Art: God's Little Artist

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ln private Gwendolen Mary John liked to call herself "God's little artist." She was very reticent about her painting and was reluctant to sell it or show it publicly. She often neglected her pictures after completing them, and left them lying about in odd corners of her studio.

Last week, seven years after her death, Londoners saw the first show of her work. (Her famed brother, swashbuckling portrait-painter Augustus John, had helped promote it.) The sad portraits, flower pieces and cat studies seemed as limited and dim as reflections in a cup of tea, but visitors found them strangely moving.

Many of the paintings looked as though they had faded in the sun; the colors were so faint that it required close examination to detect where a pink ended and a blue began. Another unusual feature of Gwen John's painting was the number of studies she made of her subjects from the rear. She sketched a good deal in church, using women at prayer for models.

Born in Pembrokeshire, Wales (in 1876), Gwen John preferred Paris. There she divided her life between painting in her monastic quarters and praying in a Roman Catholic chapel around the corner. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke lent her books now & then, and she corresponded with "Dear Master" Neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, but her only constant company was cats. She was careful to remember the cats in her will.

One fellow-artist believes that she was a genius. Wrote her brother, Augustus John, in Britain's Burlington Magazine: "Few on meeting this retiring person in black, with her tiny hands and feet, a soft, almost inaudible voice, and delicate Pembrokeshire accent, would' have guessed that here was the greatest woman artist of her age, or, as I think, of any other."