1

Augustus John 1878-1961

Born: 04 January 1878; Tenby, Pembrokeshire, United

Kingdom

Died: 31 October 1961; Fordingbridge, Hampshire, United Kingdom

Field: painting, etching

Nationality: British

Art Movement: Post-Impressionism

School or Group: Camden Town Group

Genre: portrait

2

Augustus Edwin John OM RA (4 January 1878 – 31 October

1961) was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-

Impressionism in the United Kingdom.

"Augustus was celebrated first for his brilliant figure drawings,

and then for a new technique of oil sketching. His work was favourably compared in London with that of Gauguin and

Matisse. He then developed a style of portraiture that was

imaginative and often extravagant, catching an instantaneous attitude in his subjects."

Life and work

Education

John was born at Tenby in Pembrokeshire, the younger son and

third of four children in his family. His father was Edwin William John, a Welsh solicitor; his mother, Augusta Smith

from a long line of Sussex master plumbers,[2]

died young when

he was six, but not before inculcating a love of drawing in both Augustus and his older sister Gwen.

[3] At the age of seventeen

he briefly attended the Tenby School of Art, then left Wales for

London, studying at the Slade School of Art UCL in London (his sister, Gwen, was with him at the Slade and became an

important artist in her own right),[4]

where he became the star

pupil of drawing teacher Henry Tonks, and even before his graduation was recognized as the most talented draughtsman of

his generation.[5]

In the summer of 1897, John was seriously injured while

swimming, and the lengthy convalescence that followed seems to have actually stimulated his adventurous spirit and

accelerated his artistic growth.[6]

In 1898, he won the Slade

Prize with Moses and the Brazen Serpent. John afterward studied independently in Paris where he seems to have been

influenced by Puvis de Chavannes.[7]

3

W.B. Yeats (1907)

The need to support Ida Nettleship (1877–1907), whom he married in 1901, led him to accept a post teaching art at the

University of Liverpool.

North Wales

Augustus John and his student James Dickson Innes spent two

years painting in the Arenig valley around 1910, especially the mountain Arenig Fawr. In 2011 this period was made the

subject of a BBC documentary titled The Mountain That Had to

Be Painted.[8]

Provence

Some time in 1910, John fell in love with the town of Martigues,

in Provence, located halfway between Arles and Marseilles, and first seen from a train en route to Italy.

[9] John wrote that

Provence "had been for years the goal of my dreams" and Martigues was the town for which he felt the greatest affection.

"With a feeling that I was going to find what I was seeking, an

anchorage at last, I returned from Marseilles, and, changing at Pas des Lanciers, took the little railway which leads to

Martigues. On arriving my premonition proved correct: there

4

was no need to seek further."[10]

The connection with Provence

continued until 1928, by which time John felt the town had lost its simple charm, and he sold his home there.

[11]

He was, throughout his life, particularly interested in the

Romani people (whom he referred to as "Gypsies"), and sought

them out on his frequent travels around the United Kingdom and Europe. For a time, shortly after his marriage, he and his family,

which included his wife Ida, mistress Dorothy (Dorelia)

McNeill, and John's children by both women, travelled in a caravan, in gypsy fashion.

[12] Later on he became the President

of the Gypsy Lore Society, a position he held from 1937 until

his death in 1961.[13]

War

During World War I, he was attached to the Canadian forces as

a war artist and made a number of memorable portraits of

Canadian infantrymen. The end result was to have been a huge

mural for Lord Beaverbrook and the sketches and cartoon for this suggest that it might have become his greatest large-scale

work. However, like so many of his monumental conceptions, it

was never completed. As a war artist, he was allowed to keep his facial hair and therefore, he and King George V were the

only Army officers in the Allied forces to have a beard.[14]

After

two months in France he was sent home in disgrace after taking part in a brawl.

[15] Lord Beaverbrook, whose intervention saved

John from a court-martial, sent him back to France where he

produced studies for a proposed Canadian War Memorial picture, although the only major work to result from the

experience was Fraternity.[16]

In 2011, the Duke and Duchess of

Cambridge finally unveiled this mural at the Canadian War Museum in OttawaThe Canadians Opposite Lens This

unfinished painting is 12 feet high by 40 feet long.[17]

5

Portraits

Augustus John with Tallulah Bankhead and her portrait (1929).

Colonel T. E. Lawrence (1919).

Although well-known early in the century for his drawings and

etchings, the bulk of John's later work consisted of portraits, some of the best of which were of his two wives and his

children. He was known for the psychological insight of his

6

portraits, many of which were considered "cruel" for the truth of

the depiction. Lord Leverhulme was so upset with his portrait that he cut out the head (since only that part of the image could

easily be hidden in his vault) but when the remainder of the

picture was returned by error to John there was an international outcry over the desecration.

