Quiet genius and torment...the story of a tortured artist

Under the shadow of her brother Augustus, Gwen John and her paintings remain relatively unknown. Robert McCrum looks at a troubled relationship, as explored in a new book

- Robert McCrum

As recently as 1974, scarcely a decade after his death, the artist Augustus John received the kind of tribute reserved for a great British national treasure: a two-volume life by the premier biographer of the age, Michael Holroyd, who was already renowned for his life of Lytton Strachey.

Accompanied by the media hoopla of the moment - lavish Sunday newspaper serialisation, breathless TV coverage, hundreds of column inches in the broadsheets, and immense global sales - it was the kind of celebrity bonanza that impinged on this reviewer as a student. I still possess a dogeared copy of volume one, replete with embarrassing marginalia.

Barely a generation after that astonishing, even ridiculous, outpouring of sentimental enthusiasm over the “genius” of a philandering Edwardian self-promoter, the 21st century now takes its inevitable revenge on the past in Judith Mackrell’s belated second look at the artist John, and at his (to us) neglected sister, a woman whose place in the British art scene is still a work in progress.

It’s a haunting, melancholy tale of talented siblings whose gifts got lost in the fever of the times. He was overpraised, whereas she was underrated; he lived his life in public, and died full of self-loathing; she cultivated solitude, in answer to her brother’s fame, and died in utter obscurity. At least in its origins, though, their story is a shared one, beginning with the horror of their provincial childhood in Wales.