Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. Augustus Edwin John, was born in Tenby in south Pembrokeshire on 4 January 1878 at 11,12 or 13 The Esplanade, now known as The Belgrave Hotel, , John was the younger son and third of four children. His father was Edwin William John, a Welsh solicitor; his mother, Augusta Smith, from a long line of Sussex master plumbers,[died young when he was six, but not before inculcating a love of drawing in both Augustus and his older sister Gwendolen Mary John. His father Edwin moved the family permanently to Tenby,
The household was somewhat intimidaring , - their Grandfather exhorted his grandchildren to " Talk! If you can't think of anything to say tell a lie!' and 'If you make a mistake make it with Authority!' - the John children were looked after by two aunts, Rose and Lily, who rode round the neighbourhood in a wicker pony trap known as 'the Hallelujah Chariot'.
The aunts held rank in the Salvation Army and variously followed the doctrines of the Quakers, Joanna Southcott and. Howell Harris. Irtwas in the great outdoors and through art that Augustus could avoid the cloying Victorian atmosphere of home, where Edwin ruled with a strict air of the disciplinarian. Here Augustus imagined himself a roaring Native American, adopted son of the Antelope Comanche nation with the beginnings of what he described as “an active interest in squaws.”
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, University College London. He became the star pupil of drawing teacher Henry Tonks and even before his graduation he was considered the most talented draughtsman of his generation. His sister, Gwen was with him at the Slade and became an important artist in her own right.[
He and his sister Gwen were bound together by art, inspired by their artistic mother Augusta. He recalled “Gwen and I, full of curiosity, would approach as near as we dared, to watch the mystery of painting. Even at that early age we were vaguely aware of Art and Beauty.” Their father Edwin was more bourgeois in attitude and shunned their art in favour of discipline and propriety.
Although he did not live permanently in Wales after 1894, he remained deeply attached to his native land, and supported the National Eisteddfod and Royal Cambrian Academy. He returned to Tenby periodically, being called back when his father felt as if he was dying. During these visits he would stay with author Richard Hughes in the castle at Laugharne, once saying, “My father is on his death bed but refuses to get into it.” In October 1959 Tenby bestowed the Freedom of the Borough on John, “in appreciation and acknowledgement of his distinguished service in the field of art”. The Town and County News wrote that he looked “deeply moved and at times somewhat overcome by…an emotion he did not try to conceal.”
In the summer between terms studying in London two incidents happened that would have a large influence in John’s life - on a walking trip around Pembroke-shire he had his first encounter with Irish tinkers which would lead to a life long fascination with Romany culture and way of life.
And in the summer of 1897 he suffered a severe accident hitting his head on a rock whilst diving into the sea, at Tenby this seemingly resulted in a radical change in character. He grew a beard, dressed as a Bohemian and began to drink heavily. and became known for his mood swings, his womanising and his artistic talent.
His painting became more adventurous and his friend, Wyndham Lewis remarked that John had become a "great man of action into whose hands the fairies had placed a paintbrush instead of a sword"
A charismatic controversial individual with a possible bullying personality he made a great impression on the artists, critics and collectors around him and is considered to be the most talented artist of his generation, in 1898 he won the Slade Prize with Moses and the Brazen Serpent.
The early period of his work is characterised by his exceptional drawings, notably of contemporaries, including his wives and sisters, as well as portraits in oils influenced by the Old Masters, and an experimental series of etchings.
In the early years of the 20th Century John would make his reputation as an artist moving on the edges of a number of influential schools and salons of the time, exhibiting with the New English Art Club and the Camden School as well as being a regular visitor to Lady Gregory's Irish Salon at Coole Park. Critics by now were comparing his work with that of Matisse and Gaugin.
Girl in a Blue Striped Coat (c. 1910), Augustus John.
His visits to north Wales with another Welsh artist, James Dickson Innes, between 1910 and 1913, revealed a rich talent for landscape painting, and brought to the fore a more modern impressionistic idiom, also to be seen in his paintings of the south of France, where he spent long periods in the 1920s. Through his sister Gwen, who joined him at the Slade in 1895, he came to know a group of outstanding women students, including Ursula Tyrwhitt, with whom he fell briefly in love, and Ida Nettleship, whom he married in 1901 on leaving Slade to avoid being seen to 'live in sin' .
John and his associates would frequent the Café Royal whenever their meagre student finances could afford - and John was a centre of attraction among the cosmopolitan crowd that gathered there.
