GWEN JOHN
The painter Gwen John became Auguste Rodin's lover in the summer of 1904, when Rodin was 63. She was 27 when she first visited his studio and was making a living as an artist's model. She began to model for Rodin, translate for him, and sleep with him. She fell so passionately in love with him that for a time she lost interest in everything else. He made her come alive as a sexual being and she wished for nothing in life but to serve him. Their affair was at its height in 1905 and 1906, with Rodin taking a paternal role, encouraging his young mistress to eat properly, to read more, and insisting she draw every day. He also helped her financially; in short she seems to have become completely dependent on him. She hung around the café opposite his studio, camped in the bushes outside his fence at night, and wrote him hundreds of adoring letters. It is hard to know how long what could genuinely be called an affair lasted, as it continued in Gwen's imagination long after it had ceased to be real for Rodin. For his part, Rodin began to lose interest in her, once he had finished his sculpture Muse, for which Gwen was the model.
Perhaps the mysterious Gwen, painting her contemplative and inward women, writing her letters to Rodin, surely not in the hope of replies but in some way to fulfil her own purposes, has something to tell other creative women who become mistresses of an artist. To the outsider, Gwen John's obsessive passion for Rodin must have looked embarrassing and useless, bringing her only grief; but the artist in her knew exactly what she was doing.
Gwen John's relationship with Rodin is discussed in the chapter called 'The Artist's Mistress' in The Mistress.
©Victoria Griffin, 2001
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