Word: augustus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...opening at the Tooth Gallery in London last week were pleasantly surprised by the attentions of photographers, who, it turned out, were merely taking no chances of missing the True Beard. The True Beard, when it arrived hours late in a frieze of glamorous ladies, was that of Augustus John, for ten years Britain's most distinguished R. A. and for several weeks her most congratulated ex-R. A. (TIME, May 9). Tooth was opening his first one-man show of paintings in nine years, notable for a dozen magnificent West Indian portraits...
...world of English portraiture may be thought of as a triangle with Mayfairish Photographer Cecil Beaton at one corner, the polished Royal portrait painters at the other, and Augustus John at the apex. Like Poet William Butler Yeats, whom he has often drawn and painted, John is a master technician with an extraordinary, romantic grasp of character. Born at Tenby in 1878 of parents variously described as Welsh or gypsy or both, he entered London's severe Slade School at 5 and quickly became the most brilliant draftsman in a shoal which included Sir John Lavery and the late...
Bold, and in British eyes scandalous, were Augustus John's first decades as a painter. While he was supposed to be teaching at Liverpool University in 1904 he disappeared for weeks at a time on camping trips with gypsies. He once left a train at Marseille and traveled all the way back into Spain to paint a girl he had seen from the train window. The satyrlike old Bohemian, John Bidlake, in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point was immediately accepted in Bloomsbury as a fictionalization of Augustus John, minus the real artist's wild whiskers...
Posterity will be indebted to Augustus John for the great lineaments of many of Europe's great men. His etching of Yeats as a young man is already famous. His crayon drawing of the late T. E. Lawrence in Arab headdress gives that long-jawed little man all his well-earned dignity. When the practical Lord Leverhulme, soap king of England, cut the head out of John's portrait of him in 1920 so he could get it in his safe, most of the artists and art dealers in London went on strike for 24 hours...
...artist thus admired in his own profession does not often grow rich, but commissions ranging up to $15,000 have given Augustus John an old stone manor and a bright pink studio in Hampshire, another studio in Wales. John offspring include Son Teddy, a successful professional boxer, Daughter Poppet, who married well, and Son Casper, a member of the Air Ministry Mission recently...