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The modern British artist Gwen John (1876-1939) has long been revered for her introspective subjects: portraits of solitary women, paintings of sparsely furnished interiors, and gentle still-lifes. Her compositions are often realized through a muted palette and an impressionistic style, a style that can be characterized as evolving through the work of others, whether it be the male artists that tutored her, or her male contemporaries while working in both London and Paris. Although literature and ongoing discussion has aimed to expel this myth, in-depth research into her early work has been limited and has so far failed to shake the dominant view that Gwen John preferred a solitary existence. This article will focus on Portrait Group, an unusual example of Gwen John's early surviving work and a painting that arguably, by its very nature, describes an artist who was engaged with the artists that surrounded her.

In this paper I trace pictorial acts that move beyond figuration and narration, particularly focusing on Gwen John's portraits of women and girls, the work of her maturity as an artist. In doing this I make connections between John's and Cézanne's letters about their painting techniques and direction. The analysis draws on Deleuze and Guattari's approaches to the work of art. I discuss in particular the concept of faciality in the Thousand Plateaus and the problem of painting forces in Deleuze's work on Bacon, The Logic of Sensation . My argument is that an analysis that goes beyond phenomenology and semiotics opens new ways of seeing and appreciating a modernist woman artist's paintings, and sheds new light on the way her art allows the female figure to emerge as a woman-becoming-imperceptible within a patriarchal regime of signs.