the ugly earring


“Be patient and less violent”

“My heart is like a sea which has little sad waves,” she wrote [to Rodin]. “But every ninth wave is big and happy.”

(painting: Gwen John, Young Woman Holding a Black Cat)

(on the hunt for Gwen’s letters to Rodin but in the meantime this )


copied from a manet

For a while she had a tiny allowance from her father, but that ended with his first visit, when he saw her wearing a dress she had painstakingly copied from a Manet picture. “You look like a prostitute in that dress,” he told her. “I could never accept anything from someone capable of thinking so,” Gwen blazed back.

(from here)

(painting: Édouard Manet, Woman with Fans)