The Mountain That Had to Be Painted

THUNDER RUMBLES

A century ago, the most famous and controversial artist in Britain

fled London to paint the wilderness of North Wales.

His name was Augustus John.

Bohemian, boozer, wannabe gypsy and a man who gave up doing this

to do this.

John was a perfectly good draughtsman and he was wasting his talent on this. Get on and paint!

John had fallen under the influence of a young genius

and fellow Welshman James Dickson Innes,

and unknown painter who loved the mountains so much

it was literally killing him.

He was committing slow suicide, people said.

He knew he was ill, he shouldn't drink, he shouldn't live a life of dissipation, but he did.

THUNDER BOOMS

Their canvas was the Arenig Valley in North Wales,

a sliver of craggy, swirling peaks and haunting plateaux east of Snowdonia.

Here, despite living the lives of itinerants,

drinking, fighting and womanising,

they still found time to paint a series of delirious landscapes.

In little more than two years, John and Innes would reinvent British landscape painting.

Wales had never been painted like this before.

It was an absolute revelation and probably a sensation.

Even today, a century later,

their vision draws followers to the mountain to unravel their story.

A story which would drag British art kicking and screaming

into the 20th century.

100 years ago, British painting, more often than not, looked like this

or this or this.

It was an idealised vision of the past.

And the public lapped it up.

In 1910, however, everything changed.

The catalyst was an exhibition in London of European art.

Art which up until then had made little impact here.

Famously called the Post-Impressionists, four of them,

Seurat, Van Gogh,

Gaugin and Cezanne,

were already dead.

Yet their work and that of others caused an sensation.

Some attacked the paintings as childish and crude.

But others saw in them the beginning of a new age.

In 1910, the British finally noticed modern painting.

But was modern painting already here?

THUNDER RUMBLES

A few months before the exhibition,

a young painter had been wandering the remote hills of North Wales.

Born in 1887,

James Dickson Innes was the son of an engineer from Llanelli.

At 19, he'd left Wales to study art in London.

Now, four years later,

he'd come home.

Innes had been wandering round for three or four days,

staggering round, sleeping out in the open.

He came off the moor. His long black coat,

his black hat, his sodden boots.

Can you imagine the figure that he must have painted

as he walked down? Sad, desolate, in a terrible state.

He had been looking for something to paint...

..and he'd eventually found it.

It was a mountain.

And that mountain was Arenig.

Arenig Fawr, a brooding 500-million-year-old edifice

on the edge of Snowdonia.

Below its twin peaks, Innes had stumbled across the most beautiful landscape he'd ever seen.

A landscape he was now desperate to paint

in a new and radical way.

Art historian Eric Rowan has come to see just how radical Innes was.

He believes that even before the 1910 show in London,

Innes was producing work which gave the French Post-Impressionists a serious run for their money.

His proof is one of Innes's first North Wales paintings,

The Waterfall.

Extraordinary.

Extraordinary. I've never seen this before.

It's quite amazing to actually handle it

because I've only seen it in black and white illustrations.

And it's so exciting.

I think this is a remarkable picture. It was painted by Innes

in the same year as the Post-Impressionist exhibition in London

but beforehand, so he hadn't see the exhibition.

What marks it out as what I would define as Post-Impressionist

is that you can detect the origins of Impressionism

but it's left that behind now, it's going on towards abstraction where it's the formal elements,

the things that make up the picture are more important than representing a scene.

The clouds are almost as solid as the mountains, almost sculptural, and this is a watercolour.

I think it's the most marvellous painting and it's true Post-Impressionism.

When I'm out here, I feel tremendous. I feel free.

I feel inspired.

And I need to come here.

I need this space.

In the valley below Arenig Fawr,

artist Keith Bowen is looking for the exact spot

where Innes created The Waterfall.

This is the place. This is it.

This is fantastic.

Falling water, rocks.

Everybody responds to it.

The rocks just down in the front there, there they are, leaning,

and he would've taken the force of the water against the static of the rocks.

He wasn't trying to copy the thing photographically,

but what he did do was get the elements from this and made something else of it.

To come to the place,

you get the buzz, you get the thing, the catalyst that sparked Innes off.

He must have been so excited.

Brilliant.

It's a good one.

At 23, JD Innes had found himself seduced by the beauty of North Wales.

Now he needed to tell someone.

150 miles away in London, the man he told

was fellow artist Augustus John.

And here he is, the monster. If you are above him...

Well, no, actually, if you were below him, he's very fierce.

Very fierce. A sort of bear.

