Augustus John & the First Crisis of Brilliance: Online Viewing Room

In the two decades before the outbreak of war in 1914, there was an eruption of artistic talent in Britain. Before the world changed and their lives diverged, a network of progressive artists produced work of great vision and technical refinement. Describing the Slade School of Art’s student body in the 1890s, the school’s drawing master Henry Tonks referred to a ‘crisis of brilliance’—the only sequel, in his estimation, being the cohort of David Bomberg, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer in 1908–12. At the centre of the first crisis of brilliance was Augustus John, a student at the school in 1894–98, whose prodigal gifts with a pencil were magnified by an original and magnetic personality. His young friend Wyndham Lewis summarised the situation: John was ‘one who had gigantic ear-rings, a ferocious red beard, a large angry eye, and who barked beautifully at you from his proud six foot, and, marvellously, was a great artist too.’ Virginia Woolf later wrote that in 1908 ‘the age of Augustus John was dawning.’

 Alongside Augustus John, the exhibition includes work by gifted Slade pupils Gwen John, Wyndham Lewis, William Orpen, James Dickson Innes and Derwent Lees, as well as their friends Jacob Epstein, Henry Lamb and William Rothenstein.

For further information about the exhibition and available artworks please contact the gallery. 

Even as they improvised new modes of art and living, shedding the academicism and sentimentality of Victorian culture, John and his confreres remained committed to the human figure as a vehicle for great art. They often modelled for one another, though more often it was the women who featured. As the careers of their male counterparts flourished, the artistic activities of Ida Nettleship and Mary Edwards among others were curtailed as they became wives, mothers and muses.

As Augustus John’s reputation grew in the early years of the twentieth century, he came to attract other great artists of the era. Often over drinks at the Café Royal in Regent’s Street, they were inspired and occasionally inspired him in turn. It was a young Slade alumnus and fellow Welshman James Dickson Innes who introduced John to the Arenig mountain range in Snowdonia. Working there and in the south of France with Derwent Lees, sometimes together, between 1910 and 1913 they produced an original kind of landscape art. Besides the landscape, Lamb’s wife Nina Forrest—known as Euphemia—was portrayed not only by Lamb but also Innes, John (who rechristened her Lobelia), and Jacob Epstein

Not all talented artists of John’s acquaintance contributed to the hive. His sometime friend and dealer William Rothenstein made a name with informal portraits of literary celebrities, amongst them the novelists Hardy and Forster and the playwright Pinero. Although he maintained a querulous friendship with John over the years, Wyndham Lewis quickly moved into the vanguard of the next cultural insurrection. In decorative work for the Omega Workshops and then the Rebel Art Centre in 1913–14, he contributed to a sea change in the relationship between art and applied design. Of all these artists, it was Gwen John who nurtured the most personal vision. Obstinately aloof yet consumed by erstwhile emotional attachments, she settled in Paris in 1904, living independently and striving for ‘a beautiful life’—‘ordered, regular, harmonious’. Her paintings and watercolour drawings of children and nuns reflect a partial realisation of that goal in the simulacrum of her art.