The son of a policeman, Spare was hailed as a prodigy in his teens and became something of an enfant terrible on the Edwardian art scene. He attracted extravagant praise from G. F. Watts, Augustus John, and John Singer Sargent, who is said to have described him as England's greatest draughtsman. More ominously, Bernard Shaw reportedly thought "Spare's medicine [was] too strong for the normal man", and other critics found something ugly and evil in his early, fin-de-siecle work, which on occasion resembles that of Beardsley or E. J. Sullivan. Spare went on to become a war artist, and to edit the journals Form and The Golden Hind, but during the 1920s he parted company with fame and fortune. Disenchanted and bitter, he retreated to his working-class roots south of the Thames and spent the rest of his life there, living as "a swine with swine".