From Clem Cook, London 22nd June: Gwen John Gwen John, born 22nd June 1876 in Haverfordwest, lost her adored mother, an amateur painter, at the age of eight. She and her little brother, Augustus, both escaped the severe lack of affection of their father’s household to study art at the Slade in London. After student days, Gwen settled in France and never returned to Wales. Her passionate nature led to an obsessive ten-year affair with Rodin, intense but brief involvements with both men and women – and several spiritual crises. From these, she developed a deep serenity, reflected in her painting. At 46, just before Rodin made the final break, she wrote: ‘As to whether I have anything worth expressing ... I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life.’ In Meudon from 1910, she lived alone with her cats, represented in several playful sketches.
Painstaking solitary figure studies, depicted in subtle blues, greys and mauves, form the substance of her work. Several portraits of the nuns who had befriended her followed her conversion to Catholicism in 1913, and she described herself as ‘God’s Little Painter’.
The power and radiance of her work was recognised early by her famous brother, who wrote: ‘To me the little paintings are painfully charged with feeling ... rare blossoms from the most delicate of trees. In 50 years’ time, I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.’ Sixty years after her death in 1939, posterity has – finally – confirmed his opinion. 25th July: Rosalind Franklin Born 25th July 1920 to an affluent Notting Hill Jewish family, Franklin overcame paternal opposition to her passion for science, and gained a ‘titular’ (women’s) degree from Newham College, Cambridge in 1941. Aged twenty, she wrote to her father: ‘I agree that faith is essential to success… but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. (My) belief is that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success in our aims – the improvement of the lot of mankind... faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world.’ Granted a 1945 Cambridge PhD, she was appointed as Research Assistant at Kings College, London in 1951. There, her nervous colleague, Maurice Wilkins, regarded her as a mere technician and it was he who, in 1953, gave Franklin’s vital Xray photo to his Cambridge mate James Watson.
Eight years later, on New Year’s Eve 1961, Francis Crick acknowledged in a private letter that hers ‘was the data we actually used’. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Crick-Watson-Wilkins. Franklin had died of ovarian cancer in 1958. Watson’s references to her as ‘Rosy’ in The Double Helix (1968) were only partially ameliorated by Crick’s later admission: ‘We always used to adopt – let’s say – a patronising attitude towards her.’ But Rosalind Franklin was essentially ‘a de facto collaborator,’ says Dr. Lynne Osman Elkin of California State University. ‘I think it should be called the Watson-Crick-Franklin structure.’
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Apologies to Barbara Burfoot whose name was misspelt in the last SOF Sift column.