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Quiet, subdued, and intense, this view of a young woman in an undefined interior exemplifies John's artistic vision in the years around 1920. Since 1915 she had been simplifying her paintings: paring down the details of the setting and monumentalizing her sitters. In this work she presents her model frontally, allowing the young woman to engage the viewer's eyes with her own. Yet, in spite of her open pose and glance, the sitter resists interpretation: she is introspective, impenetrable, and mysterious.
Framed by the corner of the studio, a window of which is visible in the upper right, the model sits as though rooted in place. Her pose, at a slightly oblique angle to the picture plane, is one of quietude and self-containment. Her face, bright under the umbrella of her voluminous hat, and her strong, almost masculine hands folded in her lap with their fingers interlaced, draw the viewer's attention but reveal little of her character. Like a statue, she is inviting yet inert, trapped within the material that has given her form.
Little is know about the model for the present work, although she appears in the majority of John's paintings from this period. She lived near the artist in Meudon, a suburb southwest of Paris. Since her actual name is not known, she is generally known as the "convalescent model," having played such a part in a series of works of the late 1910s. Apparently, she did not always enjoy her task. For John, however, the character and feelings of her models were of no account; painting them was merely "an affair of volumes."1 John's technique evolved constantly from her early career as a student at the Slade School in London. Careful and painstaking from the outset, her method was deeply indebted to Whistler, with whom she studied in Paris in 1898. In their evocation of atmosphere by means of subtle tonal juxtapositions, such works as this attest to his enduring influence on her work, even some twenty years after his death. Her abstraction of forms and interest in volumes also reflect her engagement with recent trends in French painting; she was particularly affected by Cézanne's portraits, many of which have a similar compositional structure and setting. In the peculiar brand of tight and intense interiority that marks her painting, however, she was alone.
The charged, emotive atmosphere of her paintings resulted in part from her almost obsessive attention to technique and constant reworkings of subjects. She often painted numerous versions of a pose: this painting, for instance, belongs to a group of works that show the same model alternately wearing a large hat or holding a cat in her lap. John's preoccupation with technique led her to develop her own technical code, which she eventually articulated in notes. In one from around 1930, she elliptically discusses her goals and procedures in making portraits:
1. the strange form
2. the pose & proportions
3. the atmosphere & notes the tones
4. the finding of the forms (the sphere-the hair, the forehead, the cheek, the eye, the nose, the mouth, the neck, the chin, the torse.)
5. Blobbing
6. the sculpting with the hands.2
The present painting displays the results of this technique: the striking, deliberately "strange" monumentality of the figure conflicts with the small format of the painting, while the thick, dry paint used to sculpt the figure-with the brush and perhaps the hands too-betrays the girl's ostensibly quiet demeanor. As a study of tones and volumes, the painting is ultimately a human still life, the exploration of a compulsive, quiet, and beautiful malaise.
[1] Landdale, 89.
[2] Ibid, 21.

Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 190, no. 79, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)