David Boyd Haycock - A Crisis of Brilliance
© Stoke on Trent Art Gallery
John Currie
John Currie (c. 188-1914): The son of an Irish Navvy and
an English mother, John Currie grew up in the Staffordshire Potteries, where
he started his career painting porcelain before going on to the Royal College
of Art. He spent a term at the Slade in 1910, where he was one of the ‘Neo-Primitives’,
and he painted a group portrait that included Gertler, Nevinson, Wadsworth
and Nevinson.
As an ambitious outsider attempting to escape an impoverished background,
Currie had natural affinities with Gertler, and they became close friends,
sharing a single-minded artistic drive. One collector wrote of Currie’s ‘burning
eyes’, ‘uncouth speech’, rough manner and self confidence: ‘he
was simple and absorbed in his work - conscious of genius without being conceited,
full of himself but not egoistic’.
His love affair with a beautiful young model would, however, end in ruin. ‘He
was a great painter,’ his friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska later recalled ‘and
a magnificent fellow.’