A Brush With Life

Peyton Skipwith enjoys a small exhibition that highlights the artist’s close association with Wessex in the early decades of the 20th century

A few months ago, commenting on Augustus John’s Madame Suggia in Country Life’s ‘My favourite Painting’ series (June 27), John Mcewen quoted the painter/critic william Rothenstein: ‘Augustus John, whose brain was once teeming with ideas for great compositions, had ceased to do imaginative work and was painting portraits.’ Rothenstein intended this as a criticism, but John had always painted portraits.

Even in 1898, at the time he was doing his 5ft by 7ft canvas Moses and the Brazen Serpent, with which he won the Slade School’s Summer Composition Prize, John was working on portraits such as the Tate’s rarely seen An Old Lady, the earliest work in this thoughtful, although modest, exhibition.

As David Boyd Haycock writes in his introduction to the accompanying book, this is not an attempt to restore John’s reputation—which was seriously damaged by the posthumous sales at Christie’s that flooded the market with the sweepings from his studio floor—but, rather, to highlight those aspects of his career that ‘brought him to prominence in the years prior to and just after the first world war’.