Tyros are fictional characters in Lewis’s writing and painting. Tyro means ‘beginner’ or ‘novice’, and Lewis presents these creatures as “satires, pictures and stories.” The Tyros were a critical response to a post-war society which was ravaged by grief. They used British humour and the ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude as an immature coping strategy, “For how can you indulge in grief with a yard wide grin painted across your face?” The defining characteristic of the Tyro is its artificial and menacing grin, and this is certainly the most striking feature of Lewis’s self-portrait. In Blast, Lewis’s Vorticist magazine, Humour is described as a ‘weapon’, and English Humour is both ‘blasted’ and ‘blessed’. The Tyros personify the sinister side of Humour, which masks deeper concerns, and Lewis likens this Humour to Tragedy, “which can clench its side muscles like hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb.”
Although topical, critics of the time considered the Tyros to be “without significance.” Lewis’s invention of the Tyro figure on both page and canvas was a distinctive and highly original attempt to create a modern myth. He intended to publish a novel about Tyro society, showing their origins and settlement on a star in the distant future. The novel was left unfinished, but Lewis published a literature and arts magazine entitled The Tyro (1921–2) with the financial help of Sidney Schiff, who also contributed a short story to the second issue of the magazine. Like Blast, The Tyro ran to two issues and was Lewis’s second attempt to encourage interest in contemporary British art. In particular, his aim was to recover the momentum experienced by the modernist arts (including Vorticism) before the war, which had since been overshadowed by Bloomsbury’s dominance in the art world.