Ffeil NLW MS 22782D. - Letters to Augustus John,

Gwendolen Mary (Gwen) John (1876-1939), painter, was born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire. She was the sister of fellow artist Augustus John (1878-1961). Between 1895 and 1898 she was a pupil at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, alongside her brother. During her time there she befriended other female artists including Ursula Tyrwhitt and Ida Nettleship, who later married Augustus. She studied at the Academie Carmen in Paris in 1898 and settled permanently in Paris from 1904. In the same year she met, and began a stormy relationship with, the sculptor Auguste Rodin. She was introduced by Augustus to the American lawyer and collector John Quinn and his companion Jeanne Robert Foster. Amongst her circle of friends was the revolutionary, feminist and actress Maud Gonne and Dorelia McNeill, who became Augustus's lifelong companion. In her later years she formed an attachment to the Russian-Jewish émigré Véra Oumançoff, who lived near her in the Paris suburb of Meudon. The majority of her paintings were of women or girls and, from 1913 when she was received into the Catholic church, ecclesiastically-themed works. She was exhibited in Paris, London and New York. It is believed that she ceased to produce any works of art after about 1933. Gwen John died in Dieppe, France, in 1939.
Her nephew Edwin John (1905-1978), son of Augustus, was the chief executor of her will. Following John's death her artistic reputation was revived by numerous exhibitions both in Britain and the United States, beginning with the memorial exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery, London, in 1946.

Prof. Gwyn Jones (1907-1999), scholar, novelist and short-story writer, was born on 27 May 1907 in Blackwood, Monmouthshire. He was educated at Tredegar County School and later studied at University College, Cardiff, where he graduated in English in 1927. He was awarded an MA degree for a thesis on the Icelandic Sagas in 1929. During the same year he was appointed to a teaching post at Wigan, later moving to Manchester. His first publications, Four Icelandic Sagas and Richard Savage, appeared in 1935, the year in which he moved back to Cardiff as a lecturer in the English Department. In 1940 he was appointed Professor of English at Aberystwyth, where he stayed until 1964, when he was appointed to the Chair of English at Cardiff. He remained there until his retirement in 1975. He was a major figure in Anglo-Welsh literature. He founded, with Creighton Griffiths, the monthly magazine The Welsh Review which appeared, under his editorship, from February to November 1939. He edited some volumes of Welsh short stories and the Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English (1977). He also wrote three novels. Together with Thomas Jones, the medievalist, he prepared a new translation of the Mabinogi which was first published in 1948. He received many honours, including the Order of the Falcon by the President of Iceland, and was a Commander of the British Empire.