[18]

By the 1920s John was Britain's leading portrait painter. John

painted many distinguished contemporaries, including T. E.

Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Lady Gregory, Tallulah Bankhead, George Bernard Shaw, the cellist

Guilhermina Suggia, the Marchesa Casati and Elizabeth

Bibesco. Perhaps his most famous portrait is of his fellow-countryman, Dylan Thomas, whom he introduced to Caitlin

Macnamara, his sometime lover who later became Thomas'

wife.[19]

It was said that after the war his powers diminished as his bravura technique became sketchier.

[20] One critic has claimed

that "the painterly brilliance of his early work degenerated into

flashiness and bombast, and the second half of his long career added little to his achievement." However, from time to time his

inspiration returned, as it did on a trip to Jamaica in 1937.[21]

The works done in Jamaica between March and May 1937 evidence a resurgence of his powers, and amounted to "the St.

Martin's summer of his creative genius".[22]

Of his method for painting portraits John explained:[23]

“ Make a puddle of paint on your palette consisting of

the predominant colour of your model's face and

ranging from dark to light. Having sketched the

features, being most careful of the proportions, apply a

skin of paint from your preparation, only varying the

mixture with enough red for the lips and cheeks and

grey for the eyeballs. The latter will need touches of ”

7

white and probably some blue, black, brown, or green.

If you stick to your puddle (assuming that it was

correctly prepared), your portrait should be finished in

an hour or so, and be ready for obliteration before the

paint dries, when you start afresh.

Family

The Two Jamaican Girls (ca. 1937)

8

Augustus John poses for the American press on board a ship.

Early in 1900, he married his first wife, Ida Nettleship (1877–1907); the couple had five children. After her death in 1907, his mistress Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeill, a Bohemian style icon,

became his partner and later became his second wife, with

whom he had two children. One of his sons (by his first wife) was the prominent British Admiral and First Sea Lord Sir

Caspar John. His daughter Vivien John (1915–1994) was a

notable painter.[24]

By Ian Fleming's widowed mother, Evelyn Ste Croix Fleming née Rose, he had a daughter, Amaryllis Fleming (1925–1999),

who became a noted cellist. Another of his sons, by Mavis de

Vere Cole, is the television director Tristan de Vere Cole noted for his contributions to TV series from the Sixties to the

Eighties. His son Romilly (1906–1986) was in the RAF, briefly

a civil servant, then a poet, author and an amateur physicist. Poppet (1912–1997), John's daughter by his second wife,

married the Dutch painter Willem Jilts Pol (1905–1988) whose

daughter Talitha (1940–1971), a fashion icon of 1960s London, married John Paul Getty, was famously photographed in

Marrakesh by Patrick Lichfield, and, after a brief hedonistic life,

died of a drug overdose. His daughter Gwyneth Johnstone (1915–2010), by musician Nora Brownsword, was an artist.

[25]

9

Later life

Augustus John by Reginald Gray, at Royal Academy London in

1960. (collection Mr. Derry O'Sullivan. Paris).

In later life, John wrote two volumes of autobiography, Chiaroscuro (1952) and Finishing Touches (1964).

[26] In old

age, although John had ceased to be a moving force in British art, he was still greatly revered, as was demonstrated by the

huge show of his work mounted by the Royal Academy in 1954.

He continued to work up until his death in Fordingbridge, Hampshire in 1961, his last work being a studio mural in three

parts, the left hand of which showed a Falstaffian figure of a

French peasant in a yellow waistcoat playing a hurdy gurdy while coming down a village street. It was Augustus John's final

wave goodbye.

He joined the Peace Pledge Union as a pacifist in the 1950s, and

on 17 September 1961, just over a month before his death, he joined the Committee of 100's anti-nuclear weapons

demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London. At the time, his son,

Admiral Sir Caspar John was First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff.

10

He is said to have been the model for the bohemian painter

depicted in Joyce Cary's novel The Horse's Mouth, which was later made into a 1958 film of the same name with Alec

Guinness in the lead role.

Michael Holroyd published a biography of John in 1975 and it is

a mark of the public's continued interest in the painter that Holroyd published a new version of the biography in 1996.

Honours

He became a leader of the New English Art Club, where he

chiefly exhibited. With his vivid manner of portraiture and his

ability to catch unerringly some striking and usually unfamiliar aspect of his subject, he superseded Sargent as England's

fashionable portrait painter. In 1921 he was elected an Associate

of the Royal Academy and elected a full R.A. in 1928. He was named to the Order of Merit by King George VI in 1942. He

was a trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1933–41, and President of

the Royal Society of Portrait Painters from 1948–53.

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68