But when you come above him,

he's more like a teddy bear.

John and Innes had met in 1906

at London's Slade School of Art.

Innes, the brilliant student who'd barely enrolled before being hired as a teacher.

Augustus, nine years his elder, the old Slade boy made good.

Augustus John was one of the most gifted, notorious,

controversial, famous people in the country, an early celebrity.

But he was considered beyond the pale, really,

by conventional people.

His life in the early 1900s

was an agitated tale of two cities, Paris and London,

and two wives, one Ida, his legitimate wife,

and then his common-law wife, Dorelia.

That is Ida

and that is Dorelia in profile looking at her.

Both of them were to have his children,

several children. He lost count. And so did they, really.

John's wife Ida would grown to accept Dorelia and the other lovers.

"Men must play," she wrote, "and women must weep".

Look at this drawing of Dorelia.

It says strong, it says tender,

it's well observed, it's unsentimental.

You really have caught her there.

John's early draughtsmanship was really quite wonderful.

John Singer Sargent, the American painter,

said that he hadn't seen anything better than this since the Italian Renaissance.

John's instinctive drawing skills

had received universal praise.

But was art merely a vehicle for technical ability?

Neither he nor Innes thought so.

Two years before stumbling across Arenig Fawr,

Innes had visited Collioure in the South of France.

It was 1908 and Innes had come to experience

the work of one of France's most exciting artists, Henri Matisse.

Matisse was entranced by the Mediterranean's vibrant light and colour.

Critics called him La Fauve, the wild beast,

and his style became known as Fauvism.

Innes immediately began painting Collioure himself.

Seduced by Fauvism, he ignored the normal rules of painting,

allowing his landscapes to reflect what he felt, not what he saw.

Not wanting to miss out, Augustus John also booked a painting holiday in France.

Like Innes, his French landscapes also stuck two fingers up at the British art establishment.

He had, it seemed, abandoned his God-given talent for drawing.

But what would the art critics back home make of it all?

I got this painting early on

and I was very keen to get it because it shows Augustus John in France, this is Martigues.

When paintings such as this were first shown by John, and by Innes, too,

they were considered just daubs. What were the artists doing?

They haven't painted it properly. Where was the detail? It didn't come together.

It was a glimpse of something. It was like the first draft of something. Get on and paint!

They were thought to be provoking everybody.

They were thought sometimes to be rather immoral, inartistic, strange.

And for somebody like John to be wasting his talent,

he was a perfectly good draughtsman and he was wasting his talent on this.

The English were very insular.

They didn't want to know what was happening across the channel.

John was more brave, more curious.

And when he came back from France, he was a different sort of painter.

In 1910, Innes also returned a different man.

Back home in Wales, he'd found a vision he could call his own.

But before he could start painting it, he needed a place to stay.

At the foot of Arenig, he found the Rhyd-y-Fen Hotel.

Today, it's a farmhouse where Geraint and Sharon Jones live with their two boys.

It hasn't changed much really, has it?

No, but the sign's gone. Is the dairy there?

No, there wasn't a dairy built there at that time.

It wasn't long before Innes persuaded Augustus to join him at Rhyd-y-Fen.

Now, for the first time, the two of them could paint together.

By day, they painted bold and primitive landscapes,

drawing on the lessons of France to reinvent the Welsh mountains.

By night, they drank themselves stupid in the hotel bar.

They used to get the beer from the cellar, bring it round

and they used to serve it through the window.

That window wasn't there. It was like a hatch thing.

So just think, Augustus John and JD Innes,

they've been sitting in there.

They would've sat in there having a drink with their friends.

It's hard imagining Rhyd-y-Fen being a hotel. I can't imagine it.

There's somewhere else John and Innes would've sat.

Here's the old toilet.

If you look down here,

you can see there's a stream running.

-It's quite cosy.

-I wouldn't like to come out here in the winter

because it might be cold

-and I wouldn't like to.

-And your privates might catch a cold.

Do you think we should go and have a look? Open the gate.

Go through the gate.

Innes and John's love of drinking was eclipsed only by their passion for Arenig.

-Look at the colours. It is the colours we see today?

-No. Is it in winter?

-I think so. What colour is this?

-White.

-Mm.

-Like snow.

That's the old bridge, which would've been over there.

As individuals, the two men couldn't have been more different.

John was a wealthy celebrity in the prime of life.

Innes, still in his early 20s, was completely unknown.

-It's a nice picture. Do you like it?

-Yes.

This is the only photograph which exists of him.

