BONUS • Lucy Wood on Gwen John: 'God's Little Artist'

I think Gwen John really, in Britain at least, has become somewhat of a national treasure of the period.

And I think people are drawn to her for different reasons.

I think she's quite unusual in terms of the way in which she worked and the style that she developed.

I feel that she's an artist who's quite hard to pigeonhole into any of the kind of isms of the time or the movements of the period.

I also think she's an artist whose subject is women and women's lives and women's experience.

So there is this very immediate way in which I think her work speaks to the changing roles of women during the early 20th century and these new forms of emancipation that women were experiencing at this time.

So I think...

there is a very obvious sense in which her work, her paintings of women in a room of their own, speak to this period and really capture the moment that she was living in.

And then I think the more that you look at her work and the more that you dig and explore and become familiar with who she was and her life and her dedication to making art, I think is...

so empowering.

I think there's lots that you can draw from both who she was as a person and the work that she made, which speaks to people on different levels.

I

mean, she converted to Catholicism in 1913 as an adult.

And before that, had she had much exposure to religion? Had religion been a part of her upbringing?

Yeah, so it's something that I thought a lot about her conversion to Catholicism and why she would have converted at this moment when she was in her mid-30s, so relatively late on in her life.

There's an amazing section of Augustus John's memoirs, actually, where he talks about religion and the various religious traditions that the children were exposed to during their upbringing.

And there's an amazing passage where he lists all of the different religious options.

And at the end of this says that Roman Catholicism was viewed with deep suspicion and the servant girls worship the Virgin Mary, and this is held in the greatest horror.

So I think it's just so fascinating that religion was part of her upbringing.

She was brought up in Wales.

So the family were Church of England, which was disestablished within Wales in 1920.

Their mother died when Gwen John was young and they were cared for by two aunts who are said to have toured around Haverford West where they lived in a Hallelujah chariot.

So they held high rank in the Salvation Army.

So they...

There were definitely different religious options and a kind of understanding of ritual.