Augustus (Edwin) John

Painter, born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, SW Wales, UK. He studied in London and Paris, and made an early reputation with his etchings (1900–14). His favourite themes were gypsies, fishing folk, and naturally regal women, as in ‘Lyric Fantasy’ (1913). He also painted portraits of several political and artistic contemporary figures, such as Shaw, Hardy, and Dylan Thomas.

Augustus Edwin John OM (January 4, 1878–October 31, 1961) was a Welsh painter.

He was born at Tenby in Pembrokeshire. He developed a nomadic lifestyle and for a while he lived in a caravan and camped with gypsies." His sister, Gwen John, was also a talented artist while at the Slade.

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.

Some time in 1910, John fell in love with the town of Martigues, in Provence. "Glimpsed from a train en route to Italy, John referred to this enchanting town on the banks of the Etange de Berre as 'the goal of my dreams', and would return regularly with his family to stay at the Villa Ste Anne for the next eighteen years. I have seen so many powerful women whose essential nudity no clothing can disguise.'"

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. Lord Beaverbrook, whose intervention saved John from a court-martial, sent him back to France but he is only known to have completed one painting, Fraternity."

He was, throughout his life, particularly interested in the Roma people (whom he referred to as Gypsies), and sought them out on his frequent travels around the British Isles and Europe. "By the 1920s John was Britain's leading portrait painter. In later life, John wrote two volumes of autobiography, Chiaroscuro (1952) and Finishing Touches (1964)."

It was said that after the war his powers diminished as his bravura technique became sketchier. The rendering of light and shade beneath the tall palms, and the easy suggestion of movement in the lightly brushed figures, all bespeak an artist whose powers were anything but diminished, harking back to the many descriptions which lauded him as the finest draughtsman since the Old Masters.

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 filmed with Alec Guinness in the lead role.

By his first wife, Ida Nettleship (1877-1907), he had five children, and by his mistress Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeill, who later became his second wife, he had two children.

"Augustus was celebrated first for his brilliant figure drawings, and then for a new technique of oil sketching. He then developed a style of portraiture that was imaginative and often extravagant, catching an instantaneous attitude in his subjects."

In old age, though 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.

Michael Holroyd published a biography of John in 1975 and it is a mark of the public's continued interest in the painter that Holyroyd published a new version of the biography in 1996.