European Drawings in Canadian Collections 1500-1900. Ottawa: National Gallery, 1976.

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Augustus John is an artist whose personality outshines his work. It has been, until recently, almost impossible to separate the two, but a biography published in 1974 might help dispel the confusion simply by describing the kind of tedious accretion of detail that comprises most people's lives.

John was a brilliant student at the Slade School of Art in London (1894-1898) during the Slade's peak period as a vital teaching institution in the last years of the nineteenth century. He is particularly noted for his swift and accurate rendering of portrait likenesses, and this drawing is an example of both his vitality as a draughtsman at this period and his ability to invest his sitters with life.

The work is an informal sketch of Ida Nettelship, John's first wife, whom he married in 1900 and who died in 1907 of puerperal fever after the birth of their fifth son. The sketch was done, judging from Ida's extreme youth, about 1900. It captures the eager, serious gaze seen in photographs of the girl, herself a former Slade scholarship student, and suggests the kind of straightforwardness which enabled her to deal with her husband's egocentric personality. It is very much in the tradition of the Slade School of about 1900, but the particular use of the chalk for modeling the head and, at the same time, suggesting an artificial light source, is typical of John's own style.

INSCRIPTION: Signed l.r., John
PROVENANCE: Colnaghi's London, 1931
THE ART GALLERY OF VANCOUVER
PURCHASED FROM THE FOUNDERS' FUND, 1931

Augustus John
Tenby (Wales) 1878-Fordingbridge (Hampshire) 1961
Portrait of Ida c.1900
Red chalk
24.8 x 19.7cm (9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.)