Visual art - Augustus and Gwen John are head-to-head at Tate Britain. Richard Cork finds there is only one winner

What would Augustus John have thought? For the very first time, Tate mounts a major retrospective of his work, but only in conjunction with his sister Gwen, who ends up stealing the show with her single-minded intensity. Worse still, her name is put pointedly before his in the exhibition's title. Augustus has been relegated to runner-up status before the event even begins.

In Augustus's heyday, nobody could have imagined such a put-down. Before leaving the Slade School of Art in 1898, he was already the most talked-about artist of the new generation. And within a year or two, the precocious young Welshman had become the Damien Hirst of his day. As a draughtsman, he was hugely talented - the result, or so he claimed, of a serious blow to the head when diving near his native Tenby.

His private life was discussed avidly. He married Ida Nettleship in 1901, but fell for Dorothy McNeill soon afterwards. He called her Dorelia, and she came to live with Ida and Augustus in an apparently blissful menage. They all went off to Dartmoor, dressed up as Romanies, and camped gypsy-style. Dorelia gave birth to Pyramus in the caravan, and Ida was pregnant as well. Augustus painted them there, from his perch inside a dark tent. Small and vibrant, the entire picture sparkles with dynamism.

Unfortunately, Augustus harboured ambitions as a figure painter on the grandest scale imaginable. All his viva- city drained away when he embarked on The Mumpers, a colossal canvas for Sir Hugh Lane's Chelsea mansion. Vying with Paul Gauguin, he flattened his design and arranged the travelling beggars in a panoramic frieze. But his artful poses lack Gauguin's mystery. The Mumpers is a disaster, and he failed to redeem himself in a later, painfully self-conscious family group called Lyric Fantasy.

Magnificently gifted on an instinctive level, Augustus never knew how best to harness his formidable skill. The drawings and swift, darting oil studies of Ida, Dorelia and their tousled children are a wind-blown delight. Direct and sensuous, the broken brush marks evoke a dreamlike vision of bucolic placidity. If he had built on this, Augustus might have been the equal of Gwen. But he became waylaid by flashy society portraiture, painting the garish Lady Ottoline Morrell in a ludicrous feathered hat and then producing a boardroom effigy of the dapper Lord Norman, the longest-serving governor of the Bank of England, resting his etiolated fingers on a gentlemanly walking stick.

Gwen wisely avoided the pitfall of painting grandees. She had no wish to be lionised at the Cafe Royal like her hammy brother. The only sign of flamboyance in her work appears early on in a commanding self-portrait of around 1899. Flaunting a black floppy bow and mutton-chop sleeves, she has the assurance of a cosmopolitan young woman who had just been studying under Whistler in Paris. Augustus, to do him justice, understood his sister very well. In 1900, he caught the essence of Gwen's vision by juxtaposing her, seated by the fireplace, with a skull. Throughout her career, Gwen was haunted by an awareness of life's fragility. The women she painted, single and unadorned, appear marooned.

Gwen probably had an affair with Dorelia in 1903, when they set off together on a Romantic walking tour from Bordeaux to Rome. She also succumbed to a calamitous infatuation with August Rodin, posing for the elderly sculptor. She was devastated by his death.

At the same time, however, she developed a vision far more singular and focused than her brother's wayward ostentation. Her debt to the radical simplification of Whistler is evident, and she must have benefited from studying Bonnard's and Vuillard's handling of figures in rooms. But she learned from the past as well. Girl Reading at a Window has a stillness and luminosity worthy of Vermeer.

Some of Gwen's most purged images show her attic room in Paris, emptied of everything apart from a wicker chair and a table. Sliced by a dramatic diagonal, the interior seems about to dissolve in the light. This sense of a vulnerable world, hovering between solidity and evanescence, deepened after Gwen's conversion to Catholicism in 1913. The new-found faith helped her cope with the loss of Rodin. She benefited, too, from friendships at the Meudon convent where her religious instruction had taken place. Responding to the request for a portrait of the much-revered Mere Poussepin, who had founded their order in the 17th century, she asked two nuns to pose. It became an obsession, resulting in an extended sequence of sober, meditative figures.

Their tranquillity must have been therapeutic for the troubled Gwen. She carried over the same ethereal poise into her secular paintings of unknown girls and young women, sitting in bare rooms with a cat, a piece of sewing or nothing at all. They all appear as becalmed as the Japanese doll she painted on her studio table. But the truth is that they are freighted with emotion. As she got older, Gwen's insight grew more subtle and profound. The young woman holding a rosary barely seems to exist. Wrapped in a blue-grey gown, the sitter appears on the verge of melting into the canvas. More spirit than flesh, she is the quintessence of stoicism. Her absolute refinement helps to explain why Gwen virtually ceased painting in the final years of her life. Having reached this ultimate distillation, there was nowhere else to go.

"Gwen John and Augustus John" is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (020 7887 8008) until 9 January 2005

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