Murdered or sleeping? Walter Sickert gave this painting two different titles to keep the public guessing.
‘I am going to climb an apple tree – and never have another baby.’
– Ida (Nettleship) John, on giving birth to the third of five children with Augustus John, 1904.
Walter Sickert did his best to keep from laughing out loud. It was June 1904 and the artist had just returned to his house in Dieppe, France, from Italy. In his hand was a month-old newspaper. Sickert turned to his mistress and model of half a decade as she sat at the kitchen table and teased, ‘If you shoot me, Augustine, you better hit your mark or no one will know your name!’
Augustine Villain, the stunning fish-stall keeper known as La Belle Rousse, was not amused as Sickert read the police report:
Two artists’ models in Paris, who had quarrelled over a gentleman friend, met recently in the Boulevard St Illmain and commenced firing at each other with revolvers. Their shooting, however, was so bad that they missed each other entirely, but seriously wounded four people who were at a distance. Frightened at the damage they had done, the rivals fainted, and in an insensible condition were carried to the office of the police.32
Sickert was no stranger to the femme fatale. Before sharing a house in Dieppe with the divorced Villain and her children for several years, the artist had lived for a time in Venice, where his favourite models were the prostitutes La Giuseppina and Carolina dell’Acqua. They sat cheerfully ‘to amuse me with smutty talk while posing like angels,’ he wrote to fellow artist Jacques-Émile Blanche.
Not long after that letter was written, Sickert returned to architectural landscape painting in Dieppe. But within three years he was back in London working on the sensationalist paintings that would become known as the Camden Town Murder series. Sickert despised the idealised portrayal of female nudes; instead he posed fleshy, recumbent models in positions of fatigue or disenchantment. He seemed to prefer anonymity in his models, often reducing the features to smudges of light and dark.
The French artist Edgar Degas had had an enduring influence on Sickert’s use of models. Sickert met Degas when he was 23, and Degas became his mentor and friend. The relationship would stimulate Sickert’s interest in the portrayal of low-lit, seedy scenes of music halls and circuses. The influence of Degas crept into some of Sickert’s café scenes as well, and later into his depictions of prostitutes and domestic poverty.
When Degas’s painting Dans un Café debuted in London in 1893 with the title L’Absinthe, Sickert defended it against widespread moral outrage. The painting, he argued, should be judged on artistic merit and not as a comment on the evils of absinthe. The café in the painting is La Nouvelle Athènes in the Place Pigalle, the models’ market and meeting place for bohemians in turn-of-the-century Paris. The inclusion of this locale was a deliberate choice by Degas; the models were actually painted in his studio.
L’Absinthe took a terrible toll on its models. The sitter for the female figure was Ellen Andrée, a French actress and model who also posed for Manet and Renoir. The male sitter was French painter and printmaker Marcellin Desboutin. After L’Absinthe debuted, both models were tarred by the assumption that they were drunkards. Degas, one of the world’s worst self-promoters, dismissed all the hubbub by sneering, ‘Art critic! Is that a profession?’ He did, however, issue a statement saying that the models were not alcoholics.
Sickert, by contrast, was the consummate self-promoter. He was also a serial husband, a serial adulterer and an opinionated man who spoke and wrote his mind. Once, in Dieppe, he looked at the work of a young Paul Gauguin and suggested Gauguin stick to selling insurance.
Sickert’s evocative portraits of unknown and well-known female sitters are a testament to his versatility as an artist. His technique seems to defy the weight of his brushstrokes in capturing even the most delicate features. Portraits such as the mysterious Mrs Barrett come across as acts of resistance against what he called the wriggle-and-chiffon school of portraiture.
As Sickert well knew, the relationship between artist and model can be a complicated one, made more so when the model is a mistress or a wife. His sitters in London included his mistresses Wendela Boreel, Nina Hamnett and Agnes Beerbohm, and his three wives – Ellen Cobden, Christine Angus and Therese Lessore – as well as prostitutes, servants and aristocrats.
In 1906, in postcards sent to yet another mistress, Sickert identifies two of his models as the Belgian sisters Jeanne and Hélène Daurmont from Soho, and calls Mrs Barrett ‘a London dressmaker’. These sitters bridge the gap between the artist’s personal relationships with well-to-do women and the everyday people he gravitated toward as models. In his depiction of The Miner, an emotional wife kisses her coal-streaked husband in absolute anonymity, which is what the artist preferred.
Murdered or sleeping? Walter Sickert gave this painting two different titles to keep the public guessing.
Sickert’s studio was a moving target in London. He frequently rented rundown rooms as temporary studio space if he liked the play of light and shadow. One of his most memorable models, a London teenager and occasional chorus girl named Emily Powell, was the daughter of his landlady at no. 26 Red Lion Square where he had a studio. Sickert called his model ‘Chicken’.
