Augustus John (1878-1961) was one of the most celebrated and, in his own lifetime, notorious British painters of the early twentieth century, renowned equally for his brilliant draughtsmanship and his flamboyant bohemian persona. Born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, the younger brother of the painter Gwen John, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1894 to 1898, where his exceptional talent for drawing was recognised early; by the age of twenty he had already won a reputation as one of the most brilliant draughtsmen in England. His early work, executed with vigour and technical assurance, drew on the influence of Rembrandt and, above all, Rubens, and his style continued to develop through exposure to Post-Impressionism during his travels in France, Holland and Belgium from 1900 onwards.
John married Ida Nettleship, a fellow Slade student, in 1901, and the following year met Dorothy McNeill, whom he named "Dorelia," beginning a relationship that would prove the defining artistic and personal partnership of his life. Dorelia became his muse, his companion and, following Ida's death in 1907, the maternal figure to most of his children; contemporaries described her enigmatic presence and her likeness to the Mona Lisa, and she features in some of John's most celebrated and sensitive portraits and drawings. From around this period John also lived for extended stretches as a traveller, camping with gypsy families in Wales, Dorset and Ireland alongside fellow artists James Dickson Innes and Derwent Lees, an experience that fed his lasting fascination with Romany culture and contributed to his carefully cultivated bohemian image. He served as an official war artist attached to Canadian forces during the First World War, and was elected a Royal Academician in 1928, resigning briefly a decade later in protest at the Academy's treatment of a fellow artist's work before eventual reconciliation. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1942.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' painting of Dorelia is a direct depiction of the woman who inspired so much of John's finest and most personal work, and stands among the gallery's most significant twentieth-century British paintings. Together with the gallery's still life of shells, it represents two contrasting facets of an artist whose reputation, while it later drew criticism for an uneven late career, rests securely on the strength of his draughtsmanship and the psychological immediacy of his best portraiture.