John Currie (c. 1884 – 11 October 1914) was an English painter and murderer. Born in Staffordshire, the illegitimate son of an Ulster-Scottish dad who was a ‘navvy’ working upon the railways and an English mother, he worked as an artiste in the Potteries, painting ceramics, before going to the Royal College of Art in 1905, and far along becoming Master of Life Painting at Bristol. He married in 1907. In the summer of 1910 he briefly attended the Slade School of Art, where he allied the ‘Neo-Primitive’ group that included fellow Slade students Mark Gertler, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, Stanley Spencer and Adrian Allinson. The contemporary art stasher Michael Sadleir described him as ‘blazing in the broadcast of genius’; others likened him to a tone in a Dostoevsky novel.
Shortly back the start of World War I he travelled to France, painting for a grow old in Brittany. Currie had since abandoned his wife and young person son to start a long and tempestuous affair in the same way as an attractive Irish model, Dolly Henry. (In full, Dorothy Eileen Henry, though sometimes written O’Henry). This ended past Currie shooting her dead at her Chelsea apartment; he after that turned the gun on himself, and died in hospital a few days later. A fictionalized account of this concern appears in Gilbert Cannan’s 1916 novel Mendel. Currie’s colleague, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, remarked, ‘He was a good painter, and a magnificent fellow.’
His show is to be found in the Tate Collection and Stoke-on-Trent Museums.
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