‘In 50 years’ time,’ Augustus John gloomily reflected following his sister’s death on 18 September 1939, ‘I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.’ He was right. In 2004, when the Tate mounted a joint retrospective of Augustus and Gwen John, it was Gwen who had become the major artist. The ‘variable strident chords’ of the self-styled Gypsy King, likened in his youth to Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Raphael, had been supplanted by the ‘sustained minor key’ of the nunlike recluse.
The first decades of the 20th century were what Virginia Woolf described as ‘the Age of Augustus John’; but the praise lathered on him after his own death, aged 83, in 1961 – ‘one of the greatest artists in British history’, ‘a man in the 50-megaton range’, ‘the last of the Titans’ – now seems embarrassing. The reputation of Gus, as Gwen called him, with Judith Mackrell following suit in her absorbing dual biography, had been on the wane since the 1930s. In the 1940s he despaired that ‘my work’s not good enough’. ‘I’m just a legend,’ he said in the 1950s, ‘I’m not a real person at all.’
Again, he was right: Augustus John is remembered now for his flamboyant hats, gold earrings, open marriage and the 100 offspring he is rumoured to have sired. When he walked through Chelsea, it was said, he patted the head of every child he met in case it was one of his own. Aged 82, he wrote to one of his daughters, Amaryllis, that should she ‘ever feel the need’ to have a baby, ‘just give me a nudge and I will do my best’.
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