InSight No. 193

‘She sold her work rarely and with reluctance’, said Gwen John’s (1876–1939) brother Augustus, ‘and then only at a price far below that which her clients were willing to pay.’ She might in part have been reluctant to release her work because, as Winifred John suggested after her sister’s death, ‘Gwen would wish to be forgotten.’ In the case of drawings, watercolours and gouaches, she sold them less than she made gifts of them. For this reason, after her death a large accumulation of works on paper was found in her studio by her nephew and executor Edwin John. Some of these became the property of Augustus and his common-law wife Dorelia, and Meudon Nocturne: A Street was one of these. (Dorelia loaned it to the Arts Council’s retrospective of Gwen John in 1968.) Augustus was a great admirer of Gwen’s work, and his high esteem for it led him to chastise her, after her death, for selling it too cheaply. In his second volume of memoirs, Finishing Touches (1964), Augustus called her ‘the greatest woman artist of her age, or, as I think, of any other.’

Nocturne is a French word that means ‘of the night’. In the early nineteenth century, the Irish pianist composer John Field used the term to describe atmospheric music for solo piano characterised by free-flowing melody and broken chords, and the genre was later popularised by Chopin who gave it new depths of drama and pathos. Field’s coinage was freighted with Romantic significance; his compositions ring with gentle emotion, a sensibility for landscape, and a yearning quality instilled by the transience of dusk. Jane Austen articulated a sense of early Romantic nocturnal delight in her novel Mansfield Park (1814), in which she describes the return of a party from Sotherton Court: ‘It was a beautiful evening, mild and still, and the drive was as pleasant as the serenity of nature could make it’.

Painters were making exquisite twilit landscapes many years before—and after—the emergence of the nocturne in music. In the Middle Ages, it was necessary to consider the problem of representing night because that is when the angels appeared to the shepherds after the birth of Christ. Later, many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish and Netherlandish artists such as Adam Elsheimer, Aert van der Neer and Peter Paul Rubens painted moonlit landscapes in which the play of half-light over water was finely observed. Not until J. M. W. Turner’s generation, and his early paintings such as Moonlight, a Study of Millbank, did these scenes begin to suggest a heightened elegiac mood. In their own way, the likes of Caspar David Friedrich, Johan Christian Dahl and Peder Balke treated the same subject-matter at the same emotional pitch.

The first painter who co-opted the musical term ‘nocturne’ to describe a painting was James McNeill Whistler. One of his paintings of the River Thames around Battersea Bridge, Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea, was the first he described as such. In his most elevated register, he described an analogous scene in his lecture, ‘Mr Whistler’s Ten O’Clock’ (1885), which reveals his feeling for a nocturnal subject: ‘when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil – and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky – and the tall chimneys become campanile – and the warehouses are palaces in the night – and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and faireyland is before us – […] and Nature, who for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the Artist alone […]’. In this description, it is the transformational quality of dusk that ignites the scene and makes it worthy of art.

Not only a grand stylist and Romantic, Whistler was also an ardent scientist. He originated a form of tonal painting in which the whole subject was harmonised to a single key. A narrow range of colours was used to articulate brighter and deeper pitches of the key. His one-time friend Walter Sickert remembered them going to the Thames together at Rotherhithe by evening where they would play ‘a sort of game’, the point of which was to sharpen the visual memory. ‘We would look for about ten minutes at a given subject, isolating it as much as possible from its surroundings, then turn our backs on it and have a guessing competition, giving each other half marks for remembering the position, size and shape of the various objects that filled the scene and full marks for remembering the exact degrees of light and dark falling on them.’ Such scientific matters of tone were inseparable from a concern with twilight and its representation. That was the time of day when the tones drew closer together and posed both a demanding technical challenge—to represent them accurately demonstrated the artist’s mastery—and an achingly desirable scene for the late Romantic imagination.

Whistler’s method, subject-matter and outlook had a far-reaching impact. The likes of Sickert, John Atkinson Grimshaw, William Nicholson, and many others of their generation used variants of the tonal method and painted nocturnes of some kind. Nicholson unusually painted a solar eclipse, for instance. Gwen John has her place among these artists. She briefly studied at Whistler’s short-lived school in Paris, the Académie Carmen, in 1898. ‘Here she acquired that methodicity which she was to develop to a point of elaboration undreamt of by her Master’, wrote her brother Augustus.

In 1911, Gwen John settled in the rural commune of Meudon on the outskirts of Paris. The landscapes she made there are small, concentrated, simply composed, and realised from intense study. Her painting of rue Terre Neuve, which shows the road where she lived at the time from the elevated perspective of an upper floor, is echoed by many studies in watercolour and gouache on paper. Nine works of this title belong to the National Museum of Wales, which acquired from Edwin John the bulk of Gwen John’s studio contents in 1976. Meudon Nocturne: A Street is comparatively unusual since the subject appears to be unique. The light is failing in the western sky to the right. Up the road, the warm illumination of a distant window swims in the gloom. The solid forms of the building, its chimneys and windows, are modelled in fine but distinct tonal gradients, and the setting—road, sky, shadows—is likewise rigorously contrived in chromatic shifts of violet. Working in the nocturnal tradition of Whistler, Gwen John nevertheless developed her own subjects and method and breathed through them her own distinctive personality. And for all their methodicity, her nocturnes are warm with poetic sensibility.

Images:

Photograph of Augustus and Ida John with their son David and Gwen John, Liverpool, 1902, collection of Michael Holroyd (detail)

Aert van der Neer, An estuary by moonlight, c. 1645–58, oil on panel, 19 x 27.2 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea, 1871, oil on wood, 50.2 x 60.8 cm, Tate

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Moon, gas and starlight, Whitby, 1877, oil on board, 21.3 x 45.2 cm, Private Collection

Gwen John, Rue Terre Neuve, Meudon, c. late 1910s/early 1920s, oil on canvas, 22 x 27.4 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Gwen John, Meudon Nocturne: A Street (framed)