There's no biography and only a handful of letters survive.

But here in Cardiff, there's something else.

It's a portrait of James Dickson Innes by Augustus John.

And Innes is leaning on his elbow in such a debonair way

and he's looking rather intense,

like he's almost about to address you.

And he's wearing the clothes that are very distinctive.

Augustus John said Innes dressed with a distinction that owed nothing to the rules of fashion.

And he has a black Quaker hat, a cadaverous cast of features

and always the same dark suit and a bright scarf

and apparently he always had a cane.

It feels like every aspect of Innes's personality in his features has been intensified

in the way that you find in many of Augustus John's portraits.

There's a very strong sense of the person there.

I think John was someone who drew particular qualities from the people he met

and he saw in Innes a sort of childlike vision.

He called him an intellectual virgin, which is not necessarily very complimentary,

but he felt Innes had this direct connection

with the landscape, particularly of Wales.

And to someone like Augustus, who was perhaps always looking for excitement and diversion,

that would've been a very attractive quality.

I think the landscape of Wales has an eternal mystery to me.

It's very similar to the mystery of painting.

It doesn't have a definite image.

And I suppose I've associated myself with this landscape for such a long time now,

I feel totally immersed in it.

Painter Iwan Gwyn Parry has come to Arenig to find out for himself

how John and Innes worked.

I saw the paintings of Arenig by John and Innes 20 years ago when I was a student

and I was taken back by them and surprised equally.

I was completely taken back by the fact that they were free of the constraints

of Victorian academic painting.

And they felt fresh and alive

and I suppose it's paved the way for generations of painters

to express their feelings and thoughts

in a manner which is vigorous

rather than a sombre, austere quality

which a lot of Welsh landscape is depicted as.

And John and Innes broke free of those constraints

and liberated the Welsh landscape pictorially.

Iwan wants to paint the mountain just as Innes and John did 100 years ago.

First though, he must find the perfect spot.

The idea of trying to paint this is an undertaking

because there's not one definite angle that one could approach it.

Personally, for me,

I'm kind of interested in so many aspects of the mountain here,

from the way the weather constantly changes direction

and equally the way the light suddenly illuminate a piece of the mountain which has remained hidden.

It'll be a challenge indeed.

DOGS BARK

Tiring of hotel life, in the spring of 1911,

Innes and John decided to rent a cottage.

Crouching at the base of Arenig, it was called Nant Ddu.

BOTH: Whoa!

THEY SPEAK WELSH

John brought Dorelia and the children to stay,

as well as a rag-bag of friends and acquaintances.

One of them was the social butterfly Euphemia Lamb.

They were both married, yet Euphemia let John first draw her

and then bed her before quickly moving on to a new lover, Innes.

She was a great romancer, an adventurous spirit,

very eccentric and beautiful.

Well, this was irresistible.

And certainly, I think,

the most important man in her life became Innes. That is what I think.

I don't think that John and he were rivals over her.

She was not an exclusive sort of person, you know.

Totally besotted, Innes has painted his own portrait of Euphemia

in the kitchen at Nant Ddu.

For him, capturing the human form had never been a strong point.

Whilst John easily adapted his drawing skills

to create delicate impressions of Dorelia,

Innes's figures, charming though they are,

sometimes sit strangely in the landscape.

His childlike vision of Augustus and family does, however, reveal one thing.

John's passion for gypsies.

John felt at home with the Welsh Romanies.

To him, they represented the wild landscape in human form.

This intense self-portrait suggests it was a wildness he aspired to.

Augustus owned several gypsy caravans,

lovingly decorating them with his own family

who became accessories in a Romany fantasy.

This, as you can see, is the considerable presence that John has.

He loved the gypsy life.

It was something exotic.

He spent a lot of his time out of doors, on the road,

free from encumbrances.

Here is a letter that he wrote

and there is a drawing at the top

which expresses the sort of open-air life he liked,

moving from place to place, meeting new people and then leaving them.

It was something that...

He had been warned as a child

never to speak to the gypsies

or he would be kidnapped.

He longed to be kidnapped, to escape,

and here he was doing it. He'd achieved what he'd dreamt of doing as a child.

Close to Arenig, at the White Lion in Bala,

John would drink and fight with the gypsies.

Introductions were made by his close friend John Samson.

Samson had spent years studying the Romanies

and he too had a house near Arenig.

This is the visitors' book

from John Samson's home in North Wales.

We've got a signature here

of Augustus John, March 12th 1911,

of Mr JD Innes, March 12th 1911.

