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Lloyd-Morgan came to examine the holograph, she saw that a corner of the letter had been torn and that ‘kplaas 5’ or ‘kplaats 5’ was not the whole address. It was now a matter of searching for a plaats the previous syllable of which ended with a k. There were three such addresses in Bruges: Jan van Eyckplaats 5, for which the records were destroyed by fire in the 1940s; Memlinckplaats 5 (now Woensdagmarkt) which was a convent occupied by five nuns; and Parkplaats 5 which had no identifiable occupants. So in this edition of my biography Leonard fades away more deeply unremembered, which is aesthetically fitting if bibliographically unsatisfactory. ‘It would be ironical if a pile of Leonard’s paintings were one day discovered in a barn and found to be great masterpieces!’ Romilly John had written to me. Unfortunately I have been unable to find any artist of the right period and nationality with such a name and initial. So Romilly’s discovery remains to be made.
    Altogether I worked for some eighty hours in the Department of Manuscripts and Records at Aberystwyth quarrying out new material. There also turned out to be John correspondence I had not seen first time round at the Royal Academy of Arts, University of Reading Library, University of Liverpool Library, BBC Written Archives Centre, as well as in two private collections. I had kept, in desultory fashion, a file in which I placed, as if for oblivion, letters from readers with corrections and additions. This I retrieved from the dark and put to use. Finally I brought myself up to date by reading those publications on Gwen and Augustus John and their contemporaries that had appeared over the last twenty years.
    There is much that is new.
    In 1974 Caspar and Romilly John had consulted lawyers about some aspects of my typescript and requested me to remove passages that might have made the family liable to financial penalties. Caspar wrote to thank me for ‘so readily, if so reluctantly’ agreeing to this excision. ‘We are both sorry to have had to ask you to do this, but in view of the enclosed lawyer’s letter we had small option.’ That legal threat has now lapsed with time, and I have restored my original account of, for example, how Augustus John was awarded the Order of Merit.
    After drastic cutting, the biography remains approximately the same length. There are new pages on Augustus John’s family, on Gwen John and their Slade School friends; new information concerning artists, such as Henry Lamb and Wyndham Lewis, who played significant roles in his life, and other supporting characters – for example Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, and the great gypsy scholar John Sampson – all of which has enabled me to improve the continuity of the narrative. That narrative is cast as comedy: romantic comedy, domestic comedy, the comedy of morals and of manners, absurdist comedy, black comedy, tragi-comedy.
    Some papers I saw twenty-five years ago have disappeared but more have risen to the surface, and this shifting archaeology of sources has inevitably altered John’s place in the artistic landscape. There are new passages about some of his pictures and those, from W. B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey to the Marchesa Casati, Eve Fleming, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Madame Suggia, who sat for his portraits.
    John’s artistic reputation, once so high, has plummeted. In place of ‘the last of the great masters’ who worked directly from life in the manner of Rembrandt, Tiepolo or Watteau, stands a banal and flashy manufacturer of pastiches and the simulacra of genuine masterworks. The famously gifted painter who led the revolutionary artists in Britain into the twentieth century has by the end of the century retrospectively dwindled to an inferior talent which in old age grew more obviously vulgar and sentimental.
    Neither judgement is definitive. John’s work, blown here and there by contemporary criticism and conventional art history, appeared to fall off the map