Gwendolen Mary John was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Although she was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother Augustus John and her love Auguste Rodin, her reputation has grown steadily since her death.

John was born in Haverfordwest, the second of four children. Her mother was an amateur watercolourist, and both parents encouraged interest in literature and art. Despite this, her father was a stern, rather gloomy solicitor, and her mother was often absent due to ill health. This left her two aunts, stern Salvationists, in charge of the household. John’s mother passed away when she was eight years old, and the family moved to Pembrokeshire. Here the siblings went to the coast of Tenby to sketch, and John remembers sketching “beached gulls, shells and fish on stray pieces of paper”.
From 1895 to 1898 John attended the only art school in the United Kingdom that allowed female artists, the prestigious Slade School of Art. Here the programme was modelled after the French atelier method, in which various levels of students worked under a master artist. They were encouraged to copy the works of old masters in London museums. Many of John’s early paintings are intimist works painted in a traditional style and characterised by subdued colour and transparent glazes. John won the Melvill Nettleship Price for Figure Composition in her final year at Slade.

In 1898 she made her first visit to Paris, where she studied under Whistler at his school, Academie Carmen. Upon return to London in 1899, John exhibited her work at the New English Art Club (NEAC). Later in 1903, John returned to Paris with her friend Dorelia McNeill. The pair set off on a walking tour from Bordeaux (intending to reach Rome), sleeping in fields along the way. In Paris John began modelling for sculptor Auguste Rodin. As her relationship with Rodin broke down, John sought comfort in Catholicism, and in 1913 was received into the church. Paris introduced John to many of the leading artists of her time, including Matisse, Picasso and Brancusi, but the new developments in art had little effect on her and she chose to work in solitude, finding living quarters in Meudon, a suburb of Paris where she would remain for the rest of her life.

John gained an important patron in John Quinn, an American art collector who purchased the majority of her work 1910 until his death in 1924. She exhibited fairly regularly but felt ambivalence towards it as a result of extreme perfectionism. In 1913, one of her paintings was included in the seminal Armory Show in New York, in 1919 she exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and in 1926 had her only solo exhibition: at the New Chenil Galleries in London. Her last dated work was 1933. In 1939 she wrote her will and travelled to Dieppe. Upon arrival, she collapsed, was hospitalized, and died, apparently from starvation.

John’s work is characterised by its quietude and subtle colour relations. Most of her paintings were portraits, but she also painted still lives and several landscapes. She believed that “a cat or a man, it’s the same thing … it’s an affair of volumes … the object is of no importance”. She also made many sketches and watercolours of women and children in church, as well as sketches of her cats. Despite living in France, her work displays a notably British sensibility.