The café in the late 1890s was the haunt of artists, writers, circus people, magicians, aristocrats 'Celtic' gentlemen and politicos of numerous persuasions from anarchists of the Kropotkin school to Liberal capitalist 'Social Creditors'.
Augustus John's first child, David, was born in 1902 and faced with the prospect of supporting a family John took a job as art instructor at Liverpool Art School which was attached to the University and it was here he he met an older man, John Samson, university librarian and self-taught Romany scholar who taught him Romany. and opened the young artist’s eyes to the richness of gypsy culture, language and lifestyle.nd embraced a Travellers’ lifestyle.
For the rest of his life John would search out gypsy encampments wherever he went - often travelling in his own set of horse drawn vans. He had his own repertoire of Romany songs and dances. Joining them round their camp fires at night, penetrating behind the veneer of romantic glamour,
John saw the gypsies as having true freedom, not compromised by the advance of industrialised society, - the supreme anti-capitalists whose belongings were always burnt at death. In turn the gypsies accepted John as an honorary gypsy.
After Liverpool the young John family moved back to London - marriage did not stop John's womanising - he met and fell hopelessly in love with one of his sisters models and friend Dorothy McNeil, he gave her the gypsy name, Dorelia, and she became his most important model and lifelong inspiration.. Ida liked Dorelia and a tumultuous ménage-a-trois was formed. Despite numerous other affairs Ida and Dorelia would be the anchors round which John’s world would revolve.
Dorelia (1909), Augustus John.
In March 1903 Augustus John and Gwen John had a joint exhibition at Carfax & Company. However, she worked very slowly and contributed only three pictures to her brother's forty-five. Their relationship was non-competitive and highly affectionate.
Tragedy struck the John clan in 1907 when shortly after the birth of her 5th child Ida died. With two other children by Dorelia, John, hardly the perfect father, had to struggle with Ida's family over who should bring up the children.
In August 1911 John and Dorelia rented Alderney Manor, a strange fortified pink bungalow built by an eccentric Frenchman in 60 acres of heath and woodland on the Newton to Ringwood road outside Parkstone, Dorset. The property, actually quite a large low house with gothic windows and a castellated parapet with additional cottages and a round walled garden was owned by Winston Churchill's Liberal aunt, Lady Wimborne, who was "pleased to have a clever artist as a tenant."
The John entourage arrived in a colourful caravan of carts and wagons with children singing as they came down the drive. They set to, turning it into the very picture of a bohemian commune - the coach house was converted into a studio, the cottage converted to accommodate the seemingly endless stream of visitors, some invited, some who just dropped in and would stay for days, months, even years.
Others stayed in the blue and yellow gypsy caravans dotted around the grounds and when numbers swelled for weekend parties, in gypsy tents or alfresco in the orchard.
The children played a natural part in the community joining in with chores. And, between private tutors for the girls and school for the boys, they ran wild over the heathland and through the woods and bathed naked in the pond.
The communal chaos was presided over by Dorelia in pre-Raphaelite robes looking as if she was constantly about to pose for a portrait, busy organising guests and making the house run smoothly, dressing everyone in handmade clothes ,helped by her sister Edie who ran the kitchen.
Over the years they acquired all the trappings of a back to the land community; cows, a breeding herd of saddleback pigs, various donkeys, New Forest ponies, carthorses, miscellaneous cats and dogs, 12 hives of bees that stung everyone, a dovecote from which all the doves flew away and a 'biteful' monkey.
Communal living did nothing to cramp John’s style,- the affairs continued, almost too numerous to mention , with Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mrs Strindberg, the actress Eileen Hawthorne and Mrs Fleming, Ian Fleming's mother, (a liaison which resulted in a daughter, Amaryliss, later an accomplished cellist.) John never seemed to deny any of his wayward offspring - taking some under his communal wing, paying maintenance to support others.
At Alderney John would spend his time painting and sketching the children and guests,- taking part in afternoon jazz sessions , the tango was his speciality - and presiding over the many parties, bonfires and trips to local pubs.
All the usual suspects from the Bohemian art scene would make their way down to Dorset; the Bloomsbury crowd; Brett, Carrington, Lytton-Strachey, Berty Russell, Wyndham Lewis.
Other more exotic characters would make it their home, amongst them Chilean painter Alvaro Guevara, wall paper designer Fanny Fletcher, Polish music doctor Jan Sliwinski and the Icelandic poet Haraldar Thorskinsson.
At intervals John would leave for his studio in London or for a continental tour in search of gypsy camps or new lovers.
