Augustus John Earns £9000

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26780, 25 May 1948, Page 2

Augustus John Earns £9OOO

By Lunchtime Special Correspondent LONDON, May 6. People have been queueing in Leicester square to buy pictures at lOOOgns each. Inside the entrance to the Leicester Galleries a tall, whitebearded 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 £IOOO. Nine were sold on opening day before lunch. Portraits of Winston Churchill and the late Aleister Crowley, the blackmagician 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. August John built his exhibition round this. He lias 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. But if anyone in New Zealand wants to buy it, he must be u r arned that it is too large and gloomy for any house smaller than a medium-sized palace.