Girl Reading at the Window by Gwen John 1911

Following her deepening religious belief, and receiving instruction into the Catholic church, Gwen John began to experiment with how faith could be reflected and brought into her painting. She worked on two paintings of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel appears to the young Mary. John places Mary in a Parisian interior reading a book; the angel is conveyed by the movement of a curtain at an open window.

In the second painting John uses herself as a model for the Virgin Mary’s face. One biographer (Alicia Foster) notes that it’s ‘a remarkable act of chutzpah’ to paint yourself as the mother of God, but religion was becoming a central part of John’s life alongside her art.

In this second version of the Annunciation which she called ‘Girl Reading at the Window’ John follows the earlier version by painting the angel as the light that transforms the curtain into a swathe of white:

‘Gwen John painted an everyday physical reality – the sun coming through the window – as a moment of profound religious illumination, her version brings together a two-thousand-year-old story with the utterly modern, retold with no recourse to haloes and angel wings.’

She also painted contemporary Catholic figures, including Pope Benedict XV (taken from as photo in a paper0, her friend the philosopher and theologian Jacques Maritain, and over a number of years many depictions of St Therese of Lisieux to whom John became devoted and who fired her work and also her religious worship. Inspired by the saint, John wrote:

‘Unless you have the will to be great you will fall into mediocrity …

1. 1. God, your Lover, is waiting for you.
   2. Make the step now that will bring you nearer to being a Saint.
   3. Ask God to strengthen your will to be a great Saint.’

Over a number of years, John made St Therese the subject of her art and emulation. John wrote: ‘I must be a saint too. I must be a saint in my work.’ Her repeated sketches of St Therese and Therese’s sister were often done on scraps of paper, and look quite haphazard –not trying to improve by repeatedly drawing the same two figures, or trying to reach a best or complete version, she is rather ‘expressing the experience, the time and the process of their making’. Here it seems she was influenced by the writing of Henri Bergson (as were Jacques and Raissa Maritain), with his thinking on the flow of immediate experience, the importance of intuition, and the creative spirit. The creative spirit is contemplative, spiritual, and free –rather than the rational and mechanistic. There is no end to be reached.

A series of oil paintings of the founder of an order of Dominican nuns – Mere Poussepin – were taken from a black and white prayer card. In these John is, ‘…summoning up a living presence in all its fullness, an entity at once solid and with an evanescent spiritual dimension’. John also painted and drew a number of the nuns in her neighbourhood convent, and people in church.

John wanted her art to elevate and explore her religious belief. Both worked for each other so that John could describe herself as: ‘God’s little artist: a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies. A diligent worker.’ ‘