Gwen John moved to Paris in 1904 and remained in France for the rest of her life. She had attended the Slade School of Fine Art (1894-98) where there were many female students. And unlike any other art schools at the time, they were allowed to study the nude in real life, albeit draped. John won the Melvill Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition in her final year. In Paris, she initially lived for a few months with Dorelia McNeill (her brother, Augustus's future partner), whom she often painted in a demure fashion. ‘Dodo’ was to become her younger brother, Augustus’s common-in-law wife and the subject of the provocative, Woman Smiling (1908/09; Tate), the first painting to be acquired by the Contemporary Art Society. John herself was an unashamed model for her friends Mary Constance Lloyd (1873-1968), the Boughton-Leigh sisters, Isabel Bowser, Ursula Tyrwhitt (1872-1966), amongst others, and the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose anguished lover she also became.
John continued to exhibit at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in London as well as at the Salons in Paris. In Paris she met and employed the English self-adopted gypsy Fenella Lovell, the model in this picture of an unnamed naked girl, which is a rarity in John’s work. A clothed version with Fenella in a white chemise with black bow and waistband (Girl with Bare Shoulders, 1908/09) is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. John had written to friends that painting Fenella was a ‘strain’ as she was ‘dreadful’ and ‘horrid’ on occasions during the sittings. Throughout this period Fenella apparently taught the Romany language to Arthur Symons, Isabel Bowser’s brother-in-law, whilst she was also linked to the occultist Aleister Crowley with whom Euphemia Lamb, model to Augustus, was also having an affair. As a diptych it seems the pictures are a raw modern take on Goya’s nude and clothed Maja (1797-1800; 1800-1807); yet this model exudes both frailty and arrogance in her gazes. One of the pair, at least, was exhibited at the NEAC in 1910 and returned to the artist in Paris at the end of the year by her brother, Thornton, so she could finish it off. The consumptive Fenella is said to have died in Budapest in 1911, the year this picture was given by an anonymous member of the executive committee to the new Contemporary Art Society who presented it to the Tate Gallery in 1917.
