Dit boek gaf ik aan ma en zij vond het heel goed. Na haar overlijden heb ik het voor de tweede keer gelezen en er opnieuw van genoten. Het verhaal van een aantal vrouwen met een klein schilderij als rode draad. ( )

I'm going to start by saying that I just loved this book. So much. It's wonderful, just wonderful.
Forster tells the story of a fictional painting by Gwen John ((a real artist, but being quite a philistine I'd never heard of her before)) and the various people who own this painting. How they feel about it, what it represents to them, and how it speaks to them.
Many don't appreciate the painting at first, finding it small, dull, quiet. But the longer they have it the more the painting speaks to them. It reveals themselves to them, and their desires for a room, a space, "of their own" where they can keep the world away, as the title says. The women who come to own this painting over the years are all struggling to find their own space in the world. And this painting, this little "insipid" thing seems to grow and turn into an inspiration and an echo of their own sense of self.
Many of the characters are artists, or wish to be. Forster writes wonderfully about art and painting, the quality of light, the struggle of putting on paper what they see in their minds. It is enough to make you want to pick up a brush and start painting.
But it is also a book about what it is to be a woman in a world designed for men. And especially what it is to wish to be an artist when one is also a woman in a world designed for men. How can you create that space and passion and energy that is needed to be an artist if you must arrange your life around men? If you must devote your time to children and keeping house? How can you let love distract you from your art?
The novel also asks a lot of questions about relationships and what love is. Most of the relationships portrayed in the book are not very successful ones. And the most successful one seems to be such a success because over time the two people involved have drifted apart. Content to share a space but also to live quite separate lives.
I think this is a book I could reread again and again. And I would love to have a work of art mean as much to me as the characters in this book. ( )

Forster’s novel imagines the story of a Gwen John painting, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, as it passes through the hands of several women. The book opens with an art student, Gillian Mortimer, who travels with her class to a Gwen and Augustus John exhibit in London. It closes with the same young woman as she is about to embark on an art career of her own. She connects with a Parisian woman who now owns the painting that once belonged to Gillian’s own grandmother.

The best sections of the novel recreate parts of Gwen John’s life: the artist’s early loss of her mother, her growing-up years in Wales with several siblings and a bizarrely exacting and irritable father, and of course, her life in France—particularly the time of her obsessive love affair with the philandering sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Through Gwen John and the other women who come to possess her painting, the author seems to take Virginia Woolf’s observation about what is required for a woman to create art (or even an independent life) one further. For Forster’s female characters, it’s not enough to have money and a room of their own. Relationships with men are shown to be distracting and even disruptive forces that interfere with creative work. Taming the emotions in order to gain the appropriate detachment to create a painting or a life of one’s own is major work in itself.

I thought the premise of this novel was an interesting one, but I’ll admit to finding it a little hard to credit that Gwen John’s modest, contained little painting—which you can see here: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/a-corner-of-the-artists-room-in-paris-72089# —would resonate so profoundly and consistently in the psyches of such disparate women. ( )

Het leven van een schilderij van Gwen John van haar zolderkamer in Parijs wordt verteld door de verschillende vrouwen die in de loop van de jaren het schilderij in hun bezit hebben gehad en die op een bepaald moment in hun leven worstelen of geworsteld hebben met het realiseren van hun kunstenaarschap. ( )

I rate this book highly, mostly because the "keeping the world away" theme resonates with me. Of course, I am somewhat misanthropic.
It's really a series a short stories tied loosely together by a painting. In each of the stories the main person is, to varying degrees, distant from the world. As usual, Margaret Forster's characters are true to life and give us useful and realistic insights about the way the world works. ( )