Art: Gypsy John

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His detractors charge that John is as much of a "personality" as an artist. His champions retort that John's preoccupation with personality, his own as well as others', is perfectly natural and proper in a portrait painter. His own exuberant, self-assertive nature looms large in his work; and some of his portraits are raised above the potboiler class only by the force of his style. John's dashing brush flourishes are as distinctive as another man's handwriting. Wyndham Lewis once described him as a man of action "into whose hand the fairies stuck a brush instead of a sword."

Golden Earrings. The beginning corner of the canvas of John's life was a town called Tenby, on the Welsh coast. His father was no gypsy, but a prosperous and eminently proper lawyer, who, John coolly recalls, "loved children, provided of course they were legitimate and well-behaved." His father appears frequently and ambiguously in John's autobiography. Having been in his own turn a father and a grandfather, John inclines to apologize for his own filial rebellions. His father's "pious admonitions," John confesses, "were met by indifference or even hostility. To this perverse and refractory spirit must be attributed many of my shortcomings and much of the ill-fortune which has befallen me in life. I appear ... to have perpetuated, only in a reverse sense, the principles laid down for my guidance as a child . . . above all, the supreme doctrine of the Value of Money . . . left me unmoved."

When John insisted on going to art school, his father dubiously packed him off with a tiny allowance and a heavy load of advice. "Be a Michelangelo if you like," the elder John said solemnly, "but first make your living." Out of sight of home, John grew a beard, took to parting his russet hair in the middle and wearing golden earrings. "In spite of a superficial appearance of negligence," he later explained, "my mode of dress was not unstudied and had a style of its own." He has since discarded the earrings, but he wears even his black Homburg with a rakish air.

Twice married, John first carried his growing family about with him in a caravan. He made a habit of dropping in on gypsy encampments, and learned some gypsy dialects. The gypsies represented everything .his father had tried to warn him against, and he devotes more space in his autobiography to happy memories of the gypsies than to his own children, with whom he was rather strict.

Occasional Grunts. Being painted by John can be a little unnerving. For a while, he impales his sitter firmly with piercing blue eyes, grunting occasionally and barely touching the canvas. As the idea of the painting takes shape in his mind, his mood lightens and he may even begin to chat as he slashes away at the canvas. But if things go too swiftly and too well, he worries ("I'm nothing but a bloody, glib—"), and embarks on an endless and exhausting series of changes which may well ruin the picture.