Two Women in a Church

Gwen John belonged to a generation of women who trained and worked as professional artists around the turn of the twentieth century. In the Paris suburb of Meudon, where she moved in 1911, she converted to Catholicism and started attending church. During services, the artist would sketch the congregants. Here, she portrays two women wearing differently shaped hats, composing the image with bold black outlines and broad washes of muted tone. In her drawings, John focuses more on the shapes she noticed in clothing, on the various postures, and the chairs they sat on, than on the individuals (2022).