Portrait of the artist: "tête farouche"

Augustus Edwin John (1878-1961), the brother of the Welsh painter Gwen John, trained at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1894 to 1898, where he won numerous prizes and awards. He became a member of the New English Art Club in 1903, and was Professor of Painting at the University of Liverpool from 1901 to 1904. He travelled throughout Europe (his first visit was to Paris in 1900) and he was a regular visitor to the USA. Before World War I, John lived as a traveller with his family, in caravans in England and Wales. During the war, he was attached to the Canadian forces as a war artist. John was made a member of the Royal Academy in 1928; he resigned in 1938; but he was re-appointed in 1940. He was a president of the Society of Mural Painters. He was a member of the Camden Town Group in 1911 and a member of the London Group from 1940 to 1961. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1942.

John quickly earned a reputation as one of England's foremost painters. His earliest works combine the poetic sentiment of the Pre-Raphaelites with a broadly Impressionist technique. Numerous works illustrate aspects of Roman life, to which John was introduced by his friend John Sampson, University Librarian at Liverpool. His mural paintings showed remarkable talent, but his work in this area was curtailed by his numerous portrait commissions - by turns intimate or grand and sumptuous in character, and often strikingly composed - undertaken to support his large family and notoriously bohemian lifestyle.

Printmaking marked a definitive point of divergence in his and Gwen's careers; it was also where Augustus John's true brilliance lay. Comparatively little has been made of his graphic work, perhaps because it seemed so much less important to himself. Yet in etching, he achieved a level of expression to match the Old Masters. What they lack in colour and expansive size, in the impatient gestural slashes of paint that typify his oils, they make up for with exquisite emotional confession.

'Tête farouche' is the French for 'fierce face' and this plate toned etching certainly lives up to its title. The attitude and expression of the face, seen front view, are based on two earlier compositions, in which John scrutinised his features and his gaze with penetrating acuity. They do not, however, achieve the dramatic intensity that the artist gave to the second state of this self-portrait, and which appears, a half-century later, to echo the self-portrait The Desperate Man (Private Collection) by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). With short, tense accents John etched the relief of his agonised face – all knitted brows and hollow cheeks. His irises are rendered by two circles of opaque black, while his dishevelled hair and beard are described in a dense network of unruly commas and curves. The rest of the torso is only summarily suggested. But the effect is above all owed to the partial wiping of the ink on the plate, which produces an ethereal grey tone around the face and a dark halo on the edges. As such, the artist’s face appears to loom out at us from the darkness, unless it was about to be swallowed by the surrounding gloom. Twenty-five impressions were made of this plate, each one experimenting with a different wiping effect. No preparatory drawing for these self-portraits is known, possibly confirming that John worked directly on the plate, the needle used to etch allowing a spontaneous gesture as close to drawing as possible. The artist’s interest in the freest graphic techniques is also displayed in the self-portraits he made in old age, which preserve the face’s intense presence.

See:

Fondation Custodia - Collection Frits Lugt, '49. Augustus John...' https://www.fondationcustodia.fr/49-Augustus-John-330

Hilton Kramer, 'Augustus John', New York Times, 10 August 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/10/archives/augustus-john-the-best-bad-painter-in-england.html

Piano Nobile, 'Augustus John, Biography', https://www.piano-nobile.com/artists/97-augustus-john/biography/

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   November 2018