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Overview
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.
W.B. Yeats, one of the first of the famous to sit for a portrait by John, described him in a letter to the American collector John Quinn, in 1907, as 'the most innocent, wicked man I have ever met. He wears earrings, his hair down to his shoulders, a green velvet collar and had two wives who lived together in perfect harmony and nursed each other's children on their knees till about six months ago when one of them bolted and the other died... He is the strangest creature I have ever met, a kind of fawn... a magnificent looking person, and looks the wild creature he is'.
The etching itself has an interesting history, and one revealing of Yeats's vanity. The poet asked John to make his portrait for an etching to illustrate his Collected Poems. John visited him in Ireland, and did some drawings and an oil painting (Tate Britain) as studies. He returned to London to make the etching, using a different study. Although it is by no means unflattering, Yeats rejected it, and chose one by the brilliant but more flattering and conventional John Singer Sargent instead. John wrote privately that Yeats, although he was then aged 42, wanted to look like 'the youthful Shelley in a lace collar'.
See:
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/
Tate, 'Augustus John OM: W.B. Yeats 1907', http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/john-w-b-yeats-n05218
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2018