FROM THE PUBLISHER

Part One Of Two Parts

Few biographers have achieved the stature of Michael Holroyd, whose studies of George Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey have met with world wide acclaim. Here, in the light of entirely new evidence, he revises his life of the British painter, Augustus John. The archetypal rebel artist and bohemian, this Welshman began as an admirer of Pablo Picasso and later became a fashionable portrait-painter of celebrities like George Bernard Shaw, T. E. Lawrence, and Tallulah Bankhead. But throughout his errant life, it was a group of women who kept his worst impulses at bay: his tragic wife, Ida; his model and muse, Dorelia; and his mysterious sister, Gwen. Vastly entertaining and affecting, Michael Holroyd's Augustus John is finally a seductive tale about the man who changed the direction of British art in the twentieth century.