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.