Art and Artists — Augustus John: A Welsh Artist of Roguish Brilliance
“ When Augustus finished his basic education in Tenby he had no particular interest in doing anything other than riding horses bareback along the beaches, his long dark hair flowing behind him…”
Augustus Edwin John was born on the 4th of January 1878, in the Welsh seaside town of Tenby. His father, Edwin, was a solicitor, who’d moved his existing family to Tenby from Haverfordwest in the January of that year to avoid an epidemic of scarlet fever. Augustus John’s mother, Augusta, was a rather frail woman of 29, who already had two children — Thornton born 1875, Gwendolen born 1876 — and was not looking forward to a third.
Then a forth child, Winifred, came along a year after Augustus, and it was after this birth, writes Susan Chitty that: “ Augusta John’s bouts of illness became more disabling.” She died ‘amongst strangers’ in 1884.
After the death of Augusta Edwin moved the family to Broad Haven, close to Haverfordwest, where the children were looked after by two of Augusta’s sisters, the Misses Leah and Smith. As Chitty describes in her biography of Gwen:
