For the past few days I've been completely engrossed by Celia Paul's imaginary correspondence with Gwen John, after reading her memoir Self-Portrait a few weeks ago, far and away my best books of the year so far. Both had obsessive affairs with more powerful male artists, Rodin in John's case and Lucian Freud in Paul's. She met Freud when she was an 18-year-old art student, fresh out of boarding school, and he was 55 and her tutor - and I felt enraged on her behalf, longing to grab the dirty old bugger by the scruff of his neck and kick him down the 80 stairs that led to the spartan flat he bought for her opposite the British Museum. And also wondered why her deeply religious parents - her father was a bishop - were so passive and ineffectual ... her mother even encouraging her to get pregnant by Freud who had who knows how many children by various wives, lovers and muses already. Celia was in thrall to him until he died in 2011, long after the passion was spent, out of fear that he would take any resentment out on their son.

Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris I was at the British Museum this week. The art exhibition I'd planned to see didn't really grab me - though coincidentally I came across an etching of Celia by Freud - and so I drifted off instead to the amazing Sutton Hoo treasure which I hadn't visited since seeing the film; well, probably not even since reading the book. But it's hard to love the BM and rise above the crowds and the noise and so after an hour or so I found myself out on Great Russell Street again. And there was Celia Paul's plane tree that she can see from her studio ...

And so I loitered on the pavement, gazing up at the mansion block that used to be a temperance hotel - 8s6d a night, with dinner - where Gwen John's lover, Rodin, once stayed, and wondered which curtainless window was the artist's studio ...

And thought what an ascetic, driven, lonely life she leads up there above the trees.