Pictures of the Month | August 2008
Picture of the Month
August 2008
Girl in a Blue Dress [1914-15]
by Gwen John
Medium oil on canvas; Size 43.9 x 34.9 cm; Acquired 1935;
Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, Cardiff
This delicate, quiet and somewhat melancholy work from Amgueddfa Cymru — National Museum Wales, in Cardiff, is on display at the Barber Institute as part of the current exhibition, Reunited: Gwen John, Mère Poussepin and the Catholic Church (4 July – 21 September). Girl in a Blue Dress is representative of many studies that Gwen John executed from c.1915, during, and following the period she was working on a most demanding commission for a series of portraits of a seventeenth-century nun, Mère Marie Poussepin (1653-1744), taken from an image on a prayer card. In 1696 Mère Poussepin had founded the Dominican order of the Sisters of Charity of the Holy Virgin of Tours in Meudon — a small town west of Paris where John had lived since 1911.
In keeping with the majority of her work, Girl in a Blue Dress is infused with a deeply meditative piety. It displays the artist’s expert application of subtly muted tonal harmonies to capture both form and mood – a skill that has its roots in her training under James McNeill Whistler in 1898. The small, dry dabs of paint are a quintessential characteristic of John’s work from this period onwards — a feature that adds to the tranquil but physical nature of her paintings. The paint is so systematically and evenly applied that both figure and background have exactly the same texture. The seated three-quarter-length pose, with hands folded neatly in the lap, is a formula that John adopts repeatedly for her portraits of women from around 1914 – an approach which derived from the Mère Poussepin series. As in the latter, the sitter gazes out at the viewer with a look that seems simultaneously to demand our attention while retaining a certain level of disengagement, secrecy and withdrawal.
Girl in a Blue Dress is one of at least eight paintings John made of the same sitter in this spotted blue dress, which differ only slightly in the treatment of the background or items the girl may be holding. The sitter is thought to be one of John’s neighbours in Meudon, possibly Angéline Lhuisset. The American patron, John Quinn, wrote of this work – ‘I am delighted with the Little Model in a blue dress. It is a beautiful composition’. It stayed in the artist’s possession until 1935, when she sent it to an exhibition of contemporary Welsh art in Swansea, where her work was very much admired. It was purchased from the show by the National Museum of Wales for £20, and was the first painting by John to enter the collection. She wrote to her friend Mary Anderson in 1936: ‘I wanted money so I ... sent [five pictures] ... to England ... one was sold for a museum of pictures & I had a very chic letter from the director, so now I don't want money for the moment’.
Only here in Birmingham until September, Girl in a Blue Dress is a charming little gem of a portrait that merits a visit to the exhibition. This work not only exemplifies Gwen John’s fascinating painterly techniques, but is also a highly rewarding, and perhaps slightly haunting, image to contemplate within its present context at the Barber.
Kathryn Murray, Gallery Assistant
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