneficent and inspiring. People sometimes rebuke Whistler, as they rebuke Pound, for being noisy and obstreperous, but the polemics – the Ruskin trial, and the ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless ...

Sit like an Apple

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Artists’ Wives, 23 October 2008

Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin 
by Ruth Butler.
Yale, 354 pp., £18.99, July 2008, 978 0 300 12624 2
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... Gesina; Rembrandt had Saskia and Hendrickje; and at least one prominent Vermeer scholar, John Michael Montias, has speculated that several of the unknown women in Vermeer’s paintings are the artist’s wife or daughter. Perhaps the order of things was a bit more bourgeois in 17th-century Holland: though biographical data for the Dutch are ...

Pushing on

John Bayley, 18 September 1986

The Old Devils 
by Kingsley Amis.
Hutchinson, 294 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 09 163790 2
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... days but I can’t help it. I came to them late, sort of.’ This exchange is between Rhiannon and Gwen, wife of Malcolm, who was once in love with Rhiannon though Peter was much more so, so much so that she had to have an abortion in consequence. The two are talking in Gwen’s kitchen, where ‘with a small start Rhiannon ...

The Amazing …

Jonathan Lethem: My Spidey, 6 June 2002

Spider-Man 
directed by Sam Raimi.
May 2002
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... as a whole was most identified. By the mid-1970s Spider-Man’s great plot-lines – The Death of Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s ethereal blonde girlfriend, who would haunt him as Kim Novak haunts James Stewart in Vertigo; The Unmasking of Green Goblins 1, 2, and 3 (a shock each time); The Marriage of Aunt May to Doctor Octopus (an odious villain) – were well ...

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