Portrait of Wyndham Lewis is a bravura study of Augustus John’s friend, a writer, artist and an early pioneer of the avant-garde modernist movement in England. The facial features are dark and striking, the eyes large and serious with a brooding gaze. A thick head of uncouth hair and a small moustache suggest his persona as an aspiring impresario. This drawing is closely related to John’s painting of Lewis (fig. 1). The absence of a signature, so frequently added to the artist’s autonomous presentation drawings, may suggest that this work was a preparatory study. The deckled edge along the left-hand side of the sheet shows that it was once a leaf in a sketchbook. Wyndham Lewis was a friend and admirer of John. Like John, Lewis studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. He first saw John, a ‘mythological figure’, when he returned fleetingly to visit the school’s life room. They were properly introduced later by their mutual friend William Rothenstein, probably in the summer of 1902. In August 1906, John visited Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes with Lewis. John’s biographer Michael Holroyd wrote that they shared ‘a lifelong precarious friendship’ and ‘stimulated and exasperated each other in about equal measures.’ Stylistic analysis is relatively useless when dating John’s drawings because, as he himself wrote, ‘there is little essential change of outlook’ between his works of widely differing dates. The date of Portrait of Wyndham Lewis can be approximated from contextual information. The sitter’s bushy hair and whiskers provide a terminus post quem. In an article for The Sunday Times magazine in 1958, John explained that Lewis changed his appearance around 1914: ‘When Lewis started his campaign of serious self-advertisement with his magazine Blast he made some important changes in his get-up at the same time; for a start, he had his hair cut.’ This drawing could not have been made later than this date. John also depicted Lewis in two etchings (fig. 2), both made in around 1903, in which the sitter appears several years younger than this red chalk study. A photograph of Lewis by George Charles Beresford from 1913 shows the same features as those depicted in John’s drawing, complete with a central parting and long curtains of hair framing the forehead and eyes (fig. 3). On the basis of these comparisons, it seems likely that this red chalk drawing was made sometime between 1903 and 1914, most likely in 1905 when John also painted Lewis’s portrait. Since his student days in the eighteen-nineties, John’s drawings have been widely appreciated. He himself was of aware of their quality and commercial value, and many drawings were made as readily saleable presentation works. Writing in 1923, the art critic Anthony Bertram described him as ‘one of the most accomplished draughtsmen of all times’. Writing about his works on paper in 1957, John reflected on the difficulties of cataloguing his drawings. He referred to ‘the fact that so many of my drawings have been dispersed without trace’ and further alluded to ‘those I have myself sacrificed, perhaps too hurriedly, on the altar of an imaginary perfection.’