Gwen John: A Queer Welsh icon?

In recent years, Gwen John has been reclaimed as a queer Welsh icon. While her sexuality was never hidden (her brother Augustus references her attraction to both men and women in the foreword to her Memorial Exhibition catalogue in 1946 and it has since been discussed in all three of her biographies), this renewed interest encourages us to think about how John’s queerness might influence how she saw the world and made art. How do gender and sexuality affect out reading of an artist’s choice of subject or how they depict people and places?

John had sexual relationships and romantic friendships with both men and women throughout her life. According to Augustus’s autobiography, she had ‘an unhappy crossing in love’ with ‘a certain girl student’ at the Slade School of Art in London which ‘led to a drama’ in which John jealously demanded the girl end an affair with a married man. John’s first biographer, Susan Chitty, suggested that this love interest may have been Grace Westray, a fellow Slade student who shared a flat for a time with Gwen and Augustus. She may be the young woman depicted sitting in the foreground of John’s Portrait Group, one of John’s only surviving student works. Outside the window, we see two figures, possibly Gwen and fellow artist Ambrose McEvoy, another love interest. This group scene represents the tangled web of love, friendship, and family that defined Gwen’s student days. It depicts the shared student flat at 21 Fitzroy Street which served as a hub of creativity that fostered her artistic development, as well as a safe space in which to explore her emerging sexuality.

Gwen John, Group Portrait, 1897. UCL Art Collection – currently on display in Gwen John: Strange Beauties

John’s subsequent relationships followed a similar pattern: passionate attachment and deep affection spilling over into overwhelming devotion on John’s part. When she met the sculptor Auguste Rodin after moving to Paris in 1904 she became a favourite model and soon began a romantic relationship with him. This is documented in the hundreds of letters she sent him, now in the archives of the Musée Rodin. While many of them are love letters and some speak frankly about sex and desire, including with other women, others describe her day-to-day modelling for other artists. Among these were many queer women, such as Ottilie Roederstein, Ida Gerhardi, Anna Wood Brown, and Hilda Flodin all of whom were long term clients and friends. While it’s not clear if John ever attended any of the cafés or salons associated with the Parisian sapphic artistic circles to which these women belonged, she would undoubtedly have been aware of them.

Like many of the women John worked with and for, having her own lodgings was essential for both her professional and personal life. Her garret apartment, as depicted in Corner of the Artist’s Room, was both her home and her studio. As art historian Alicia Foster has pointed out, having a ‘room of one’s own’ was essential for her art practice, but as an unmarried woman it was also a space to which she could invite friends and lovers. At a time when even walking city streets unchaperoned could illicit unwanted attention, the ability to rent a small, private space meant freedom, sexual and otherwise. Is it any surprise then that John’s rooms appear so frequently as the subject of her art in its own right? For a single, queer woman and artist, this space represented both sanctuary and livelihood.

Gwen John, Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, 1907-9, NMW A 3397

In late 1926, John met the famous Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who lived nearby in Meudon with his wife, Raissa, and his sister-in-law, Véra Oumançoff. John quickly became deeply attached to Oumançoff, who became her confidante and spiritual advisor. The two women would often speak after mass at their local church and go for walks in the woods together. John’s affection for Oumançoff developed into romantic feelings, which appear to have been unrequited. Many passionate draft letters addressed to Oumançoff can be found in the Gwen John Papers in the National Library of Wales. In them, John mixes religious thought with romantic devotion, asking God to ‘show her how to love Véra’ and asking Oumanoff to let her ‘kiss her hands’. Oumançoff became overwhelmed by the attention, and asked John to limit her letters and visits to once per week. John duly obeyed, but began bringing not just letters to these rare visits but also drawings, which she called ‘dessins de lundi’ (Monday drawings). Each week for nearly two years, John presented Oumançoff with a drawing or watercolour, some new and others apparently versions of older motifs. The subjects, styles, and mediums are widely varied. Some were presented attached to backing sheets of coloured paper with the title and date given inscribed on the back. The titles of many of John’s works on paper (such as Mademoiselle Pouvereau and Souvenir du Dimanche des rameaux) are known thanks to these inscriptions.

Gwen John, Mademoiselle Pouvereau, NMW A 3607

Oumançoff kept these drawings long after the relationship ended, in spite of moving the United States as an exile during the Second World War. Over one hundred of the dessins de lundi were discovered again in the 1960s in the Maritain archive. Several works now in the studio collection at Amgueddfa Cymru are versions of compositions John gave as dessins de lundi. Reading these works through the lens of John’s sexuality, we can see them not just as formal studies of composition or tone, but as tokens of love and affection intended to convey a shared experience of faith and prayer. Furthermore, because John’s ability to communicate with Oumançoff was restricted to just once a week, these drawings became an additional means through which she could communicate to her beloved. They stood in for conversations and letters.

One of the images that John gave to Oumançoff as a dessin de lundi was a drawing of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897). This modern French saint, a close contemporary of John, died young and was canonised very quickly. She was one of the first saints to ever be photographed, a fact that her convent used to help create an iconography for her and advance the cause of her canonisation. The convent in Lisieux published books, prayer cards, and memorabilia with Thérèse’s image on it. As a Catholic convert and an artist, John was fascinated by these photographs which for the first time showed the real face of a saint, rather than an anonymous stylised icon made hundreds of years after their death. She became particularly attached to an image of Thérèse and her older sister, Céline, as children, drawing and painting this composition hundreds of times. These images have tended to be underrepresented in studies about Gwen John’s art, and are often dismissed as obsessive or absent-minded doodles. But this diminishes the importance that the ‘true face’ of a saint just three years older than her would have had for John. Furthermore, by the 1920s when John began drawing her, Thérèse had become a bit of a queer icon herself. Jean Cocteau, Henri Ghéon, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Vita Sackville-West, and Radclyffe Hall were all devotees of the saint. Her theology of the ‘Little Way’, which suggested that small, imperfect lives could be made holy through everyday sacrifices appealed to converts, avant-gardists, and other outsiders. John, who would write in her late notebooks about her desire to become a saint, was likewise drawn to Thérèse’s ‘Little Way’. Perhaps as an outsider herself, whose life and sexuality didn’t conform to heteronormative standards, she took particular comfort in Thérèse’s image and doctrine.

Gwen John, Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux and her sister, NMW A 15561

Gwen John, Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux and her sister, NMW A 15534

Reading John’s art through the lens of her sexual fluidity opens up possibilities for new interpretations of her art. While this article has touched on a few examples, there is still more work to be done. In acknowledging John’s queerness and considering how it might influence her way of seeing the world around her, we add depth and nuance to our understanding. To read more about John as a queer artist, see Norena Shopland’s book Forbidden Lives (2017), Tabitha Deadman’s Art UK article ‘Bi visibility: Gwen John and multiple gender attraction’, and Mair Jones’s Art UK article ‘Queer Welsh women in art’.