Gwen John was born Gwendolen Mary John on the 22nd of June, 1876, one of four children of Edwin William John and Augusta John (née Smith). Gwen was 8 years old when Augusta passed away, when her family then moved from Haverfordwest to Tenby, where they would often sketch the Pembrokeshire coast.
Her earliest surviving works are from when she was 19, when she began to study at the only art school in the UK that would take female students, Slade School of Art. She developed a relationship with artist Ambrose McEvoy (a portrait by him of Gwen survives), but she also had a relationship with another woman at Slade - her identity is unknown but the relationship was known to Gwen’s brother to be so intense that the woman’s ‘love’ for Gwen ‘turned to hate’.
Gwen won the Melville Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition at Slade, and first visited Paris in 1898, studying under Whistler. She exhibited in London when she returned in 1899, living very poorly, before returning to France in 1903. Gwen was an artist’s model in Paris in 1904, including for Rodin, who she developed a relationship with - she was devoted to him for the next decade.
Despite the famous European artists Gwen met, she preferred to work in solitude. She could afford to work independently and no longer work as a model when patroned by John Quinn from 1911. She continued to exhibit but could be too perfectionist to complete some works. After the end of her relationship with Rodin, Gwen became increasingly Catholic.
Of course, she also lived in solitude, except for her cats. She possibly remained living in France to avoid personal relationships, like with her family. However, she still developed feelings and relationships in France that could be intense and sometimes one-sided.
It is certainly known that Gwen was attracted to men and women, and was likely bisexual. Rodin drew Gwen erotically with Hilda Flodin, his assistant who he also had a sexual relationship with, but Gwen’s own main subjects in her work are women (and cats). Certainly it’s possible to see Gwen’s interest in women in her paintings of various women, whether or not she had relationships with those women.
As well as the women already mentioned, Gwen also was infatuated with another unnamed woman, a married woman in France, and German artist Ida Gerhardi herself was infatuated with Gwen. This was unrequited, as was Gwen’s most intense infatuation with Véra Oumançoff. Gwen wrote 2000 letters to Rodin, especially when she could not get his undivided attention in person, telling him of different aspects of her day and her life. He died in 1917 and it was in 1926 she developed an attachment to Véra, who she also wrote letters to, some (but not many) of which survive at the National Library of Wales. Though these aren’t many, in one of them, Véra asks Gwen whether she needs to write to her every day.
“I don’t think so,” Véra wrote, in French, “- and I even think that it is bad for your soul - for you are too attached to a creature, without ever knowning it, so to speak. I am well aware that you have great sensitivity, but you must direct it towards Our Lord, towards the Blessed Virgin.”
Gwen also sent Véra about 100 drawings, which were discovered in a cupboard after Véra’s death in 1959. This one-sided relationship ended in 1930 as Véra’s family wanted to concentrate on prayer.
By 1933, Gwen had stopped painting, and lived the end of her life in isolation, leaving to Dieppe in 1939, with a will and burial instruction, and dying in a public hospital there on the 18th of September.
The grave was unknown until it was found that Gwen had been buried as ‘Mary John’ in a Dieppe Cemetary, in the 2015 S4C documentary Mamwlad, presented by Ffion Hague. A memorial plaque was added in Dieppe in 2015, finally marking the rest place and celebrating one of the most famous artists from Wales - or perhaps even the most famous artist from Wales, and not just the most famous female artists from Wales either. (Though of course how Welsh her identity was can be also debated.) As she is herself more recognised, rather than just her associations with men, her bisexuality also is increasingly recognised, and perhaps Gwen John is also better understood.
The plaque is inscribed with a quote from a letter of Gwen’s:
Mae pobl fel cysgodion i mi ac fel cysgod ydwyf innau.
(People are like shadows to me and like a shadow I am to them.)
Note: This post was originally written in 2019.
2026 Update:
Between 7 February and 28 June 2026, Gwen John: Strange Beauties ('Gwen John: Hardd a Hynod' in Welsh) was exhibited at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, which was the first major exhibition on Gwen John's work in over 40 years.
Sources & Further Reading:
- Gwen John Self-Portrait.
- Gwen John sources at National Library of Wales.
- Ceridwen Morgan-Lloyd, Gwen John: Letters and Notebooks
- National @museumwales blog ‘LGBT Figures from Welsh History.’
- Norena Shopland, Forbidden Lives: LGBT Stories from Wales, 2017.
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