Celia Paul puzzles me. I find some of her paintings sublimely beautiful and others very crude. Aspects of her personality also puzzle me. She’s clearly a deeply private person, and yet has written two very self-exposing books. She complains that her reputation as a painter has been overshadowed by her relationship with Lucian Freud, but seems to have done as much as anyone to make people aware of that love affair and its consequences. Not that these paradoxes matter (if they are paradoxes); she has produced some wonderful paintings and published two memorable and sometimes beautifully written books.

When she set out to write her imaginary Letters to Gwen John, Celia Paul did so as a homage by one painter to another, not as a conventional biography. Nevertheless, the letters, written between February 2019 and November 2020, reveal a lot about the character and relationships of a deeply private artist whose work during her lifetime (1876-1939) was overshadowed by that of her brother, Augustus John, and her sometime lover, Auguste Rodin. The artistic and personal similarities between Celia and Gwen are striking; the ascetic tendencies in their habits, the absolute dedication to art, the longing to be loved and understood while living entirely on their own terms and in the shadow of great artists.

Few painters, at least in my experience, can write as well as Celia Paul, especially of love, longing, and the solitude on which her art depends. Letters to Gwen John, part biography, part autobiography, and part homage, is a book infused with sadness, vulnerability, and no little nobility.