Trained by Whistler to paint from nature, Sickert would begin using sketches as source material for his paintings as he aged. By 1912 he was painting sparingly from photographs while cautioning others that only artists who could do without photographs should use them. By 1929 he had fully embraced the camera as a tool and was painting under his middle name, Richard. This was several years after suffering what is generally thought to have been a stroke.
Sickert was too old to serve in the First World War, but he would worry daily about the fate of his beloved Dieppe. As with Bloomsbury’s Charleston Farmhouse and the grounds at Garsington Manor, Dieppe was a model in its own right. Venice, Paris, Rome, Sicily and Madrid lured English artists with a breathless sophistication, but Dieppe in Normandy was the golden muse.
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Dieppe was a fashionable French resort town that held great appeal for artists and writers in the first decades of the twentieth century. Sickert met Spencer Gore there in 1904; it was at Gore’s urging that Sickert returned to London to become part of the English modernist movement. The two men continued their friendship at Fitzroy Street and toasted Gore’s jungle scenes at the Cave of the Golden Calf in Heddon Street in 1912.
From the late nineteenth century, to the mid-twentieth century, many of the world’s greatest talents continued to seek out Dieppe as their muse. These included Alexander Calder, Georges Braque, Eugene Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin and Felix Vallotton. The British were well represented, with Sickert, J.M.W. Turner, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, William Orpen, Max Beerbohm and Ben Nicholson leading the way.
Dieppe took on a legendary status as the stories about it mounted. Wyndham Lewis sat up all night in a kitchen in Dieppe killing dozens of bugs with a hammer. Vita Sackville-West stayed near Dieppe with her lover, Virginia Woolf. Gwen John fell ill and died there. Picasso visited Georges Braque at nearby Varengeville-sur-Mer and spoke of the light on the Dieppe cliffs as if it were his favourite mistress.
And Augustus John? His tangled life of wives, mistresses, models and flings would stretch from the cliffs of Normandy to the streets of London, to the ateliers of Paris and the commune at Alderney Manor in Dorset.
Eighty kilometres west of Dieppe, the town of Vaucottes sat tucked away on terraces above the cliffs. It was at Vaucottes that 21-year-old Augustus John first stayed with his friends, William and Alice Rothenstein, in 1899. Joining them were the artists Charles Conder and William Orpen.
William Rothenstein was a man who married his muse. His actress wife posed for many of her husband’s interiors, as well as some of his portraits. One can only imagine what this happy couple thought of their friend Augustus, whose sexual shenanigans were in full roar by the time he got to Normandy. Rothenstein apparently had no misgivings; he seized the opportunity of Vaucottes to pose his wife Alice and his friend Augustus together for The Doll’s House, creating what would become one of his most famous paintings.
With William Rothenstein happily married in Normandy and Augustus John happily single, what of Conder and Orpen? They were something of a morality tale. Conder was a troubled man and a decent artist. Reckless and fun-loving, he was free with his sexual favours. He married late for financial security and died eight years later of syphilis contracted in his youth.
Orpen married Alice Rothenstein’s sister Grace, had three children, and was miserable but never divorced. Instead, he had a serious affair with a wealthy American, Evelyn St George. Their relationship would produce his fourth child, Vivien, and some of his finest paintings. These included annual portraits of St George’s older daughter, Gardenia – the pretext the artist and his mistress used for spending time together. Later, Orpen would live for some years with Yvonne Aubicq, a young Red Cross nurse he met in 1917. She ended up marrying his chauffeur.
Orpen frequently used his mistresses, and occasionally his wife, as models. He also projected his own sexual bonhomie on others. He once wrote to a favourite Irish model, Beatrice Elvery (Lady Glenavy), to enquire about his friend, the art dealer William Sinclair: ‘How is Zink? – and the French maid? – and the model? All news of that great champion of sex gratefully received.’33
Despite taking very different approaches to life, the four men – Rothenstein, John, Conder and Orpen – would continue to visit Normandy for inspiration, and John, the most outrageous of the quartet, would embark on a truly herculean experiment of wives and mistresses. Whereas artists such as Walter Sickert often hid the identity of their mistress-models, Augustus John was more akin to Picasso. He publicly acknowledged his muses in his life and art.
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Ida Nettleship was just 24 years old in 1901, the year she married Augustus John. A Slade student from the age of 15, she met her future husband through her classmates Gwen John and Dorelia (Dorothy) McNeill. McNeill would become John’s most famous muse.