At the outbreak of the First World War John was perhaps the best-known artist in Britain. His friendship with Lord Beaverbrook enabled him to obtain a commission in the Canadian Army and he was given free rein to paint what he liked on the Western Front, but is only known to have completed one painting. He was also allowed to keep his facial hair and therefore became the only officer in the Allied forces, except for King George V, to have a beard.
After two months in France, Lord Beaverbrook had to intervene to save John from a court-martial after he was arrested for taking part in a brawl. John was sent back to France but is only known to have completed one painting, Fraternity.
John also attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 where he painted the portraits of several delegates. However, the commissioned group portrait of the main figures at the conference was never finished.
John spent extended periods of time in the south of France and the work he produced during these visits is more vibrant in colour. He was a prolific artist, producing a vast amount of work; favourite subjects included coastal landscapes, gypsies and his family
The years at Alderney were the peak of John's artistic career. By the 1920s Augustus John was the leading portrait painter in Britain, He was so popular that he appeared on the front of Time magazine in 1928 , the same year he was elected to be a Royal Academician.which he resigned in 1938, but was reinstated in 1940, and was awarded the O.M. in 1942 for services to art, and although his portraits were often controversial he was inundated with commissions.
Everyone who was anyone seemingly wanted to have their portrait painted by the erstwhile King of Bohemia., as he had an almost psychological insight in his expression, in the way his portraits famously captured the true character and personality of each sitter. Those who sat for him included Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Ottoline Morrell, T. E. Lawrence, Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats, William Nicholson, and Dylan Thomas.
Thomas Hardy on seeing his portrait painted by John in 1923 remarked "I don't know if that's how I look, but that's how I feel." Augustus John had met the octogenarian English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy through T.E. Lawrence,– Lawrence of Arabia in September 1923. In the following weeks he made several visits to Max Gate, the house that Hardy had designed and built for himself in Dorchester, Dorset, to work on this affectionate and admiring portrait.
The study in which Hardy is shown is that in which he wrote many of his most celebrated works, including Jude the Obscure (1895), In an article written for the monthly review Horizon in the 1940s, John recalled the harmonious relationship that developed between artist and writer:
'An atmosphere of great sympathy and almost complete understanding at once established itself between us, though the veneration in which I held Hardy impeded to some extent the natural expression of my response to his quite lovable personality ...'
John recorded in his memoirs that 'Hardy himself was, physically, not of monumental build, though he had a fine head'. Yet in the portrait the artist has done his best to endow the old man with a certain stature.
We are made to gaze up at the novelist from a low viewpoint, a position that perhaps reflects the veneration John spoke of. The ‘fine head’ sits atop a pyramid of grey tweed, Hardy’s suit, which takes up half the canvas and suggests a robustness at odds with his old age. The enormous thumbs resting on the lapels of his jacket direct our gaze up to the face, with its wide, rheumy eyes, eyes that ignore us, that look out to the right, brows and lids raised as though the great man is pursuing a thought.
Thomas Hardy, 1923, by Augustus John,
As well a portraits of friends, like Ottoline Morrell and W.B.Yeats, he painted Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald and Winston Churchill. Augustus John became increasingly successful as a portrait painter, so much so that his personal artistic interests could not develop fully. Hence many of his large figure compositions and imaginative pictures were left unfinished.
A controversial portrait of Lord Leverhulme, the founder of Port Sunlight, was returned to John minus its head, the soap millionaire having been offended by the artist's depiction of him.
The story goes that Leverhulme commissioned John to paint his portrait despite claiming that no one had ever really been able to capture his likeness and that he could not give much time for the sitting.
When Leverhulme saw it, he complained that the eyes, nose and mouth were not a likeness. My favourite part of this story is that John offered his Lordship his palette and brushes for him to make the adjustments! Despite his coolness towards the portrait, it was purchased.
However, once in his possession, Lord Leverhulme did not wish it to be on display. He attempted to hide it away in his safe, but it was too large, so he cut the face off the painting and placed that under lock and key. The story now descends into farce, as, unwittingly, Leverhulme’s housekeeper packaged the damaged painting up and it was returned to Augustus John. If you look carefully, you can see the repair to the painting around the head of the sitter.
The resultant outcry at this insult to John's artistic integrity reverberated around the globe. A 24 hour art strike was called in Paris involving not only artists, but also models and picture framers. In Italy a huge soap effigy of Leverhulme was ceremoniously burnt and in Hyde Park art school students marched in protest bearing aloft a giant headless torso. (The portrait was later 'stitched' back together and hangs in the Lady Leverhulme Gallery at Port Sunlight.)
The Johns moved to Fryern Court, Fordingbridge - a 14th century friary turned farmhouse - in 1927. The house on the edge of the New Forest became a stopping-off point for artists travelling to the West Country from London and developed into more of an open house than bohemian commune.
However, Bby this time 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."
His biographer, Michael Holroyd, has argued: "From the late 1920s onwards John's talent went into a decline which, despite a number of journeys he made through Europe, Jamaica, and the United States seeking to revive it, was accelerated by his heavy drinking. The rebel artist had now moved from the roadside into London's West End where his work was irregularly exhibited from 1929 to 1961 at Dudley Tooth's gallery in Bruton Street." John's 1937 portrait of Dylan Thomas is widely accepted as his last great painting.
Even his granddaughter Rebecca John, the leading authority on her grandfather, said in 2024, while praising his earlier work, that "most [paintings since the 1930s] should have been burned. My grandfather went down the drain from the 1930s onwards, drank too much, lost his judgment, and took every opportunity to earn money from portraits of society ladies and the wives of notable men".
From March to May 1937, when John travelled to Jamaica, he experienced a renewed burst of motivation, creativity and a resurgence of his powers; John was on a quest to portray the emotional 'otherness' of people outside of the centre of European civilisation and its art.
The Caribbean island was a great inspiration to John. He made many observant paintings of the women and hotel workers that he met there, including the Two Jamaican Girls. This is a celebrated example of John's renewed creative vitality.
Two Jamaican Girls - Augustus John
During the Caribbean visit, John also created a number of pencil-on-paper studies and sketches of Jamaican females. The Portrait of a Jamaican Woman has an overall closed impression, as the woman is depicted with a closed mouth and averted gaze, clutching clothing to her bosom. This work has a contained yet also an incomplete feel to it, as if John was unsure how to finish the portrait.
Although John was seen as a part of the 'establishment', his later art and lifestyle positioned him firmly outside of the centre of established society. and iIn the less hectic lifestyle at Fryern where he entered the twilight of his artistic career John became increasingly interested in politics. He was active in the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment and perhaps somewhat ironically supported the Voluntary Contraception League.
He pestered MPs on behalf of gypsy and travellers' rights, and was honoured to be elected president of the Gypsy Law Society in 1936.
Augustus John has often been cited as one of a few from the British artistic and intellectual milieu to have identified themselves with the anarchist movement. But Augustus John’s relationship with that movement was as ambivalent as his own life.
His wildly bohemian life earned him the epithet of the King of Bohemia. His imposing height and carriage and his confident stride, his big black broad brimmed hat, his flowing beard and gold earrings, his great love and knowledge of the Gypsies, his many affairs with women and his unorthodox domestic life justified the title.
He certainly had a knowledge of the anarchist movement from the time he moved to London from his native Wales. As a student at the Slade in 1897 he took his sketchbook to the anarchist clubs in Fitzrovia where he encountered Louise Michel, Peter Kropotkin, and David Nicoll, ex-editor of Commonweal, among the British, French, German, Spanish, Italian and American anarchists to be found there.
Later in Paris in 1898 he often ate at an anarchist restaurant where self service seemed to have been invented, and where “grubbily dressed girls” fetched their own food to avoid being waited upon. He read Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist just before arriving in Liverpool in 1901 and he temporarily named his son Ravachol after the anarchist bomber in 1902 before finally plumping for David.
John elaborated his own beliefs in the Delphic Review, a magazine edited in Fordingbridge and through a number of radio broadcasts. He argued for the breakdown of Nation States into small autonomous, self-supporting, communities - `Gigantism is a disease,' he declared, pointing out that 'Classical Athens was hardly bigger than Fordingbridge.'
His attacks were elegantly argued, even if they did appear somewhat eccentric. He launched an attack on hedges. `Hedges are miniature frontiers when serving as bulkheads, not windscreens. Hedges as bulkheads dividing up the Common Land should come down, for they represent and enclose stolen property. Frontiers are extended hedges, and divide the whole world into compartments as a result of aggression and legalised robbery. They too should disappear…'
His long career as a portraitist for the establishment, when he painted royalty and millionaires was rather at odds with both his bohemianism and his professed republicanism and radicalism, something which he himself seems to have recognised and which caused him much personal anguish. However he defended anarchist Herbert Read’s ‘courageous decision’ to take a knighthood in 1953, which caused a furore within the British anarchist movement. He himself accepted the Order of Merit in 1942, and he was criticised for this being at odds with his republicanism.
