The art, rage and illicit love affairs of Augustus and Gwen John

Telegraph

08-06-2025

Augustus John once ate a hedgehog. Born in 1878, by his 20s he was one of the country's most famous artists, known for his dazzling draughtsmanship, Bohemian leanings and fascination with Romani encampments (where he dined on said hedgehog stew). Over the course of his marriage, his wife, Ida, slowly resigned herself to his affairs, eventually inviting his lover, Dorelia McNeill, to move in with them. Their ménage grew to include children by both women; one painting of their family life is called Caravan: A Gypsy Encampment.
Never one to resist what he desired, Augustus had plucked Dorelia from an intense friendship with his artist sister, Gwen. Both siblings studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, but where Augustus's output was vast, wayward and produced at pace, Gwen, 18 months his senior, was happy if she managed 'one beautiful square inch in a day'. She said that she was 'born to love' (both men and women), but it was love of a different kind to her brother's fly-by-night promiscuity. Her most famous affair, with Auguste Rodin, 35 years older, soon suffered from the intensity of her devotion.
Judith Mackrell has produced a fine portrait of these two artists in her double biography, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries. Forged in the same unremarkable Welsh childhood, each in different ways threw off society in order to paint and love. Augustus's early career was a dazzle of technical brilliance, deeply influenced by Rembrandt. Gwen was indebted to figures such as Whistler and Vuillard, masters of the misty and the muted. Her quiet and mottled interiors, of women alone or cradling cats, have a glowing stillness and piercing precision that make her brother's verve seem merely bumptious.
Mackrell's approach is nuanced, with no trace of gushing bar the title (I hope the three-noun formula doesn't catch on). The delicacy of Gwen's painting is never mistaken for meekness or fragility of character, and Mackrell avoids the cliché of contrasting Gwen's introspection with her brother's extrovert panache. Beneath Augustus's relish for life lay struggles with anxiety and depression. And Gwen could be socially gregarious and physically adventurous. On holiday in Dorset, she plunged on impulse into the churning sea and nearly drowned, but was thrilled by the 'delicious danger'.
The book refers always to 'Gus', a nickname used only by Gwen, as if each sibling were narrating the other's story. Mackrell places herself unfashionably, but rewardingly, in the background. She has an eye for the telling detail, where her silence can be as revealing as any high-handed ticking-off; she quotes Augustus dribbling over Dorelia – 'your fat entices me enormously, I long to inspect it' – and no more needs to be said.
Empathy for her subjects does not reduce her compassion for those caught in the siblings' turbulent slipstream. Augustus, for example, was accused of rape by Caitlin Macnamara (to whom he introduced her future husband, Dylan Thomas). Mackrell permits herself a moment of accusation, the more powerful for its rarity: 'the hard truth remains that she'd been little more than a child, a very damaged child, when he seduced her, and, in that, he was guilty of abuse.'
The book is thrifty with dates, sometimes leaving the reader temporally adrift, and I would have welcomed lengthier quotations from letters, especially in the compelling stretch devoted to Gwen's affair with Rodin, during which, at his urging, she poured her desire into the written word. Mackrell enticingly describes a series of graphic letters blazing with 'supplication, anger and sexual provocation', but sticks mainly to paraphrase.
This is the fourth book on Gwen to appear in recent years (following Celia Paul 's acclaimed Letters to Gwen John and studies by Alicia Foster and by Emma Chambers). As for Augustus, Michael Holroyd's 1974 biography has not been superseded, and Mackrell leans on it heavily: around half of her endnotes cite his work, and she offers little new material. But as Ida wrote to a friend before she married Augustus, 'these Johns, you know, have a hold that never ceases.' The value of interweaving the two lives within a single frame more than justifies the repackaging, and the two strands are tightly braided rather than laid out in alternate chapters.
Augustus always said that his sister was the greater painter; it's hard to disagree. Gwen slowly retreated into a world of cats and Catholicism, painting for herself and for God, and then not painting at all; she died in 1939, having produced little for some while. Augustus survived her for 22 years, a period of physical and artistic decline covered here in a single chapter. Most of his final portraits, lazy and lumpen, were bashed out for money; there were many mouths to feed. Officially he fathered 13 children, but legend had it that, walking through Chelsea as an old man, he would pat the head of any passing infant, just in case it was his.