Lot Essay
Painted circa 1912, Augustus John chose to depict his wife and favoured model, Dorelia, propped against a Mediterranean tree in the Provençal landscape. Never before exhibited, T. W. Earp identifies Landscape with figure as ‘one of a long series of landscapes of wild nature which aroused attention from their earliest view. Following neither the meticulous attention to detail on the part of the pre-Raphaelites, nor the impressionist’s preoccupation with atmosphere, John’s treatment of landscape reveals properties of decorative charm without reducing the naturalness of the scene or weakening its wilder elements … beside its abstract qualities of energy and rhythm, this “Landscape with Figure,” while a study of a particular locality, is a synthesis of the Provençal scene’ (T. W. Earp, Augustus John, London, 1920, p. 55).