He detested Spanish fascist General Franco and horrified by the rise of fascism across Europe he helped to form the Artists International Association along with the likes of Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Ben Nicolson. The association's aim was to establish an 'army of artists' to oppose the advance of 'philistine barbarism'.
They organised a number of exhibitions 'Against Fascism & War'. John reserved a particular hatred for General Franco - and in the early years of WW2 he presented several of his pictures to war funds and , using his influence to free people like the anarchist Werner Droescher and a number of German and Austrian refugee artists interned by the British government,.
In this period he joined the Voluntary Contraception League (considering the number of children he sired, better late than never!), the Committee of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, and he regularly campaigned on behalf of gypsies, in particular around police harassment of gypsies in Kent.
During the war years he also dabbled with the Greenshirts and the Social Credit Party but seems to have gravitated more and more to the anarchist movement after that time, attending anarchist meetings in London. and in I945 joined with Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Herbert Read and Osbert Sitwell in sponsoring the Freedom Defence Committee `to defend those who are persecuted for exercising their rights to freedom of speech, writing and action'.
This was an alternative to the National Council for Civil Liberties that had temporarily become a Communist Front organisation refusing to help anarchists.
He never voted in his life as he said, and his dislike of politicians began to grow even more in the 50s. He remarked that “Anarchism is the thing,” and communism, differentiating communism- “which surely lies at the basis of human society” - from its travesty in the USSR.
By the end of the1940s he was publishing and broadcasting that national states were by definition bound to clash. All nationalities were composed of a haphazard conglomeration of tribes, but the State, originating in violence, must rely on force to impose an artificial uniform on this conglomeration, transmitting its laws and class privileges like a hereditary disease.
“The state must not be judged by human standards nor ever be personified as representing the quintessence of the soul of the people it manipulates. The state is immoral and accountable to nobody”.
Communities must be broken down into smaller groups. Hedges must be dug up - “hedges are miniature frontiers when serving as a bulkhead, not windscreens. Hedges as bulkheads dividing up the Common Land should come down, for they represent and enclose stolen property. Frontiers are extended hedges, and divide the whole world into compartments as a result of aggression and legalized robbery. They too should disappear… they give rise to the morbid form of Patriotism known as Chauvinism or Jingoism”.
“Without frontiers, the State would wither and society change from a heavy pyramid to a fluid form of amoeba. Monstrous industrial towns, congested capital cities with their moats of oxygen-excluding suburbs would melt away and a multiplicity of local communities would appear, autonomous, self-supporting and federated.’gigantism is a disease”.
John and Dorelia lived out the last years of their lives at Fryern, interspersed with occasional trips abroad or up to London - where John would proceed, even into his eighties, to out-drink, out-party and out-flirt his considerably younger companions.
He joined the Peace Pledge Union as a pacifist in the 1950s, and the Committee of 100. which was a British anti-war group set up in 1960 with a hundred public signatories by Bertrand Russell (who resigned from the presidency of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in order to form this more militant group),Its supporters used and advocated nonviolent civil disobedience to achieve their aims. "....you may count on me to follow your lead,..... it is up to all those of us above the idiot line to protest as vigorously as possible." So wrote the 84 year old Augustus John to Bertrand Russell during the build up to the mass anti-nuclear demonstrations of 1961.
Recovering from an attack of thrombosis and suffering from what amounted to agoraphobia against doctor’s orders he joined the mass sit-down in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 17 September at the age of 83. The police had banned the demonstration, and on the day deployed 4,000, which included all their reserves. 888 people were arrested that day.
Augustus hiding himself, somewhat appropriately, inside the National Gallery until the demonstration started. At 5 o'clock he emerged, walked across the road to Trafalgar Square and sat down, joining the unprecedented numbers who had gathered to protest against the lunacy of atomic weapons - and declaring that he would " go to prison if necessary."
Few there recognised the sick old man, but later when Bertrand Russell heard of John's attendance he described it as a "heroic gesture." A month later Augustus John died at Fryern Court, from heart failure on 31 October 1961.
Today despite the ebb and flow of his reputation he is widely recognised as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. On his death in 1961 an obituary in The New York Times observed, 'He was regarded as the grand old man of British painting, and as one of the greatest in British history.' and his work is represented in many of the main galleries in the United Kingdom, from the Tate, the National Museums of Wales, the Bodleian, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, the Glynn Vivian and of course Tenby Museum and Art Gallery among many, many others across the country, while a bronze statue celebrating his life can be seen in Fordingbridge on the banks of the Avon near the Great Bridge.
