Augustus Edwin John, O.M., R.A. (1878-1961)

The present work is a study for an etching called The Mulatto. Campbell Dodgson notes that the model was a man from Barbados and that the etching was made in Liverpool. In discussing John's first experiments in etchings he comments on his choice of models, 'They included also several portraits of his wife, and studies of drapers and other queer old men of Liverpool, and all the rest of those curious specimens of humanity - negress, mulatto, frock-coated bourgeois, gypsy, tramp - whom he studied with a penetrating eye and recorded in a careful, elaborate, and realistic manner, which comes nearer than any other modern English work to the style of the early pupils of Rembrandt' (see C. Dodgson, A Catalogue of Etchings by Augustus John 1901-1914, London, 1920, p. 6).