Much has been written about the complicated relationships of Augustus, Ida and Dorelia. McNeill lived with the couple for a while, with the first of her four children fathered by John. The marriage itself lasted just six years – Ida John died of puerperal fever in 1907 following the birth of their fifth son. After her death, McNeill would grow in importance to the artist as both his muse and his common-law wife.
The women and their children frequently served as models for John, as did his other mistresses. One mistress that was outside the immediate household, but very important to him, was the charismatic Alexandra (Alick) Schepeler. Schepeler was working as a secretary for the Illustrated London News when she met the artist, who admitted to becoming obsessed with the Russian-born beauty. For a while they became inseparable.
Ida John was a prolific letter writer who found solace in admitting her isolation. Clearly, it was stressful for her to care for a large family while her husband was off to Normandy or Paris with a model in tow. Taking her letters at face value, one has to wonder whether she might have foregone children completely in a different age. She wrote to Augustus of Alick, ‘I often dream of you & the Schep. Such ridiculous dreams. Last night you were teaching her French in the little dining room while I kept passing through to David who had toothache and putting stuff on his tooth.’34
And even more directly to McNeill in 1905: ‘You are the one outside who calls the man to apparent freedom & wild rocks & wind & air – & I am the one inside who says come to dinner & whom to live with is apparent slavery.’35 And yet, even here, there is too much intelligence in her choice of words to dismiss her as a victim.
Dorelia McNeill (left) and Ida Nettleship had a genuine but wary love for each other as Augustus John’s mistress and wife.
Despite Ida John’s desire to make her husband happy at her own cost, it is questionable how long the marriage would have lasted for this exhausted young woman had she not died so young. As a model, however, the connection between husband and wife was palpable. Her complex feelings for McNeill are equally clear in the dual portraits created by the man who bound these two women together.
Augustus John was profoundly affected by his wife’s death. McNeill stepped in and ended the affair with Alick Schepeler, and in August 1911, John and McNeill moved their blended brood to Alderney Manor. They would remain there for almost sixteen years seeking a more carefree life, hosting artists and hoboes and mistresses while John made forays to London and Paris. It was at Alderney that the child Nicolette would peer through the rhododendrons at Lady Ottoline Morrell and think she was a witch.
In 1927 Augustus John moved his family to Fryern Court in Fordingbridge. The household once again became a magnet for bohemians and the creative coterie of London. Henry Lamb came to visit, and McNeill, a long-time friend and sometimes model for Lamb, reportedly had an affair with him at Augustus’s urging.
In her book, Two Flamboyant Fathers, Nicolette Devas provides a record of what may be the only time a female ran away from Augustus John. Visiting Fryern Court aged 15 or so, she saw the artist she thought of as a father figure watching her during an evening of dancing. When he broke his silence it was to tell her that he would draw her ‘interesting lines’ in the morning. ‘This meant in the nude,’ Devas wrote.
The others never minded, he drew them often; sitting for Augustus was just another job, like making the beds or washing up. I hardly slept all night and got up at seven in the morning to walk the two miles into Fordingbridge and catch the first bus home. I was never asked again.36
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Among the many partners to genius were the artists Hilda Carline and Dora Carrington. Carline remained a muse to Stanley Spencer both during and after their marriage. At various times he was in love with her, bored with her, disrespected her, wronged her terribly and begged forgiveness – but he always needed her as a model. The fact that she continued to sit for him despite her obvious annoyance speaks to her admiration for the talent, rather than the man.
Carrington, the conflicted painter linked to the Bloomsbury set, charmed the artists C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash and Mark Gertler, who painted a well-known portrait of her. Gertler reportedly sent Carrington a letter listing five reasons why she should marry him, starting with: ‘I am a very promising artist – one who is likely to make a lot of money.’
Carrington herself was a promising painter who lacked the confidence to exhibit. She painted almost as a hobby, dabbled in a few affairs and married once (not Gertler), but was at her most passionate with the American socialite Henrietta Bingham. Bingham modelled for Carrington’s Reclining Nude with Dove in a Mountainous Landscape at the height of their affair in 1924. That relationship led the model Iris Tree to comment that Carrington’s messy love life was like a tin of mixed biscuits.
Carrington came to a sorry end after her companion, the writer Lytton Strachey, died of cancer in the winter of 1932. Strachey, a homosexual, was Carrington’s long-time platonic love, mentor and kindred spirit. She kept him comfortable and well fed. He taught her French and Shakespeare. If she was not exactly his muse, she was much more than an acolyte – irreplaceable in his life, as he was in hers.
Two months after Strachey’s death, Carrington put on his purple dressing gown and shot herself. In her diary was a quote she borrowed from the statesman Sir Henry Wotton three centuries earlier: ‘He first deceased; she for a little tried, to live without him, liked it not, and died.’