Considered by John Singer Sargent to be the best British draughtsman since the Renaissance, Augustus John was the first of the British ‘Post-Impressionists’. Such was his importance that Virginia Woolf declared that by 1908 ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ and Wyndham Lewis would dub the ten years leading up to 1914 ‘the Augustan decade’. Handsome, unconventional and full of brilliant promise and Bohemian spirit, John was the man almost every young British art student wanted to emulate. This book reveals why, telling his extraordinary story from his birth in south Wales in 1878 through to the end of his youth in the closing stages of the First World War.