He was a wild, glamorous, promiscuous painter, the toast of the early 20th century, whose life and career eclipsed his sister’s. But, after dying almost unknown, Gwen is now having the last laugh
When I began researching the lives of Gwen and Augustus John, the image I held in my mind was of the two of them, as very small siblings, sketching together on the coast around Tenby. For both to have escaped the narrowness of their modest provincial home, and established themselves at the heart of early 20th-century art, was a remarkable journey – and I was intrigued by what possible forces of temperament and upbringing might have driven them.
It is hard to credit, now, the scale of Augustus’s celebrity. His youthful drawings were compared to Raphael; he was briefly acclaimed as the leader of British post-impressionism, then celebrated as the pre-eminent portrait-painter of his age. And while recognition came slower to Gwen, the singularity of her vision, drawing on early expressionism and abstraction, as well as her own mystic embrace of Catholicism, earned her a significant place in the modernist canon.
