Born in 1902 Strevens had vivid memories of the late Edwardian era, of women in long white dresses, horse-drawn carts and quiet, dusty streets in east London where on a Sunday the only sound other than church bells was the tinkling of upright pianos in the front rooms of rows of terraced houses. The sense of time passing was central to his vision. He often talked of his deep nostalgia for the quiet elegance of the Edwardian era, which came to an abrupt end with the First World War.
Strevens began his long route to becoming an artist after a series of jobs after leaving school at 12, he was employed during the First World War years, by a French wine merchant boss who saw the teenager’s interest in his own collection of paintings and sent him to copy 19th century narrative history paintings by Delaroche and La Thangue at the Guildhall museum in London. A small windfall from his aunt and extra cash from teaching and playing the violin in the silent cinemas paid for a few art classes in the Regent Street Polytechnic and later at Heatherley’s art school. It was here that during a lecture on the avant-garde and Cubism he famously walked out, saying “I thought art had something to do with beauty”. That was the end of any formal art education for John Strevens.
Strevens went against fashion trends in the 1920s, dressing like a latter-day Edwardian dandy and sporting a beard when most young men were clean-shaven. Roger Fry’s Post Impressionist exhibition and Bomberg’s Futuristic Blast were anathema to him. Working in Fleet Street studios with other graphic artists was to teach him how to channel his artistic talents into earning a living.
After the Second World War, the romanticim of New Look fashion, Hollywood ‘retro’ films like Gone with the Wind, Gigi and My Fair Lady seemed to echo Strevens’ own ‘harking back’ to the elegance of Edwardian London and the Paris of the Belle Epoque. Strevens was an avid collector of 19th century sheet music and magazines like the Strand, the Illustrated London News and the Figaro Illustré, and now he used them as references for narrative pictures set in London or Paris.
A fan of books such as George du Maurier’s Trilby, he would wander through Paris streets on regular visits from London with his second wife Julia, absorbing their fin-de-siècle atmosphere. And the demand grew from outlets like Harrod’s picture gallery for his fantasies of ‘bygone days’. Strevens’ imaginary portrait, the ‘Woman in Black’ reproduced in the International Art Directory, attracted the attention of the New Orleans art dealer Kurt E Schon. This was the beginning of a long relationship and from the 1960s onwards, the demand grew for Strevens’ paintings of imaginary scenes and collections of his work, particularly in the USA.