Augustus John

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

He was a key proponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom for a brief period of 1910.

He was the brother of painter Gwen John.

Early life

John was born in Tenby, either at 11,12 or 13. The Esplanade, now known as The Belgrave Hotel, Pembrokeshire, was the youngest son and third of four children. Edwin John, a Welsh solicitor, died young when he was six years old, but not before instilling a love of drawing in both Augustus and his older sister Gwen. He attended the Tenby School of Art for a short time before moving to London and attending the Slade School of Art, University College London, at the age of seventeen. He was regarded as the most gifted draughtsman of his generation even before his graduation. In his own right, his brother, Gwen, was with him at the Slade and became a well-known artist in her own right.

John submerged rocks crashing into the sea at Tenby in 1897, causing a serious head injury; the long convalescence that followed seems to have ignited his creative spirit and accelerated his artistic growth. He was a winner of the Slade Prize with Moses and the Brazen Serpent in 1898. John afterward attended Paris alone, and he seems to have been inspired by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Ida Nettleship (1877–1907), whom he married in 1901, was inspired by the need to assist him.

Later life

John wrote two volumes of autobiography, Chiaroscuro (1952), and Touching Touches (1964), in later life. Despite the fact that John had ceased to be a moving force in British art, he was still highly respected, as was shown by the Royal Academy's vast exhibition of his 1954 work. He continued to work up until his death in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, in 1961, his last work being a studio mural in three sections, the left hand of which featured a Falstaffian figure of a French peasant dressed as a hurdy-gurdy while walking down a village street. It was Augustus John's last wave goodbye.

He joined the Peace Pledge Union as a pacifist in the 1950s and was a founding member of the Committee of 100. He died on September 17th, 1961, just over a month before his death, but he was a member of the 100's anti-nuclear weapons protest in Trafalgar Square, London. Admiral Sir Caspar John, John McCain, was First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff at the time. He died at the age of 83 in Fordingbridge.

He is believed to have been the model for Joyce Cary's book The Horse's Mouth, which was later turned into a 1958 film with Alec Guinness in the lead role.

In 1975, Michael Holroyd published a biography of John, revealing the public's continuing interest in the painter that Holroyd revealed a new version of the biography in 1996. During the winter of 2004-5, Tate Britain hosted 'Gwen John and Augustus John,' a major exhibition. This exhibition revealed that although Augustus referred to himself and his sister as "the same thing," their art developed in different directions, according to the gallery's publicity. Augustus' work is remarkably upbeat in comparison to Gwen's more personal style, but both artists point to a similar flight from the modern world to a world of fantasy. The exhibition continued in Cardiff to the National Museum of Wales later this year. The exhibition 'Augustus John: Drawn From Life' in 2018 was held at the Poole Museum in Dorset, which then transferred to the Salisbury Museum in 2019.'

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