Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: Gwen and Augustus John

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Judith Mackrell, one of Britain’s most eminent biographers, chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: 

• Artists, Siblings, Visionaries is the first major dual biography of Gwen and Augustus John, siblings who became two of the most significant British artists of the 20th century.
• The death of Augusta, Gwen and Augustus’s mother, left the young children emotionally bereft, creating in Augustus a compulsive pattern of falling in love with new women, and in Gwen an intense, sometimes obsessive yearning directed at unattainable figures such as the French sculptor, François Auguste René Rodin.
• Judith challenges the assumption that Augustus’s fame damaged Gwen’s career. Instead, he was his sister’s most devoted advocate and correctly prophesied that history would one day remember him as Gwen’s brother.
• By choosing a dual biography, Judith could use both siblings as a ‘marvellous laboratory’, tracking year by year the social, cultural and economic forces that propelled Augustus to fame rapidly while Gwen remained largely unseen, illuminating the structural barriers facing women artists.
• Judith came to understand Gwen’s famous reclusive shyness as a form of armour, a deliberate self-presentation that gave her control over who she engaged with, contradicted by her ferocious capacity for emotional pursuit and sustained creative work.
• Judith describes herself as a ‘gardener’ rather than an ‘architect’ of narrative. She begins drafting the manuscript almost from the start of the research, finding that structure emerges organically, with serendipitous connections between the two lives surprising her along the way.
• For Judith, writing about artists means foregrounding the people, not just the work, asking how two desolate children became artists, and what the interaction was between their art and their lives.