Gwen John: a life Sue Roe Chatto & Windus, 364pp, £25 ISBN 0701166959

One day in the late 1920s, a huge lorry climbed the steep hillside above Versailles and stopped outside 8, Rue Babie, in the village of Meudon. On a clear day, all of Paris would have been visible from here. Number 8 was a wildly overgrown plot with two primitive wooden buildings. The lorry had come to collect one of Gwen John's paintings for an exhibition but, at the last moment, she decided that it needed retouching. The driver waited in the street for many hours, because he was under the strict instruction not to leave without the painting. At least there was a good view.

From this incident, Gwen John's neighbours rightly deduced that she was both an important artist and a perfectionist. After her death in 1939, at the age of 62, her place in British and French art history was overshadowed by stories of a reclusive, mystical woman, the sister of Augustus John and lover of Auguste Rodin, whose pictures, although beautiful, were rather small in scale and few in number. In 1994, Alison Thomas's Portraits of Women: Gwen John and her forgotten contemporaries, undermined the stylisation of John as an isolated eccentric. Sue Roe's new biography builds on this revisionist work, openly and stridently challenging the idea that, because John was strange, she must remain elusive. This idea, Roe argues, has less to do with John than it does with our own difficulties in imagining "the lifestyle and frame of mind of a woman artist living alone". Her book faces up to these difficulties; it doesn't pretend they don't exist, nor does it shelter under them when the going gets rough and John, in a spiral of obsessive despair, threatens to disappear from view. As she patiently sifts the archives, Roe steadily constructs the picture of John that she wishes us to have, assimilating biography to portrait painting, with haunting results.

Gwen was born in 1876 and, in the 1890s, followed her brother Augustus to the Slade, because "she wasn't going to be left out of it", as he later remarked, with a mixture of sibling rivalry and pride. In 1903, similarly determined, she began a walk to Rome with her brother's mistress. Distracted by Paris, she decided to stay on, and called to meet Rodin at his studio in the Depot des Marbres. Soon afterwards, she became model and mistress to the man who esteemed himself as France's "only great artist". Rodin was 36 years older than her; he was tired, pestered by the world and persistently at work on immense sculptures, yet he was still socially and sexually promiscuous.

On Roe's account, Rodin patronised Gwen John in the best and worst senses of the word. He encouraged her to work and to develop both personal and professional independence. But he was also open about his need for more sophisticated female companions. Gwen devoted 14 years to being available for Rodin should he need her in any capacity whatsoever. Their relationship was not violently destructive, not like the infamous affair between Rodin and the sculptress Camille Claudel, but it was painful and debilitating; Gwen could scarcely leave her rented room without worrying that she had missed a rare visit from the maItre.

In the earlier stages of this relationship, it was almost impossible for John to work. With the encouragement of her brother, lover and friends - those she had made at the Slade as well as those she made in Paris while modelling to earn money - John gradually resumed drawing and painting.

Roe shows how John learnt to reclaim her attention in increments, and to redirect it to create impressive pictures. Her conversion to Roman Catholicism played a part in this process. So, too, did the New York collector John Quinn, who paid John a regular allowance for several years, hoping always for more paintings than he got, but delighted by the few that arrived. By the time Rodin died in 1917, at the end of the First World War, John had an evolving artistic identity of her own. On an emotional level, she retained the need for a romantic focus: someone whom all her work was for - Christ, a priest, a soulmate or a special friend. But she had succeeded in reconciling her passively receptive and creative selves. In the last years of her life, she worked with frenetic energy - and when her nephew entered the sheds in the Rue Babie, he found a "mass of beautiful drawings".

Roe is sure of her judgements, and her technique is deliberate. This is an example of a perfect match between biographer and subject: very rare and a genuine triumph for the genre.

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