This exquisite painting is a portrait of Robin John, the third son of Augustus John’s first wife, Ida Nettleship, at the age of fifteen or sixteen. As a child Robin was constantly climbing and jumping, a habit that may have extended into his teenage years to judge from the scar that John has delineated with a deft lick of paint on his son’s left upper lip.1Michael Holroyd, Augustus John. The New Biography. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1996. p. 197. When this work was reproduced in the journal Art in Australia in 1922, The Australasian newspaper commented: ‘It is perhaps worth mentioning that the mark on the upper lip of the upper lip of the boy is not a fault in printing but is in the original’, ‘Art in Australia’, The Australasian, 2 Jun. 1922, p. 50.
The seven John boys grew up in a rough and tumble manner, in sync with their father’s bohemian lifestyle. The youngest son, Romilly, remembered how he and his brothers were ‘a wild troop of naked boys’ each summertime.2Romilly John, The Seventh Child. A Retrospect, Jonathan Cape, London, 1932, reprinted 1975, p. 28. As they grew older, however, the children moved past this carefree existence, each entering into conflict with their father as they matured. Robin later recalled that ‘I’m sure he [Augustus] regretted our inability – as I did – to achieve a friendly and easy relationship. But the main obstacle was that he – fundamentally – was a rebel against established society and most conventions, while I hated Bohemianism and yearned for a normal life – which made me in turn also a rebel – but in reverse’.3Robin John to Michael Holroyd, 13 Jan. 1969; quoted in Holroyd, 1996, p. 539. While John could be a formidable father figure, his biographer Michael Holroyd has noted how he supported his children financially in a handsome fashion, and also gave them the freedom at a very young age to choose their own schools. Robin chose the Institut Le Rosey, a boarding school in Rolle, Switzerland, that was then, as now, one of the world’s most exclusive schools.4ibid. p. 536. Robin developed a talent for languages, becoming fluent in at least seven.5In 1961 he was reported as speaking ten languages. ‘Life with father (with the lid off)’, The Sun-Herald (Sydney), 5 Nov.1961, p. 15.
The British writer Gerald Brenan, at whose home in Spain Robin stayed for a while two years after Portrait of a boy (Robin), c. 1919–1920, was painted, described a vivid picture of the teenager’s personality as it was in 1922:
Robin was a tall, very good looking boy of seventeen and from the first he fitted well into our life. He was lethargic, no doubt because he had grown too fast, and used to lie for hours on his bed strumming on a guitar he had bought but which he never learned to play. Although he had ambitious plans for educating himself – after he had left I came across a programme he had drawn up in which he set himself the task of mastering philosophy, mathematics and all the sciences with the whole of French and English literature and the theoretical background of music and painting – he did not succeed in making much progress. Indeed the only book I ever saw him open was Casanova’s Mémoires and even in that he never got beyond the first volume. Yet he was by no means stupid and picked up Spanish with an extraordinary rapidity and entirely by ear. At the end of a few months he was talking it more fluently and with a better accent then I was.6Gerald Brenan, Personal Record 1920–1972, Jonathan Cape, London, 1974, p. 40.
Augustus John was somewhat skeptical about his son’s language skills. According to John family lore, Robin was ‘a gifted linguist in 8 languages of whom Augustus is reported to have said [that he] couldn’t communicate in any of them’.7Ben John, grandson of the artist, letter to Annette Dixon, former Curator, National Gallery of Victoria, 27 Oct. 1986. John himself recalled how in 1922: ‘My son Robin in a few weeks had learnt to speak perfect Castilian; he has a linguistic genius. But as he rarely exerted himself so far as to open his mouth, this faculty was of little use to him or to others’, Augustus John, ‘Fragment of an autobiography – IX’, Horizon, vol. 7, no. 37, Jan. 1943, p. 64.
Portrait of a boy (Robin) was included in John’s exhibition Augustus John: War, Peace Conference and Other Portraits held at London’s Alpine Gallery in 1920. Advertisements for the exhibition in the Times included the following recommendations: ‘ “There is one thing Mr Augustus John has above his contemporaries: that is, an instinct for painting.” – Morning Post. “It needs no prophetic insight to foretell that the exhibition will be one of the sensations of the season.” – Daily News’.8‘Art exhibitions’, The Times, 16 Mar. 1920, p. 14. The critic for The Spectator (1920) was not in agreement, arguing that the portraits on display were of mixed quality and dependent upon what John could draw from each sitter:
Mr John is so sensitive to the qualities of those he paints that they often betray him into commonplace, and indeed into something perilously near the Academy presentation portrait … inevitable everyday things of the portrait-painter’s practice’. [The portrait of Robin, however, was awarded special praise:] The Portrait of a Boy (No. 27) is a most beautifully modelled and coloured head quite unlike in execution to the other pictures.9H. S., ‘Art. Mr John and Mr Epstein’, The Spectator, 6 Mar. 1920, p. 16.
The critic Charles Marriott, also reviewing John’s Alpine Gallery exhibition, noted the singular style of Robin’s portrait:
Portrait of a Boy reminds us that, with all his modernity, Mr John is a traditional painter. Nothing, to my mind, is more significant of his personal security than the candid way in which he will refer to this or that painter of the past.10Charles Marriott, ‘Mr Augustus John as Portrait Painter’, Studio, vol. 79, no. 325, Apr. 1920, p. 48.
Portrait of a boy was reproduced on page 43, with a note concerning its purchase by the NGV. John had spent two weeks in Italy in 1910, during which he was profoundly inspired by trecento and quattrocento painting; art historian Ann Galbally has noted that the artist’s subsequent use of ‘the technique of panel-painting with a pale background reveals John’s interest in fifteenth-century Italian painting’.11Ted Gott et al., Modern Britain 1900–1960, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, p. 54.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria