Augustus John Volume 1 & 2
Michael Holroyd

Volume 1: The years of innocence: Though for decades out of fashion, Augustus John occupies a place among the foreground figures in British art during the first half of the twentieth century.

Volume 2: The years of experience: In this second and concluding volume of his biography, Michael Holroyd carries on the story of Augustus John into the tumultuous years of experiment and discovery before the First World War.

John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigour and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signalling the end of a distant era.