And here is a drawing, a self-portrait of Augustus.

Absolutely incredible.

The partying, the dancing, the drinking that's going on

must have been instigated by this connection with Samson.

And, of course, Innes would revel in it.

When John Samson died...

..the gypsies came in mass from all over the country.

The ceremony with full Romany ritual

was conducted by Mr Augustus John, RA,

who wore a light slouch hat and a red and white muffler.

Mr Augustus John delivered the funeral oration

with a cigarette still smouldering between his fingers.

I remember him at his marvellous home, Fryern Court, near the New Forest.

He was an old man with a rather terrifying appearance to a small child.

And very deaf, so it was difficult to have a conversation with him.

In fact, one didn't have a conversation.

You've had the need to follow beauty wherever you've struck it, I suspect.

Well, isn't that my profession as an artist?

You've got to get excited before you can do anything.

And beauty is a great exciter.

There's an inconsistency that I'm interested to ask you about,

because one of the things that is known about you

is the long stability and happiness of your family life

and yet, at the same time, you've written candidly about many of these adventures that are well known.

-And yet it's also quite clear...

-It's not inconsistency.

-It's not?

-Tell me why not.

-I wouldn't know.

How much have women really meant to you in your life?

Certainly, I'm interested in women.

-In beauty primarily or in love?

-I don't...

Beauty, I should think. If it's beauty, it's love, in my case.

He was not, in his old age, a very happy man.

I wish I'd known Augustus as a young man, not as a grumpy old man.

John's granddaughter Rebecca has come to Arenig to follow in his footsteps

and search out the places where he painted.

Unlike Innes, John liked to use the landscape as a background,

placing his models centre stage.

His lover Dorelia appears in many such works.

But like Innes, he was still breaking the time-honoured rules of British painting.

Both worked quickly

and they worked outside,

completing a landscape in as little as an hour.

Look at that. That is exactly...

..what we're looking at.

It's even the same colouring. It's all fairly cursory.

-A few blobs for sheep.

-SHE LAUGHS

In Augustus's landscapes,

he paints the rushes and the gorse bushes and sort of dots and dashes.

He's more concerned with the bigger picture.

But this is definitely the spot.

Fascinating.

Well, this is simply given the title Welsh Mountains and we don't know where it is.

But this reservoir surely gives you a clue.

It does. This track goes down to Llandecwyn at the bottom

-where the church is.

-I know Llandecwyn, yes.

-Up there.

And as for Lily at Tanygrisiau...

-Tanygrisiau.

-Under the stairs.

-You think this is...

-That's the Moelwyn there

and this is where... There's a dam there now.

-And this girl came from the East End of London.

-THEY LAUGH

She came a long way.

There's a wonderful story about her.

A poor girl from London of classic proportions who had never travelled beyond the city.

And she recognised the sheep because she'd seen them in Hyde Park.

THEY LAUGH

John wasn't alone in enjoying the company of young women.

Innes also drafted in models

to paint and seduce.

He liked gypsy girls, too,

famously chasing after one as she left Arenig for new pastures.

He never caught her.

Collapsing with exhaustion, Innes instead had to be rescued by a passer-by.

He should've known better.

Euphemia was his one true love.

But not only was their affair now breaking down, so was he.

Innes had contracted tuberculosis.

And he was dying.

So, this is the pulpit room and here is the James Dickson Innes.

I bought it in the 1980s

and it's rather a lovely story, I think.

It was on sale at Christie's in South Kensington

and this painting was actually on the cover of the catalogue

and the painting failed to meet its reserve.

When the sale was over, I asked Christie's who had bought it

and they said it had been bought in,

but they told the owner that we were very interested in it

and she let us have it for £2,500,

which was very generous of her,

and she gave us six months to pay.

I imagine that it was probably a bit shocking at the time.

These are revolutionary colours, aren't they, for 1911 in Britain.

It looks as though it's done quite quickly. You can see the board, particularly underneath the blue.

And the subject itself is fiendishly difficult to paint.

So you have to enjoy it for the fact that it was being tackled in an entirely new way.

The way we came to acquire it also has great poignancy.

When I sent the final cheque in to the previous owner,

the following morning, her husband told us that she'd died the day before.

She never told us that she was ill

and when you think that Innes, when he was painting it,

was also terminally ill, there is sadly

an extraordinary parallel.

Below Arenig Fawr, Iwan Gwyn Parry has begun painting.

Like Innes and John, he's working in oil on wood panel.

But with the sun setting fast,

he has little more than an hour to finish his landscape.

