This major new novel by the best-selling Maggie Humm is the story of artist Gwen John's tumultuous affair with the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
This historical romance literary fiction is told in the first-person present tense. It explores Gwen's journey from a naive young woman to a self-confident and celebrated artist. Both Rodin and Gwen John were radical artists who challenged the conventions of art and respectability in the early years of the twentieth century. Here Gwen steps out from the shadows cast first by her brother Augustus John the painter, and then by Rodin, to play her part in the furthering the cause of female artists to be treated as equals by their male counterparts.
The novel is largely set in London and Paris between 1897 and 1917, and focusses on pivotal moments which transform Gwen's life.
As a Slade student in London in 1897, she mixes in an artistic coterie, drinking together in Fitzrovia, dining at the Cafe Royal, and learning from all the famous artists of the time, which sustains and encourages Gwen in her chosen career.
Living in Paris in 1904-1917 she moves in the exciting Parisian art world and its cafes, studios, and complex heterosexual and Sapphic relationships. Gwen enjoys her life as an independent woman living alone, with her painting supported by modelling for income. One day, while modelling, Gwen meets Rodin. Having once glimpsed him, to her excitement, in the British Museum, she is delighted to be invited to model for Rodin and they begin a sexual relationship. Their affair, despite his other lovers, is passionate and for Gwen life changing. The ups and downs of their relationship produce scenes of tense confrontation and equally intense love. Gwen adjusts to her life as a cinq-a-sept mistress.
Her obsessive love for Rodin, and his increasingly casual treatment of her, threatens to stultify her painting but Gwen is continually inventive. One day Rodin visits, telling her that only she, the sole artist among his other models, can fully understand him and his art. The surprising moment transforms Gwen's understandings about herself, and her art and that dramatic insight fully releases her into a vocation, supported by recognition of her work by a major American collector John Quinn and by the New English Art Club.
A brief afterword 'What happened next' completes the lives of Gwen and other real-life characters after 1917 and reveals which characters are fictional.
