ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an account of Augustus John's status as artist-outsider, an identity that was clearly assumed by Innes as well. It considers how the paintings John produced in Provence are intrinsically bound up with his own disaffection for modernity, coinciding with the discourses around health and degeneracy and with certain tendencies within early modernism. A Family Group transposes classical composition and gesture into modern rural imagery and results from a series of closely related works, the most immediate being a charcoal-and-wash drawing of a year earlier where the structure of the group is essentially the same. Memory was fundamental to the process of John's paintings, which are themselves visualizations of accumulated imagery. John's experience reveals the extent to which what has been described as the 'romantic cult of TB' associated with the decadence of the 1890s had diminished by 1910, replaced by those assertions of vigour and healthfulness in art and literature.