One could copy the mountain, but Matisse famously said

that exactitude is not necessarily truth

and I subscribe to that school of thinking, really.

Innes radically reinvented the mountain

and painted it not through a stylised academic tradition

but through this newly-found language of personal expression.

A painting's a lot more than a place.

It's a place within one's self, a place in the mind,

and I think he's translated that through Arenig.

But I'm sure he sat and gazed in wonderment at this spectacle

and wrestled with himself and wrestled with a painting

which is the spirit of a human being

in relationship to a sense of place.

The light is fading beautifully.

I have perhaps half an hour to resolve this

and that's the end of the painting.

And whatever it looks like in half an hour, that will be the final work.

Yes, this is the gentleman called JD Innes.

Looks a handsome fellow there, doesn't he?

-Yes.

-Look at his clothes. What kind of clothes are they?

-Posh, expensive.

-You think so?

-Really posh. Truly posh.

And this is a picture of his girlfriend, a lady called Euphemia.

-And...

-That's a name you don't hear every day.

And this lady was the love of his life.

And the story goes that she was JD Innes's girlfriend

but she didn't want to carry on being his girlfriend

and he was so heartbroken that he gathered all the letters she'd sent to him,

put them in a casket and took them up Arenig Fawr and buried them

cos he was so upset.

-What do you think of that story?

-It's very sad, though.

-Mm.

-Mm.

-I think he was very upset.

The Jones boys, Oisin and Hugh,

are keen to know if the myth of Euphemia's casket is true.

And that means climbing Arenig.

At the top, there's no sign of a casket.

But there is something else.

BOTH: In memory of the crew of the Flying Fortress

which crashed on the Arenig 4th August 1943.

During the Second World War,

an American bomber crew lost their bearings on a night mission over Wales.

All 12 on board died

when the aircraft smashed into the top of Arenig Fawr,

apparently slicing off one of its peaks.

If Euphemia's casket was here,

it would've been vaporised in a fireball of molten aluminium.

When we were exploring in the rocks over there,

we found these old pieces of aluminium,

little pieces of the aeroplane that crashed here.

When the aeroplane crashed, it burst into flames

and the aluminium turned into these.

John later said that burying the letters

was Innes's way of embracing the mountain.

In Innes's head, Arenig and Euphemia were the same thing.

This desire to connect with the wilderness was something Augustus John perfectly understood.

For him too, the landscape was everything.

This is a painting called Llyn Treweryn by Augustus John

and it shows a view looking west from Arenig,

looking towards the Moelwyn Mountains, which is probably that peak there in the distance,

and I think it's a beautiful painting. I think it's one of John's best. It's certainly my favourite

because there's no clutter, there's no trying to impress anybody,

it's a very simple response to his home country, to his native land.

Quite subtle touches, the warm blue of the sky reflecting in the warm blue of the lake,

and then there's the cold blue of the mountain, that funny peak in the distance, which is quite stylised.

I think he just was good at landscapes.

He didn't have to do these big symbolic figures that he was painting beforehand

which ranked him as a symbolist,

and they had to have some sort of enigmatic content.

This was just a response to his own country and it was simple painting.

Very beautiful. Very much catches the spirit of the place.

You just feel you want to go there and look for it.

Augustus John's granddaughter Rebecca

first came looking for Llyn Treweryn ten years ago.

In the distance is this very defined... It looks like a pyramid.

Rebecca's hoping that one of the locals can spot the pyramid-shaped mountain from John's picture.

There is it. Come on. You'll see it.

Can you see it, to the right of the left-hand-most pylon?

See a little... You used to see far more, but the trees have grown up.

-I know.

-Trees are...

-Bit of a nuisance, aren't they?

-They are in a way, yes.

-This is Cwm Prysor.

-Cwm Prysor, yeah.

-There's the gate you climbed over.

-Yes.

It's jammed shut to stop sheep getting out.

My father remembers coming to this station aged nine

and he said that the station mistress would always put out some hot lardy cakes from the oven.

-Well, you do.

-He's never forgotten.

-It's right in the wilds

and when people come visiting, they're always very welcome.

When I came here ten years ago,

I felt a tremendous feeling of the past,

of a century ago.

You know, my grandfather had stood here, painted this not brilliant painting, actually, I don't think,

and my father was here as a child and...

..you get this sense of... time staying still.

Yes, I was overwhelmed, to be honest.

There are three things an artist needs.

His eye,

his hand

and his heart.

And two won't do.

This is my favourite painting.

Innes's Arenig Fawr of 1911.

