Augustus John was born in 1878 in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, in Wales, younger brother of Gwen John. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1894 until 1998, winning numerous awards and prizes particularly for his draughtsmanship. In 1900, John visited Paris, and then travelled across Europe over the subsequent few years. Alongside fellow Slade student he founded the Chelsea Art School and was briefly a Professor at the University of Liverpool. During WWI he was an Official War Artist, attached to the Canadian forces.

At the start of the twentieth century, John was a bohemian figure, seen as a romantic and rebellious free spirit, and a prodigiously talented artist. His subjects, with whom he strongly identified, were frequently gypsies, vagabonds and outcasts of society. His eccentric clothing, unconventional lifestyle, with wife, mistress and various children living in the same house (or occasionally caravan), and his legendary carousing lent him an infamous notoriety.

In the 1920s, John became the premier portraitist of British society figures, taking up the mantle of John Singer Sargent. Amongst his most iconic portraits are ‘Colonel T. E. Lawrence’, 1919; Tate Collection, ‘Madame Suggia’, 1920-23; Tate Collection, and ‘Lady Ottoline Morrell’, 1919; National Portrait Gallery. By the time of his death in 1961, and with the publication of two autobiographies, John’s reputation was in steady decline, but his early work ranks amongst the most significant contributions to twentieth-century British art. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1928, awarded the Order of Merit in 1942, served as a Trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1933 to 1941, and was President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters from 1948 until 1953. His work is held in all major international collections. Most recently Augustus John and Gwen John were the subject of a major exhibition at the Tate, showing their work side by side.

From the very start of his career, studying at the Slade, Augustus John was drawn to outsiders and outcasts of traditional society, and, in particular, gypsies. Romany culture and the mythology of Bohemia became, for John, a symbol of social and cultural rebellion and the vehicle for a romantic, folk existence outside the constraints of the establishment. John identified with his subjects, adopting Romany or ‘folk’ dress, living a nomadic lifestyle, and setting up a communal family arrangement with wife, mistress, and children living together.

In 1910, John travelled to Martigues, a fishing-port on the Etang de Berre between Estaque and the Mediterranean, an area that inspired many of his most famous gypsy pictures in the ‘Provençal Studies’. Between 1910 and 1913, John travelled across Europe and Britain, using various locations as inspirations to expand the ‘Provençal Studies’ series. Although titled ‘Two Women in a Mediterranean Landscape’, this oil on board work was most probably painted during John’s trip to Dorset in the summer of 1913 due to the colour palette. The work is dominated by rich, tonal colours of mandrake green, lavender purple, raspberry pink, and burnt umber. Two women, with a enigmatically ambiguous relationship - one sitting seemingly picking flowers, the other standing, shielding her eyes from a strong sun as she looks out into the distance – are set in an arid landscape. Barren but for patches of purple flowers and prominent evergreen trees, the warm light and heat of the Mediterranean is palpable. The two women wear unconventional clothing, loose robes, bare feet, and hats. ‘Two Women in a Mediterranean Landscape’ is a quintessential, jewel-like exposition of John’s romantic vision of the nomadic gypsy life, and of the homespun yet mysterious women at its heart. As John wrote, “The absolute isolation of gipsies seemed to me the rarest and most unattainable thing in the world.”