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:
“ Aunt Leah was the cheerful one while Aunt Rosina, who had a ferret-like face, was lugubrious and suffered from indigestion.”
Both aunts had a horror of Roman Catholicism, but were devoted to General Booth, holding important ranks in the Salvation Army. It was not a happy household — with the children missing their mother dreadfully — and it was probably then that Augustus John, aged 6, felt that family life was to be enjoyed, without restriction and the sword of a vengeful god, or aunt,hanging over them. From then onward he became more self assured, more playful and more daring.
In the autumn of 1884 Edwin sold the house in Broad Haven, gave up his lawyers practice in Haverfordwest, and moved everyone back to Tenby, taking two servants with them. This didn’t go down too well with his sisters-in-law, with Aunt Leah heading for the US within a few weeks, followed by Rosina, who headed for Japan, via Switzerland, finally settling in California.