When I first saw it,

it just bowled me over.

It's strange. It's a tiny little panel

and half the picture is the sky, the huge cumulus clouds that come here in the spring.

It's got the Fauvish brush mark and the stroke.

Look at the marks around there.

That's pure Fauvism. That's where that comes from.

Even these little dots here. There must have been Welsh black cattle down there at the time.

The impact, for me, was he's doing something with something I know about, somewhere I've been,

and he's making something of it

and I think that was the trigger.

It's never wavered.

After a little over two years in North Wales,

Innes and John had produced hundreds of paintings.

Both passionately believed in what they were doing.

The question was, would anyone else?

In February 1913, New York City played host to a major event in the history of art.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art

introduced America to the same group of European artists

who'd wowed London three years earlier.

Men like Picasso,

Seurat

and Van Gogh.

But also two new names,

James Dickson Innes...

..and Augustus John.

For Innes in particular, New York was a triumph.

Three years before, he was unknown, even in England.

Now he stood shoulder to shoulder with some of the world's greatest artists.

But his euphoria was short-lived.

Innes had repeatedly ignored doctors' orders to stay off the mountain

and the booze.

Now the tuberculosis was tightening its grip on his life.

I think the last light is clearly a metaphor in his paintings,

as if he was staring into his mortality, really.

And I think his escapism was lost

once the ray of sunshine would disappear.

Every time I've looked at the landscape,

I see something completely different

and I realise that it's quite a haunting sight

to just stare at the top of an ancient mountain

hoping that you could capture something.

So I'm trying to come up with inventive solutions to explain the space across the plateau here.

I'm trying to find inventive solutions to deal with the changes of light.

So the painting's constantly in shift.

Innes painted with confidence and verve when he was up here.

It's a very reflective period in his life

where I think he saw enlightenment and meaning in this particular place

and his paintings, for me, are not just of this topography,

they're metaphors for his state of mind.

Yes, and I think... I think I've concluded the image now.

It's a thrill if Innes knew we were still discussing him

and his work was taken seriously, not just the story of him coming here,

but his paintings, his magnificent body of work that he's left.

Six months after triumph in New York, Innes was close to death.

In one of his final paintings, the Crucifixion,

he embraces a classical subject for the first time.

Staging his own death in front of the mountain he loved.

There was a very moving moment when Augustus took Euphemia Lamb

to see Innes for the last time.

This tortuous love affair he'd had with her,

the letters that he'd buried on the summit of Arenig Fawr in the silver casket.

John said what a sad meeting it was

and he left them alone for a while

but he did say how sad it all was.

And a tragic end.

Within a month, August 22nd 1914,

Innes died of tuberculosis.

But he left a body of work

that was done in an absolute flame of passion.

Just two and a half years of intense creative activity.

And that, I think, is the only way he knew how to live.

He was a man in a hurry.

And sadly it was all over for him.

JD Innes was 27 when he died.

Together with Augustus John, he flew the flag,

and it was a Welsh flag, for British Post-Impressionism.

I suppose, in a way, Innes could be compared with modern superstars like James Dean.

He lived a rather quick life,

he was reckless with his health,

he was committing slow suicide, people said.

He knew he was ill, he knew he shouldn't drink, he shouldn't live a life of dissipation, but he did.

And that's the romantic image that appeals to me.

And he kept on painting till he couldn't paint any longer.

I admire him for that. I think that's better than lingering on with a fading reputation.

Augustus John would outlive JD Innes by 46 years.

But he largely abandoned landscapes,

settling comfortably into the role of portrait painter to the stars.

Do you consider that you are now accepted by the art establishment in this country as being a master,

or do you think you're still regarded as being rather a wild man of art?

I think I've got a very fishy reputation.

-In what respect?

-As a painter.

-Why fishy?

-Because I'm out of date.

Many believe that Wales was Augustus John's finest hour

and Innes his inspiration.

John said this was Innes's sacred mountain.

He also said that the mountain was his spiritual home.

I find that brief period when they are both working together

is almost a school of their own, they're equal.

They had different strengths. They were not competitors.

I don't think you can say

that either led the other. They both gained from the other.

It's a very harmonious combination of two talents.

I personally prefer Innes's interpretations of the mountain.

I prefer his colour and he's certainly more decorative with his use of paint

and somehow they're more fantastical

and more imaginative and more appealing somehow.

Not so real. I mean, Augustus's landscapes are more the same colour,

but Innes had quite a different approach

and I do prefer Innes's paintings of Arenig, yes.

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