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Augustus John (January 4, 1878–October 13,
1961) was a Wales|Welsh painter.

He was born at Tenby in Pembrokeshire.  He studied
at the Slade School of Art University College
London|UCL in London and even before his
graduation had proven to be the most talented
draughtsman of his generation.  His sister, Gwen
John, was an equally talented artist.

Although well-known early in the century for his
drawings and etchings, the bulk of John's later
work consisted of portraits, some of the best of
which were of his two wives and his children. He
was known for the psychological insight in his
portraits, many of which were considered "cruel"
in the truth of the depiction. Lord Leverhulme was
so upset with his portrait that he cut out the
head and returned the rest of the picture. John
painted many distinguished contemporaries,
including Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard
Shaw, the cellist Guilhermina Suggia, the Marchesa
Casati and Elizabeth Bibesco. Perhaps his most
famous portrait is of his fellow-countryman, Dylan
Thomas. 

During WW I, he was attached to the Canadian
forces as a war artist and made a number of
memorable portraits of Canadian infantrymen. The
end result was to have been a huge mural for Lord
Beaverbrook and the sketches and cartoon for this
show that it might have been his greatest
large-scale work. Alas, like so many of his
monumental conceptions, it was never completed.

It was said that after the war his powers
diminished as his bravura technique became
sketchier and sketchier. However, from time to
time his inspiration returned, as it did on his
1937 trip to Jamaica.

He is said to have been the model for the bohemian
painter depicted in Joyce Cary's novel The Horse's
Mouth, which was later filmed with Alec Guinness
in the part.  

By his first wife, Ida Nettleship (1877-1907), he
had five children, and by his mistress Dorothy
"Dorelia" McNeill, who later became his second
wife, he had two children.
By Ian Fleming's mother,  Evelyn St. Croix Rose
Fleming, he had a daughter, Amaryllis Fleming
(1925-1999), a noted cellist. At one time it was
quite popular for women to suggest that their
liaison with the painter had produced offspring.

In old age, though John had ceased to be a moving
force in British art, he was still greatly
revered, as was demonstrated by the huge show of
his work mounted by the Royal Academy in 1954. He
continued to work up until his death in
Fordingbridge, Hampshire in 1961.  His last work
being a studio mural in three parts, the left hand
of which showed a Falstaffian figure of a French
peasant in a yellow waistcoat playing a hurdy
gurdy while coming down a village street.