Plotted with all the verve of a great Victorian novel, this account of artist siblings Gwen and Augustus (“Gus”) John offers a fascinating survey of the lives of both as they chart different but connected courses through the Europe of the Edwardian age, and into its burgeoning modernist scene. Fuelled by the author’s ample research and deft use of source material, these two complicated individuals come alive.
Augustus, the more famous in his lifetime, is by turns compelling and infuriating, indulged in his mistreatment of the women around him by a society that makes allowances for his amorous transgressions. His art suffers, and by the end of his life he is a satyr-like alcoholic, reduced to painting bad commissions.
Gwen, more elusive in both personality and style, emerges as the true artist. Dedicated to the point of mania, her passions erupt in the form of obsessive crushes on women and men in her circle, an affair with the sculptor Rodin, and ultimately in religious withdrawal.
Mackrell’s pithy and incisive writing eschews the temptation to make her a heroine, and instead she teases out the emotional parallels between these two outwardly different artists. Both are self-centred to the point of sociopathy, yet also forceful and charming.
The women around them are also fascinating, with one passage detailing the push and pull between Ida John, Augustus’s artist wife, and his lover Dorothy (Dorelia) McNeil, as their menage a trois implodes. Ida realises that it might be easier for her to escape Gus if Dorelia stays behind, telling the latter: “As soon as the baby was born […] Gus would be ‘as stirred up with love as he had ever been’.”
The readiness of all those involved to sacrifice others at the altar of Gus’s need makes for a difficult read at times, and we wonder what other women artists might have emerged from this generation, given the chance to escape their husbands’ shadows.
[ The forgotten women impressionists: Far more than models, muses or mothersOpens in new window ]
As for redemption? There are glimmers. Gus and Gwen were supportive of each other’s art, in spite of spats and long silences. In one late autobiography, Gus wrote of Gwen: “Few on meeting this retiring person in black […] would have guessed that here was the greatest woman artist of her age, or, I think, of any other.”
