Augustus John
  • Published: 1 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781845951849
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 752
  • RRP: $69.99

Augustus John

The New Biography

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The revised and updated biography of the British painter, drawing on the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd's first edition in 1974, revealing the complete story of John and his circle, from one of the greatest modern biographers.

This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd's two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers.

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 vigor 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 signaling the end of a distant era.
  • Published: 1 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781845951849
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 752
  • RRP: $69.99
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About the author

Michael Holroyd

Besides the Lives of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington), Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. His most recent book, A Strange Eventful History, winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, was a biography of theatre greats Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and their children. He has been president of the Royal Society of Literature and is the first non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.

Also by Michael Holroyd

On Wheels
A Book of Secrets
Basil Street Blues and Mosaic
A Strange Eventful History
Lytton Strachey
See all

Praise for Augustus John

Superb biography. . . . Holroyd has it all

Robert Hughes, Time

Vastly informative and hugely entertaining

Newsweek

An entertaining, essentially comic story... Holroyd tells it with great skill and elegance

Sunday Telegraph

Here is one of the most entertaining lives ever written... Holroyd depicts his subjects with great sympathy and understanding... Very funny... thought-provoking

Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

Both a celebration and a tragedy. The celebration of a man of enormous vitality, intermittent zest and remarkable magnetism, and of the most naturally gifted artist that the English-speaking world has produced in the last hundred years; and the tragedy of a man who never came to terms with himself... A wonderfully engrossing, entertaining and even moving book

Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph