Overview

Considered by John Singer Sargent to be the best British draughtsman since the Renaissance, Augustus John was the first of the British ‘Post-Impressionists’. Such was his importance that Virginia Woolf declared in 1921 that by 1908 ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ and Wyndham Lewis would dub the ten years leading up to 1914 ‘the Augustan decade'. Handsome, unconventional and full of brilliant promise and Bohemian spirit, John was the man almost every young British art student wanted to emulate. This book reveals why, telling his extraordinary story from his birth in south Wales in 1878 through to the end of his youth in the closing stages of the First World War. Interweaving his biography are the personalities who surrounded John, and the book looks at their influence on him, and his upon them. They include his fellow students at the Slade School of Art – his sister Gwen John and future wife Ida Nettleship, and his friends William Orpen, Ambrose McEvoy, Spencer Gore and Percy Wyndham Lewis – all of whom would become prominent artists in their own right. This book is a long overdue, new interpretation of this singular figure, who was both at the heart of the British artistic milieu, and yet set apart from its movements and manifestos.

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9781848226579

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David Boyd Haycock is a Visiting Research Fellow in Art History at Oxford Brookes University who has curated exhibitions at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2013 and 2020), as well as two exhibitions on Augustus John at Poole Museum and Salisbury Museum (2018 and 2019) and on the equestrian painter Lucy Kemp-Welch at the Russell-Cotes Museum and Art Gallery in Bournemouth (2023). His group biography, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War, was ‘Book of the Week’ in The Guardian and shortlisted as ‘Non-fiction book of the year’ by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain in 2010. David lives in Oxford.

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