Inspired Innocent

When the formidable Augustus John displayed an accumulation of his paintings, as he did every decade or so in London, the occasion was apt to follow a rigid ritual. The critics would arrive, admire the deft draftsmanship, and report in awe that though John did not change, he never seemed to date. Then would come John's friends--poets, artists, actors, M.P.s, and a generous sampling of the House of Lords--chatting and advising. Finally, John himself, bearded and majestic, would sweep in, his headgear--whether a beret or black Homburg or battered trilby--cocked at some outlandish angle. He would stay only an hour or so. "Very exhausting, all that," he would say, and be off to his favorite pub--knowing full well that once again he was the talk of the London art world.

Whatever he did, Augustus John did with dash, and that often made it hard to see the man and his work in perspective. "I'm just a legend," he once said. "I'm not a real person at all." His life on the surface seemed a series of poses, and his work at times seemed too facile to be true. Actually, few men lived with greater gusto or, in portraits at least, were so penetrating on canvas. When John died quietly last week at the age of 83, it was as if another door had closed on that exceptional generation of talented eccentrics who so brightened Britain's imperial landscape that it still seemed imperial long after the empire was gone.

On a Gypsy Caravan. Augustus John was born in the Welsh seacoast town of Tenby, the son of the leading barrister in town. He discovered his talent for drawing early, at 18 entered the University of London's Slade School of Fine Art. He let his hair and beard grow, adopted whatever garb--flowing smocks, trailing scarves, bright bandannas--that seemed appropriate to a budding genius. Thus the legend of Augustus John began.

In 1900 he eloped with a pretty, olive-skinned girl named Ida Nettleship, and soon the two set off for Liverpool. There John befriended a scholar whose odd specialty was the gypsy. John became so fascinated by the subject that eventually he, his wife and infant son were wandering about the British Isles in a caravan. The travels lasted through the births of three more boys, ended when the family moved to Paris, where Ida died suddenly after the birth of a fifth. The next year John married again, and in time four more children were born. The family lived in France for a while, then Dorset, and finally in a white brick Georgian house in Hampshire, a charming bedlam of bright children and assorted animals that was John's headquarters until he died.

In a Soho Cafe. Yet he was never a stranger to London. The Soho restaurant called the Eiffel Tower knew his booming voice and august figure as well as it knew his colorful companions: Max Beerbohm, Tallulah Bankhead, Wyndham Lewis, the young Prince of Wales. In Ireland he spent his time with W. B. Yeats; in Paris he sought out James Joyce; in London he came to know Shaw, Wilde and Aldous Huxley. To women he was irresistible. It was said the female sitters would sometimes strip off their clothes without John's either asking or wanting them to. When in a stern mood, John would punish them by painting only their faces.

And faces were always his specialty. A John portrait began slowly, with a great deal of staring, circling about and staccato grunting. But once John had a grasp of his subject, the portrait would form almost on its own. Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Hardy and Yeats, lord mayors, marchese, duchesses, generals and politicians--all felt the pierce of his eye.

Critics have complained that had John spent his talents more carefully, he might have been a greater artist. But it was not in his nature to be a profound man: it was his impulses, not his thoughts, that were inspired. As his friend Wyndham Lewis said, he was "a great man of action into whose hands the fairies stuck a brush instead of a sword." Had he tried harder for greatness, he might well have lost his innocent freshness, and the gallery of portraits he left to the world would have died on their walls.

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