Gwen John's tortoiseshell cat
The most important Welsh female artist of her generation, Gwen John is at last earning the recognition that she thoroughly deserved.
This autumn the record for a Gwen John piece was broken as an oil portrait realised £320,000 in London. With a tongue in my cheek, perhaps helped very slightly by the considerable price paid for Gwen John’s ‘Two Hatted Women in Church’ at the Welsh Sale in Gregynog, which at a £22,000 hammer price was a record for the artist's church series of drawings.
For the Welsh Sale in Cardiff this November we are going feline! And how Gwen John loved her cats. To her, they were ideal company: independent, self-sufficient and self-contained, their languid presence brought just the right balance of life and serenity to her home and studio. They enhanced rather than disrupted the level of focus that was essential to her creativity.
This drawing of a tortoiseshell cat has the flow and precision of Tai Chi, that calmest of martial arts, which balances the body, soothes the mind and aids concentration, in addition to defending the self, as and when necessary. I doubt if Gwen John had even heard of Tai Chi, let alone mastered it, but its aims would have appealed to her intense and solitary nature. As it was, she exercised and meditated, fluently and searchingly, through her drawing. No wonder that this little creature strikes us as being a very wise, serene, and (dare I say it) somewhat Confucian cat.
It is also a very elegant cat. With its long neck, sloping body and alert gaze, it almost looks like a feline version of the artist’s own self-portraits, but free of the inevitable and sometimes painful soul searching inherent in the process of representing oneself. Rather, for Gwen John, this cat becomes a conduit for the pure pleasure of drawing: an object for the gaze to settle upon and for the eye and hand, pencil and paint to replicate and, in so doing, almost become. The cliché that people come to resemble their pets and vice versa seems particularly appropriate to this picture.
Some artists regard drawing as means to an end, an underpinning for larger, more ambitious work. Not so Gwen John, who produced only158 known and complete oil paintings. She seems to have found them something of a chore - works to be exhibited and promoted, a tiresome and possibly terrifying disruption to her creative need for solitude. This captivating drawing of her tortoiseshell cat shows Gwen John where she wanted to be, deep in her own world and confident in her assurance as an artist, as she succumbs to the flow and rapture of her daily devotion to drawing.
