Augustus John

"Augustus John" is one of the eminent figures of oil painting and a great painter, and the English critic "Wyndham Lewis" has described him in these words: "a great hero into whose hands the fairy gods placed a brush instead of a sword."

"Augustus John" is one of the eminent figures of oil painting and a great painter. Many of his portraits — such as the portrait of Madame Suggia, the player of the guitar; of Yeats, the Irish poet; and of King Faisal, King of Iraq — have won world fame. John was born in 1878; he studied painting from 1896 to 1899 at the famous Slade School in London; then in 1928 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy, and in 1942 he was awarded the Order of Merit.

The English critic Wyndham Lewis described Augustus John as follows: "a great man of action into whose hands the fairy gods placed a brush instead of a sword." And when we see this extraordinary heroism of life striding steadily through our present age with broad steps, armed with the confidence of a victor, we are certain that the description matches the reality.

It is strange that John should differ from all the contemporary artists of England: though he is the eldest of them (he is now sixty-eight years of age), he is marked by the vitality, energy, and confidence that mark the young. The young painters of today are men of thought: they think and construct theories, so that their art emerges as an intellectual product. John is not so; he painted his most striking pictures before he had thought about them. He possesses an immense wealth on which he draws in venturing upon his artistic works, and he is certain, by sheer instinct, of what he is doing, so that his pictures, when finished, come out in the most striking style. But if he errs, it is difficult for him to correct his error; hence the sober, deliberate painter is, in this respect, in a better position than the rash, adventurous John. And he finds himself in a like position, too, when his emotional and artistic wealth carries him beyond his model, and his ideas lose their harmony.

It is an injustice to call this man, who excels in so many spheres of life, merely a painter, despite the world fame his pictures have won. Ever since he left the Slade, the famous school of art in London, he has never ceased to study the lines of the face and the parts of the human body. He is beyond dispute to be counted a link in the chain of the great English painters; there is no doubt that Gainsborough, Reynolds, Raeburn, and Lawrence would admire him and take pride in adding his name to their circle. And perhaps the credit for his brilliant success in painting human faces lies in this: that he did not spend his whole life before the human face, but would turn aside from it to paint landscapes and other pictures of still life.

Perhaps the greatest distinction of John's portraits is their want of veneration and respect for the sitter, for the more important the person painted, the less his effect upon John. Nor has he ever respected false qualities or pretended nobility; where he finds courage, intelligence, and wisdom, he paints them. But if he finds nobility mingled with selfishness, vanity, and the other qualities that betray human weakness, he will not portray it; hence his portraits are saturated with character and empty of veneration.

In truth, portraiture is a narrow field for one with a great merry spirit like John's. From his earliest days in painting, John was more drawn to the gypsies and vagabonds than to the members of society and the men of letters; he would leave the Slade School and make long journeys to the remote districts of Wales, where he would paint for long spells among the simple country folk.

John could not bind himself with the fetters of our present age — the age of matter and of social planning — and he felt the pressing need for complete independence and for going out to the gypsies and vagabonds, where life is natural. So he loved the life of risk and adventure, and living among those who love that life; he is a gambler who loves hazard and independence — his pictures of peasants, from which life pours forth, proclaim it. As for his pictures of gypsy women, they are far more beautiful, and far more dignified, than his pictures of the women of urban society.

At one stage of his professional life John painted a group of portraits of certain West Indian subjects; these pictures came very close to the primitive peoples, and it is the two portraits "Phyllis" and "Aminta" from this group that moved Wyndham Lewis to describe John in these words: "John opens his two great blue eyes and sees with them a head standing and glittering before them; he lays hold of it while he makes ready his brush and his canvas, and with them traces the picture of that dusky phantom." But neither the portraits of colored people nor the pictures of peasants could alone satisfy the appetite for painting that surges forever in John's breast.

Had John lived in another age, he would without doubt have been commissioned to paint the walls of churches, palaces, and chambers, and it would have been necessary for his genius to be spread over different fields. He did indeed at times try to carry out this scheme by attempting enormous pictures, but he never finished them, feeling that there was no fitting place for them. It is said that he was once heard to remark jokingly in a London restaurant: "I believe that if they allowed me and 'Matthew Smith' to decorate the walls of this restaurant with beautiful paintings, they would demand a large sum of money from us in return."

His greatest experiment in painting in the grand manner was the picture "Lyric Fantasy," that picture in which he painted beautiful, fierce gypsy women carrying their bewildered children and sitting in the wilderness. This picture stands as a kind of indictment brought against civilized life, and it is also an excellent example of the breadth of John's genius and gifts. His second attempt was an enormous picture in charcoal, drawn upon a wall, representing a Canadian war memorial; it was filled with figures masterly in their handling of events and incidents, but it was never completed. So too the picture "Galway" — which he finished in a week — and the picture "Mirz": both are full of living, speaking action, but they too were left unfinished.

John is counted an authority in the mastery of detail; were all his paintings destroyed and only his drawings left, they alone would immortalize his name.

Nature, in John's eyes, is a great comedy: he sees in it grandeur and courage, as he sees in it wantonness and mockery, sorrow and evil; but in any case he enjoys it with vitality and energy, whatever it may be, and he understands it well — and that is the source of his greatness.

But if you look at John today, you will find before you a broad, bearded man wearing a loose, flowing garment, and you will perceive that you are looking not at a rebel who refuses submission to every crooked system that stands in the way of freedom, but at a man who lives, with openhandedness and energy, a grand and splendid life. If a friend of his is ill-used, he feels for him and rolls up his sleeves to defend his rights, whatever that defense may cost him; people still talk of his resignation from the Royal Academy in 1938 because the Academy rejected the portrait of "Eliot" from the brush of his friend "Wyndham Lewis" (he was re-elected to the Academy in 1940). And once an idea has won his sympathy, he throws himself behind it with all the enthusiasm and energy he possesses.

"Augustus John" was born in the town of "Tenby" in "South Wales," but he now spends most of his time at his country house at "Fordingbridge, Hants," though he is always inclined — like his friends the gypsies — to move about and wander. He is a sportsman, a poet, an artist, and a man of the impossible; but he can never keep to one place, nor hold fast to a single theory — he is far above all that.