The art world suddenly has a taste for double-header shows that mix past and present.

Earlier this year Grayson Perry put his work alongside objects made by unknown men and women at the British Museum.

Tracey Emin has work sited next to Auguste Rodin’s sculpture at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate.

And at Tate Liverpool, Cy Twombly is exhibited next to Turner and Monet.

Now at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, London-based portrait painter Celia Paul is to be exhibited beside early 20th-century artist Gwen John.

Both Paul and John studied at Slade School Of Art in London (though 50 or so years apart), and both were muses for blockbuster names.

John, who emigrated to France in 1904, met Auguste Rodin in Paris and began to sit for him alongside her other modelling work. Despite being 30 years his junior, she was soon his mistress.

Paul, once a muse and partner of Lucian Freud (she has a son, Frank Paul, from their relationship), says the connection between her work and John’s is stylistic.

“Gwen John is one of the painters I most admire,” she says, speaking to The Guide from her studio overlooking the British Museum.

“We both go for stillness, we both work from people we know, and we keep painting the same people again and again.

“In that way I felt a connection to her in way I don’t with other women artists.”

Personal portraits

Indeed, neither painter has a feminist agenda. They are not in the mould of artists such as Paula Rego, who tackles the starkness of abortion and genital mutilation.

Neither is interested in celebrity life, which fascinates Frida Kahlo and Tracey Emin, for example.

“We are more like male painters, such as [Léon] Bonnat or [Alberto] Giacometti, who work from the same people and the same places, without an agenda.”

At the Slade, Paul was trained to makes studies of the human figure. Life drawing was central to the curriculum.

She credits that influence with her love of portrait because she began to see “there was nothing more moving or interesting that the human being”.

But, she explains, the sitter employed by the school was too removed.

“I didn’t feel any emotional response to the sitter. The model meant nothing to me. I found myself not able to work from her. My drawing seemed lifeless and academic and it bothered me. I realised I needed to work from people that mattered to me.”

The person who mattered most was her mother.

She became Paul’s motif.

It is only now, more than 30 years on, that her mother has ceased to sit for her daughter.

She is 85 and can no longer climb the 80 stairs up to Paul’s studio.

“I was 17 or 18 when I really started to work from her and in a way it did change the balance in our relationship.

“She suddenly saw me in a position of power. Before I was just her daughter. She actually did find it difficult and upsetting and I remember her saying I was making her feel like an object.

“But as she sat more it became more a part of her life. It became the thing she did.”

Paul now concentrates on working from her son Frank (himself now a painter who does detailed drawings evoking Lucian’s early works – “he dreams on paper” says Paul) and her sisters, most often Kate.

In Five Sisters (pictured below left) you can see Paul’s fascination with how sitters react to each other and the subtle interaction between them.

“Because all five of us look similar, it really sharpens your insight if you see them all sitting together.

“You really focus on the different ways they hold their head or put their feet, it’s that which is telling about who they are.”

Of the paintings of her mother it is My Mother With A Rose (pictured below right), with its natural light coming in through the studio window, which reveals her belief that likeness is unimportant in portrait.

“My aim is to make a moving, powerful and unforgettable image.”

In terms of light, Rembrandt is the master.

“Light is essential for him, both the inner light of the people but also directional light from window.”

Because her studio faces north and the London sky floods through the window, she is also reminded of Johannes Vermeer.

“He looked on to the river at Delft and must have had a studio not unlike me. He painted people and interiors, beautifully lit up from directional light from a window.”

Unlike Freud, who she sat for in her 20s, Paul needs silence to paint. The greatest asset in a sitter is stillness.

“Lucien worked in a completely different way to me. He liked to talk all the time, to have a conversation because he liked to see your face in movement, watch how your mouth moved.

“He was after something quite different to me.”

Paul, whose father was the Bishop of Bradford and a missionary in India where she was born, has made a 14-painting series, Separation, to coincide with the exhibition at Pallant House.

These echo the form of the Stations of the Cross.

“It was certainly connected to Lucian’s death but it was also connected to other forms of separation. “I think separation has been a theme in my work all along. I’ve done paintings of me and my mother and the feeling of the separation between us.

“There are many forms of separation. I found it quite difficult – and this seems trivial compared with death – but my son growing up and growing away from me was involved.”

She is not religious as such, but she compares painting to a prayer – not that Lucian, who died last year, would have encouraged the mysticism.

“When I started going out with him, my work became more ambitious and on a bigger scale.

“I dare say I influenced him as well, but he always liked my more gutsy art rather than my more mystical and melancholy work.

“He really liked a painting I did soon after my father died, again of my mother and four sisters sitting on the bed. He admired the thickness of the paint and the gutsiness of it.

“Somehow the world does seem a more precarious place without him. He was such a strong person.”

  • Pallant House Gallery, North Pallant, Chichester, until January 27. The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm, Thursday, 10am to 8pm, and Sunday, 11am to 5pm. Tickets £9/£5.50/£3.50. For more information, call 01273 744557