An Afternoon in Dorset

Painted in 1914, An Afternoon in Dorset depicts two women sitting together within a rural idyll. A blue ribbon of water stretches across the landscape behind them, likely the Blue Pool in Wareham near John’s home at Alderney Manor. The sky spread with vibrant planes of pinks and purples, this tranquil scene appears to have been painted at sun set. Dorelia McNeill, the artist's second wife and most enduring subject, is seated to the right of the picture, sporting a spotted headscarf. She was to give birth to the artist's second daughter, Vivien John, the following year in March 1915. The figure to the left is Nora Brownsword, who had recently begun sitting for Augustus and who was to bear his first illegitimate child, Gwyneth Johnstone, who was born in June 1915 and was to be come an artist in her own right.

The waters of the Blue Pool, a former clay pit, would have been particularly attractive to John, as in certain weather conditions it emulated the glorious colours he had enjoyed in the South of France in preceding years. He had spent the summer of 1910 with Dorelia painting by the Étang de Berre, an inland lake on the Mediterranean coast. The present work, with its rich Post-Impressionist palette, reveals this new inspiration for John.

Commenting on the artist’s Modernist journey, C. Lewis Hind wrote: ‘John is the chief of the English representatives of the new movement in art. His artistic antennae have long drawn in the stimulation of the spirit that inspired the movement. He does not copy. In a flash he will suck the essence from a Cezanne landscape, from a Gauguin savage, inform the essence with his own personality, and lo! it is not imitation, it is new life’ (C. L. Hind, 1911, quoted in D. B. Haycock, Brilliant Destiny: The Age of Augustus John, London, 2023, p. 184.)

We are very grateful to Rebecca John for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.