Famous people of West Wales

By 1910, Virginia Woolf was writing that the era of John Singer Sargent was over and "the age of Augustus John was dawning." He superseded Sargent as Britain's most fashionable portrait painter, capturing the likenesses of Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, T.E. Lawrence, James Joyce and Guilhermina Suggia — portraits renowned for their psychological penetration and occasional cruelty. Lord Leverhulme was so upset by his portrait that he cut out his own head and locked it in a vault.

From around 1910 he made regular painting expeditions into north Wales with his friend James Dickson Innes, working in the Arenig valley in Snowdonia and producing some of the finest landscape work of his career. This period was later the subject of a BBC documentary, The Mountain That Had to Be Painted (2011).

During the First World War he was attached to the Canadian forces as an official war artist, producing memorable portraits of infantrymen. He was the only officer in the British Army, apart from the King, permitted to wear a beard. He was made a Royal Academician in 1928, awarded the Order of Merit by George VI in 1942, and given the Freedom of the Town of Tenby in 1959.

His later career was marked by a decline that even his granddaughter Rebecca John acknowledged frankly in 2024 — too many society portraits, too much drink. But the early work, particularly the drawings and the pre-war oils, remains extraordinary. He wrote two volumes of autobiography: Chiaroscuro (1952) and Finishing Touches (1964, posthumously). He died at Fordingbridge, Hampshire on 31 October 1961, aged 83. His papers are held at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

White Ladder spent 151 weeks on the UK Albums Chart, eventually reaching number one two and a half years after its original release. It became the fifth best-selling album of the 2000s in the UK and was ranked the tenth best-selling album of the 21st century in the UK in 2019. The follow-up, A New Day at Midnight (2002), went straight to number one, famously beating Pop Idol runner-up Gareth Gates to the top spot and selling 150,000 copies in its first week.

Gray has continued to record prolifically — Life in Slow Motion (2005), Draw the Line (2009), Foundling (2010), Mutineers (2014), Gold in a Brass Age (2019), Skellig (2021), Dear Life (2025) and Nightjar (2026) — a body of work that has consistently rewarded listeners who value craftsmanship and emotional depth over trend-chasing. He has received four Brit Award nominations, including two for Best British Male. He is the brother-in-law of Phil Hartnoll of Orbital, with whom he collaborated on the 2001 single Illuminate.

He married his wife Olivia in Los Angeles in 1993 and has two daughters, Ivy and Florence — the latter a musician who has appeared on his recent recordings. He lives in Hampstead, London. The Sloop Inn in Porthgain, Pembrokeshire, remains, by his own reckoning, the best pub in the world.

If you'd like to visit the family shop, Window on Wales they're on Main Street in Solva and Nun Street, St Davids, Haverfodwest