A Lady Reading (1909-11)

Gwen John moved to Paris in 1904 and settled in France for the rest of her life. This interior is her own room there, either at 7 rue Saint Placide, her first independent home or 87 rue du Cherche-Midi, with the familiar wicker chair. The framed drawings of cats on the wall are also by her – she had owned her own female cat that she had called Edgar Quinet, after the boulevard where she had first stayed with Dorelia McNeill but it went missing in 1908.

John was inspired by the idea of depicting figures in interiors from her Parisian contemporaries such as James McNeill Whistler, whose Académie Carmen she had attended in Paris with fellow Slade graduates Gwen Salmond and Ida Nettleship (her future sister-in-law) in 1898/99; the ‘intimistes’ Bonnard and Vuillard who were part of the Peintres d’Intérieurs group that first showed in Paris in 1905-with the inclusion of a red checked fabric and the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi whom the Nettleship family had known and exhibited his work privately in London.

John had attended the Slade School of Fine Art (1894-98) where they were encouraged to copy pictures of the old masters as well depict real life. She wrote to her fellow student friend Ursula Tyrwhitt that she had tried to make the head of this woman look like an image of the Virgin Mary by Albrecht Dürer but she later decided to improve the picture and made a second version, using her own portrait - Girl Reading at a Window (1911) is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This picture (along with Nude Girl, 1909-10) was given by an anonymous member of the executive committee to the new Contemporary Art Society in 1911. It was presented by the CAS to the Tate Gallery in 1917.

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