Fall in love with the strange beauty of artist Gwen John

Welsh artist Gwen John is experiencing a well-deserved renaissance, one century after her only lifetime exhibition. A painter as sensitive to psychological interiority as she was the technical aspects of her craft, John’s contemplative portraits are currently featured in a touring exhibition moving from Amgueddfa Cymru to the National Galleries of Scotland before it travels to the US. 'She was such a remarkable painter and a remarkable mind,' says Charlotte Topsfield, co-curator of ‘Strange Beauties’. 'She was a thoughtful artist who was very analytical in her working methods. She was constantly reading and thinking about art.'

Born 150 years ago, John was deeply independent, among the first generation of women to receive a formal art education. She moved to Paris to pursue her painting career, where she was inspired by French modernism. The artist also converted to Catholicism in adulthood and regularly painted the parishioners at her Meudon church. 'She could create suspension, tension and intrigue with something very quiet,' says Topsfield.

Alongside small works on paper, watercolours and rare drawings, the exhibition includes a famous painting, ‘A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris’, which reveals John’s presence without showing her. The work features a simple table and chair placed by the window, a piece of clothing slumped casually over the arm.

'I love artists who are good at playing with the absent presence, and you feel the artist in the room through her possessions,' says Topsfield. Many of John’s paintings featured female subjects, some repeated in over 60 different works. 'There is so much depth to them and something slightly enigmatic. When you look at her female sitters you have a very strong sense of an interior life. You get a sense of these women as real people.' John also drew the orphaned children at her local church, later painting them in watercolour at her studio. The repeated motif of a black cat runs through her works, sometimes sitting or sleeping on children’s laps.

While her paintings suggest an enduring interest in women’s interior life and the community that surrounded her, Topsfield notes that a tension exists between the meaning we might read into her work now as a contemporary audience and John’s own drive. She was an avid follower of Cezanne, engaging with the Parisian avant-garde artists of the 1930s. John wrote hundreds of letters to Rodin and attended lectures on cubism.

'I think we instinctively want to know who her sitters are and have a strong sense of them, but at the same time, she was more and more influenced by modernist ideas and she was looking at the works as a pictorial challenge,' says Topsfield. The arrangement of forms and space were just as important as the individual within them. John famously wrote, 'a cat or a man is the same thing… it’s just an affair of volumes… the object is of no importance.'

The exhibition plays with ideas of strangeness, an idea that repeatedly came up in John’s notebooks. She described herself as 'God’s little artist, a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent worker.' As Topsfield sees it, 'I think she was trying to step back, look afresh and do away with preconceived ideas. She was very rigorous with everything, which can be slightly destructive as she was very intense with her emotions. She felt things very deeply and sometimes reacted to things in what could be seen as a strange way. At the same time, she had immense intellectual clarity.'

Gwen John at the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art until 4 January 2027