Art: Gypsy John

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For the first time in a decade, Britain's most durable top-rank painter was having a one-man show. On opening day, the doors of London's little Leicester Galleries had parted promptly at 10 o'clock and the corduroy-jacketed clique of fellow artists hurried in for a long, appraising look. If anyone came with doubts, there was colorful evidence on every side that Augustus Edwin John's considerable gifts are still as full-blown and as fresh as they were when he gave his first exhibition, 49 years ago.

To the more militant admirers of modern art, there is something baffling in John's brilliance: his painting is a whole lifetime behind the times. For half a century now, he has been working right across the Channel from Picasso and Matisse, and yet he has never been swayed an inch by the powerful influence of those moderns' magnetic brushes.

Britain's conservative Royal Academicians (of whom John is one) also find him confusingly out of step. He is as fashionable as John Singer Sargent once was, and his portraits come high (£1,000 and up); but he gets along fine without Sargent's dramatic slickness. What's more, his art, admittedly academic, has enough sparkle to put the stuffy Academicians to shame. At 70, Augustus John and his works are living proof that it makes very little difference what "school" a really good artist belongs to.

John owes some allegiance to that once terrible fellow, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He admits that, when he was an art student, Whistler "enslaved" him. Like Whistler, John takes all painting for his province, and paints as he pleases. But the pictures that have brought him fame & fortune are not landscapes and murals but portraits. The gallery of John's sitters is a contemporary gallery of Britain's great ones: from Thomas Hardy to Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth. (It also includes some rich Americans and some spectacular unknowns, such as a haughty-looking farmer and a deep-eyed Jamaica girl named Aminta.)

A Title for Everybody. By teatime on opening day, the artists had drifted away and the gallery had begun to fill up with John's rich and fashionable friends. "Augustus is no snob," one of his more feline cronies once remarked. "He'd like everybody to have a title." Queen Elizabeth had had a private showing two days earlier (her wartime sittings for John were interrupted by a German bomb; she is reported to think that she has taken on a bit too much weight to have the portrait continued).

The best of the portraits looked as if they had been dashed on to the canvas in an hour apiece; yet many of them had the kind of intensity that persists in the mind's eye for a lifetime. John's view of Poet Dylan Thomas, with the poet's chubby face and curly hair, hits a high pitch of adolescent sensuality, freshness and innocence; it might well outlast Thomas' own vivid verse.