"The Best Woman Painter"

The back rooms at London's Tate gallery are sometimes ignored by art lovers, but those who took the trouble to visit one of them last week found the trip well worth the effort. On display there was the work of Gwen John, elder sister of famed Painter Augustus John, and an artist almost unknown before her death in 1939. Even six years ago, when a memorial show of her work was held in London, the critical reaction was guarded. This time the critics took a second look. Wrote John Russell in the Sunday Times: "The judgment of history . . . will rank Miss John as one of the rare, complete individuals among women painters." Said Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate: "She is the best woman painter who has ever painted in England."

Gwen John never heard such public praise in her lifetime. She lived much of it in painful seclusion in France, rarely showing her work, caring little for outside opinion. Her subjects were simple ones: a woman holding a cat, an empty room, a vase of flowers. Her pale colors and still figures gave the pictures a quiet, reticent look. But there was nothing vague or misty about them. All had been drawn with a strong, accurate hand.

"I Want to Flourish." Outwardly, Gwen John was as reticent as her painting. Inwardly, her life was one of intense feeling, rebellion and search. She was a spinster who became the mistress of Sculptor Auguste Rodin, an agnostic who turned to the Roman Catholic Church. In his new book, Modern English Painters, published last week, Sir John Rothenstein devotes a chapter to Gwen John, tells much of her story for the first time.

She grew up in Pembrokeshire, Wales, a quiet girl who sometimes broke out in bitter clashes with her lawyer father. In 1895, at 19, she left home to study art with her brother Augustus in London. "We shared a room together," remembers Augustus, "subsisting like monkeys on a diet of fruit and nuts." Gwen soon crossed to Paris. She wrote her brother: "There are people like plants who cannot flourish in the cold, and I want to flourish."

In Paris, she flew at her work, paid little attention to her contemporaries. Once she was asked her opinion of some Ceezanne watercolors. "These are very good," she said quietly, "but I prefer my own." For a while she had a tiny allowance from her father, but that ended with his first visit, when he saw her wearing a dress she had painstakingly copied from a Manet picture. "You look like a prostitute in that dress," he told her. "I could never accept anything from someone capable of thinking so," Gwen blazed back.

"Be Patient." Gwen John was in her 30s when she met Rodin. But Rodin was in his 60s, and busy with a complex public life. "Be patient and less violent," he admonished her. Yet the illustrious sculptor was fond of Gwen, and wrote frequent letters scolding about her health. And even after she entered the Roman Catholic Church she clung to Rodin for love and comfort. "My heart is like a sea which has little sad waves," she wrote. "But every ninth wave is big and happy."

Gwen John spent the last 25 years of her life living and working in poverty at Meudon, near Paris. After Rodin's death, she turned her devotion to a collection of cats; almost the only humans she suffered were the nuns of Meudon and the orphans they cared for. She took Holy Communion each day, but when she was absorbed in painting she would forgo Mass for a month at a time. Her style changed drastically: while her early canvases were built up from thin, fluid paint, she now changed to thick paint, made her colors lighter and lighter.

In the fall of 1939, Gwen John felt a sudden longing for the sea. After arranging for the care of her cats, she took a train to Dieppe, collapsed on arrival and was taken to a hospital. There, at 63, she died alone.

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