THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES

Otago, New Zealand

25 May 1948

(page 2)

Augustus John Earns

£9000 By Lunchtime.

People have been queueing in Leicester Square, London, recently to buy pictures at 1000gns each. Inside the entrance to the Leicester Galleries a tall, white-bearded man, wearing a battered grey trilby and a red-striped shirt, stood chain-smoking while actresses, peers, and company directors stood six deep in front of his paintings. Seventy-year-old Augustus John son of a Welsh solicitor, and Britain's most famous artist, was holding his first exhibition of paintings for 15 years.

More than 50 pictures were on view, many of them priced at about £1000. Nine were sold before lunch on the first day.

Portraits of Winston Churchill and the late Aleister Crowley, the black-magician with the staring eyes, were on show in the same room. Lady Killearn, ex-ambassador's wife, is near a red-complexioned barmaid from the Cathedral Hotel in Salisbury.

People politely pushed and edged past each other to gaze at a 12-foot painting called "The Little Concert," a group of Irish peasants painted entirely in grey.

Augustus John built his exhibition around this. He has been working on it for three years and postponed the exhibition several times until it was ready. It arrived, still wet, in the gallery a few days before the opening. It is too large and gloomy for any house smaller than a medium sized palace.