Art: Gypsy John

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One of the most ambitious paintings in the new show was The Little Concert, a huge (9 by 12 ft.) monochrome which he had delivered still wet to the galleries. The London Times thought that it was "full of recklessly mingled details." In the portraits, every detail counted. The elaborate flowered background lent a heavy air of luxury to his portrait of Massachusetts' onetime Governor Alvan T. Fuller. John had hesitated at first to accept that commission because of Fuller's part in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. ("Would his share in the tragedy invalidate him as a subject for my brush?") The question did not trouble him long.

John had gone ahead with the job, on the principle that "the portrait painter should allow no moral bias to affect his attitude to the sitter. The exploration of character should be left, with confidence, to the eye alone. Heaven knows what it may discover!" In Fuller, John's glaring eye discovered a well-fed man of conscience—dignified, amiable, and perhaps not particularly intelligent.

Goat's Milk & Whiskey. John's shaggy white mane and beard, bowing among the perfumed, chattering sea of well-dressed gallerygoers at his show, attracted more attention than his paintings. Roaring with good will, he played the lion for an hour, then ducked out to his favorite den, a pub. The time he has spent in pubs adds up to several of his three-score-&-ten years. For reasons of health John now ' alternates liquor in London with goat's milk in the country, but he much prefers the city drink.

His enemies call him a great old ham actor, a sort of Monty Woolley of art; his cronies bedeck his name with legends, most of which center around his prowess in pub and boudoir. They say that he is descended from gypsies and hint that he has lived a wild, free, gypsy life. His friends point out that he has always been an intense family man (he has had nine children), that he succeeded as a painter through hard labor, and never ceases struggling to improve his art (frequently overworking his larger pictures). A less friendly tale has it that he once dived from a cliff of his native Wales, struck his head on a rock under the water, and came up a spluttering genius. In fact, the stories told about John are as contradictory as the man himself.

For the past seven years, John has been exploring his own legend-spawning life, in an autobiography published piecemeal in Cyril Connolly's highbrow British magazine Horizon. The published fragments read sometimes like a sophisticated traveler's guidebook, sometimes like a recital of Important People I Have Known, sometimes like Major Hoople, sometimes like crumbs from Winston Churchill's table. But the mass of entertaining trivia is shot through with eloquence, wit, and an artist's imagery.

"Without premeditation," he begins, "and in an indifferent light, we set to work at one corner of the immense canvas, upon which, as it stretches into darkness, we are to weave with so little skill the tapestry of our lives. The picture will never be finished and is marred by many confused, threadbare or mutilated passages, but at last and at a certain distance a Pattern will emerge which, though not of our designing, is the key and signature of Personality."