Although John was born and brought up in Wales, it was only through the encouragement of fellow Welshman, James Dickson Innes, that in 1911 he returned there to paint. As John recounted of his first visit to Wales with Innes,

Our meeting at Arenig was cordial, and yet I seemed to detect a certain reserve on his part: he was experiencing, I fancy, the scruples of a lover on introducing a friend to his best girl—in this case, the mountain before us which he regarded, with good reason, as his spiritual property. Had he not been the first discover and surmount it?

These paintings proved successful. In his autobiography Chiaroscuro, John wrote that the house he commissioned to be built for him in Mallord Street, Chelsea, was paid for with the proceeds of an exhibition at the Goupil Gallery that ‘consisted of pictures done in North Wales.’

John had strong impressions when he went to Arenig with Innes in the spring of 1911. ‘This is the most wonderful place I’ve seen’, John wrote to Dorelia shortly after their arrival. ‘The air is superb and the mountains wonderful.’ As their paintings reveal, at times they painted virtually shoulder-to-shoulder. Following the technique John had developed in Provence of working rapidly in oil, Innes began using oil paints almost in the same way he used watercolours.

Innes painted even faster than John, who was impressed as his new friend worked with ‘swiftness and decision’, setting down in a single sitting ‘view after jewelled view of the delectable mountains he loved.’ It is possible some of Innes’s approach rubbed off on John—though John would be careful not to identify too close a link. ‘My mountains were never Innes-conceived,’ he told John Rothenstein in 1952. This was just ‘[a]nother silly legend. They were conceived by neither of us but seen by both, though more effectively by him, for I lacked his superstition and drew better. His limitations actually helped him.’