John, Augustus
NAME:
John, Augustus
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Paintings - Portraits, lithographs, etchings, sculpture
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
4 January 1879, Tenby, Wales
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
31 October 1961, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, England. Aged 82
DISCIPLINE:
Artist
FIELD:
Art
LANGUAGE:
English
PARENTS:
Father: Edwin John
Mother: Augusta Smith
SIBLINGS:
1 brother: Thornton
2 sisters: Gwen, Winifred
SPOUSE:
Ida Nettleship
CHILDREN:
by Ida Nettleship:
5 sons (Caspar John was knighted and was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty 1960-63)
by Dorelia McNeill:
1 son, 2 daughters
EDUCATION:
Greenhill School, Tenby
Clifton College, Bristol
St Catherine’s School, Tenby
Slade School of Fine Art, London
MAJOR WORK:
Early landscape:
“Encampment on Dartmoor” (1906)
Most famous imaginative painting:
“Lyric Fantasy” (1911-15)
Considered among his most successful portraits:
“W B Yeats” (1907)
“The Smiling Woman, Portrait of Dorelia” (1908)
“Madame Suggia” (1924)
“Dylan Thomas” (1938)
LIFE AND TIMES:
After attending art school in Wales, John decided to be an artist and left to study art in London. He was already a superb draughtsman and in 1897 he won the Slade Summer Composition prize for his painting “Moses and the Brazen Serpent”, an exuberant composition resembling a sixteenth-century mannerist painting with figures painted in the style of renaissance masters. He was so revered as a draughtsman that students used to paste together the drawings he had torn up.
In 1898 he met the artist <met> Whistler* on a brief visit to Paris where his sister, Gwen John, was studying art. In 1899 he sold a number of paintings from his first exhibition in London and used the proceeds to join a group of friends who included the artist <a pal of> Rothenstein* on a painting holiday in Normandy. He also went back to Paris where he studied the old masters in the Louvre and met the English playwright <met> Wilde*. Back in London, he married Ida Nettleship, a fellow student at the Slade, with whom he had five sons.
Through Nettleship, John met the artist <a pal of> Sickert* who, with Wilson Steer, was one of the ruling spirits of the New English Art Club which had been founded earlier in the century by artists who wanted an exhibiting society run on democratic lines which would accept realism in paintings and dispense with narrative sentimentality. John began exhibiting at the Club but he needed money.
In 1901 he took a job as art instructor at the Liverpool art school. He loved the raw energy of the city and the life in the docks and the Chinese quarter where he created a stir with his long hair, gold earrings, Parisian artist’s hat and big fisherman’s jersey. The university librarian introduced John to life in the surrounding gipsy encampments and taught him the Romany language, and John developed a lifelong affinity with the gipsy way of life.
He produced pastel portraits of the ordinary Liverpool people on the streets which Rothenstein sold for him in London, and he also became a skilled etcher.
He moved back to London in 1902 and the following year met the hauntingly beautiful art student Dorelia McNeill, with whom he became infatuated. Dorelia became his favourite model and in 1904 set up a menage a trois with John and Ida at their cottage in Essex.
After Ida’s death in 1907, Dorelia was the pre-eminent and constant figure in John’s life and bore him three children. John had numerous love affairs throughout his life, one of which was with <affair with> Morrell*, the society hostess and the muse of many talented men. John was one of many visitors to the Morrell’s country home in Oxfordshire where he met the philosopher <a pal of> Russell* whose left-wing politics he shared.
Frida Strindberg, wife of <stalked by wife of> Strindberg*, the Swedish dramatist, pursued John all over London and Paris, hiring a private detective to follow him, and other minions to hurl champagne bottles at his head if she thought he was paying too much attention to another woman. John and Dorelia had a son and two daughters, and John also fathered two more daughters. He painted and drew his children and Dorelia constantly.
Apart from his masterly portraits, his most successful early paintings were landscapes which were romantic, richly-colored versions of post-Impressionism. He traveled constantly in Wales, Ireland and the English Dorsetshire countryside, often by caravan accompanied by his growing family, or with the gypsies.
His large decorative paintings showed the influence of French masters, in particularly that of Puvis de Chavannes.
In Paris, John met the American writer and collector of avant-garde art, <met> Stein* whose companion noted that John was “amazing looking and not too sober”. His addiction to alcohol was well-known and after the war his work declined in quality. He became preoccupied with painting huge imaginative pieces.
For some time he remained a superb draughtsman and among the friends and acquaintances whose portraits he drew were the sculptor Jacob Epstein, the artist Wyndham Lewis, the poets <a pal of> Yeats* and Dylan Thomas, the adventurer <a pal of> T E Lawrence* and the writers <a pal of> Joyce*, <a pal of> Thomas Hardy* and <a pal of> Shaw*. He also executed portraits of the politician <painted> Lloyd George* and the musician <painted> Delius*.
John’s best portraits are not only well-executed but reveal the character of the sitter in a striking fashion. Eventually, both John’s drawing and painting deteriorated although he could still show flashes of his former talent. His reputation remained high and his persona as a romantic bohemian continued to fascinate. He was a member of the Royal Academy and he was awarded the Order of Merit in 1942. His paintings hang in museums in America and elsewhere abroad.
ASSESSMENT: John was a bold, spontaneous and talented painter and a brilliant draughtsman.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Augustus John, 20th century painter
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Holroyd, Michael, Augustus John, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996