In January of 1903 he moved from Fitzroy Street to Great Ormond Street, where he lived – at two different addresses – for most of that year. On 24 August John’s wife Ida wrote to his sister Gwen with the news that Lewis had gone to Spain with Spencer Gore. This was his first taste of foreign travel unaccompanied by his mother.
The advertisement described Eliza Briggs’s ‘first class English pension’ as being ‘airy’ with electric light and a lift. Terms were moderate and available on application to: Miss Briggs, Calle Mayor, 92, Madrid.
‘I think Madrid in the really winter time . . . must be an extremely dangerous place, and one’s life would be crowded with precautions and not worth living, – like walking on thin ice.’ Hypochondria was a characteristic feature of Lewis’s letters to his mother, and she encouraged such anxiety in her only child. He had contracted a cold almost as soon as he arrived and felt exhausted for the first ten days. He developed a painfully ulcerated throat, but a physician friend of Miss Briggs told him that everybody in Madrid, including the Queen and half the Court, had ulcerated throats.
Despite the poor health both were suffering, Lewis and Gore rented a studio and furnished it, the younger man keeping account of everything they spent for his mother:
15 pesetas for a good coke stove
8 pesetas for the pipes
5 pesetas for two chairs
3 or 4 pesetas for a sort of table
1½ pesetas for a deal box
30 pesetas for a carpet
They would be able to sell the furnishings back for half the price when they left. The exchange rate stood at 33 pesetas to the pound at this time; their rent for the pension was equivalent to about 38 shillings each and the studio 4 shillings. ‘Models are cheap here: three pesetas for three hours. So if we spend three pesetas each a day we’ll have no lack of work.’
‘We go to bed at 10 and get up at 8 without the least variety, and spend no money outside, as there’s nothing worth spending it on.’
Every week Mrs Lewis sent him a cheque for £6 which he collected from the offices of Thomas Cook in the Carrera San Jeronimo.
In mid-September, about a fortnight or so after their arrival, he was ill again. ‘I think I have caught a fresh cold (a slight one). I still have the old one. Gore’s not well either. I suppose I must stay here another month, and see the run of the studio out but dare not longer . . . We’re not well chiefly because of the change – extreme change – of climate, I suppose, and change of food: we eat an awful lot here.’
They visited the Prado. Lewis told his mother that they had seen a room full of Goya drawings. This was the ‘Salón de Goya’, on the ground floor to the left of the vestibule, and contained, not only pen and ink and crayon drawings, but portraits and the series of scenes from Spanish life originally executed as tapestry designs. Lewis copied Goyas and, years later, also claimed to have ‘studied the principles of the red Venetian grounds’ in the Prado.
At least one, unfortunately anonymous, contact was made in Madrid’s artistic community:
We . . . visited an artist, (ridiculous person,) and to do so hired a conveyance. I’ve never had a more exciting twenty minutes than that cab drive: we had our side-step smashed by a carriage, stopped the traffic several times, quarrelled with everybody, were turned out of main street for frightening a mule-team and using bad language, dived into dark narrow lane, and, finding large cart facing us, turned round, having first driven onto pavement, and nearly into a shop window: we reached the artist at last, and found him, as I said, a ridiculous person.
*
Before coming home he thought of extending his travels. ‘I rather think that I should like to go to Italy . . . before returning to England; as I am going there soon, it would be cheaper to go while I’m abroad.’ It was to be, however, another 20 years, and in the glamorous company of Nancy Cunard, before he made his only excursion to Italy.
Leaving the climatic perils of Madrid behind, they probably returned to London in mid to late October. On 30 December he was signing the British Museum visitors’ book and giving 18 Fitzroy Street as his new address.
In January 1904 he moved to 8 Fitzroy Street and, towards the end of the month, north to 4 St Georges Square* near Regent’s Park, where he would remain until June. In August he moved to 5 The Mall, Park Hill Road, Hampstead.
*
There is evidence that his mother’s business was in difficulties at this time. A letter from T. B. Bowe & Co., Thames Soap Works in Brentford, to Anne’s West Middlesex Laundry acknowledged the receipt of £26 with the balance of the bill to be paid in four days’ time. Mrs Lewis had allowed her debt to remain unpaid for six months, despite an agreed credit limit of three months, taking advantage of the leniency the company had shown her in the past. She was warned that steps would be taken to see that overdue accounts were paid if she failed, in future, to keep within her terms of credit.
This crisis did not prevent her from taking a short holiday with her son, and towards the end of August she joined him in Holland. Lewis was in Haarlem for the best part of two months. Part of his time was spent in Room III of the Municipal Museum, where the west wall was occupied by ten Frans Hals paintings from which he was copying. There must also have been something to interest him at the Teyler Museum, because the guest book records two visits. On 1 September he was there with his mother. He went again, three weeks later, and this time he was joined by the young Dutch painter Lodewijk Schelfhout,† a new acquaintance. ‘Louis’ Schelfhout would be responsible for getting Lewis his first, rather unsalubrious, lodgings in Paris a month or so later.
Following his mother’s departure he stayed on at a pension where, by October, he had compromised himself by dallying with the daughter of the house – an attractive but ‘very stupid, uninteresting and not in the least exciting’ girl called Lesbie. ‘I have taken certain opportunities to bestow a kiss upon her blanched brow,’ he wrote home, ‘and may perhaps have stroked her bosom, but . . . I have done nothing more.’ His mother might have been reminded of her husband’s abuse of hospitality with the pretty English housemaid in New Jersey a decade earlier.
His attentions, far from outraging his hosts, gave Lesbie’s parents reason for hope. The father began talking of marriage and asked questions about his family. The girl’s mother dropped blatant hints as to the attractions of such a match: ‘Of course the furniture will go to my dear little Lesbie.’ Lewis was greatly amused by this: ‘it’s the sort of remark Mamas make in Dickens’s books.’ Loud arguments were overheard in the next room. ‘I think that I am often the subject of these disputes.’
It was a good story, and the picaresque situation in which he found himself was obviously relished in the telling.
He instructed his mother to send him, poste restante, enough money to effect a hasty departure. Another letter, ‘with nothing much in it’, sent to his lodgings would allow him the subterfuge that pressing family business called him back to London.
He had finished copying Hals and there was nothing to keep him in Haarlem.
Then, before sending the letter, he seems to have had second thoughts about leaving just then. He could, after all, stay on for a fortnight with comparative safety. ‘I don’t see what possible thing these people could do to annoy me, beyond the beastly hinting the whole time that I might marry their daughter; and I may even exaggerate that.’ He intended coming back to London, at the latest, in the last three days of October, so as to be in time for the New English Art Club’s sending-in day on 5 November. As no work of Lewis’s appeared in the NEAC show the following April, it is not clear whether he arrived back in time or not.
*
In November or December he went to Paris. His first address was a room at 41 rue Denfert-Rochereau, sublet to him by the family of Louis Schelfhout – a wretched, Zolaesque menage of uncertain number. He was their sole tenant and only source of income. They were out of work and ill-looking. Salvation, in the form of two Spanish lodgers, was expected imminently, but in the meantime they clung desperately to the young Englishman, spending the two napoleons (40F) he gave them each week on paying their own rent and furnishing the Spaniards’ accommodation. The tottering economic edifice of this blighted household would occasionally be shored up by a visit to the Mont de Piété in the rue de Rennes. ‘They pawned something this morning,’ he told his mother, ‘I suppose to get my dinner with.’
His embarrassment gave rise to absurd qualms: having earlier borrowed a couple of francs from one of the Schelfhouts, he was worried about paying the money back too promptly, in case ‘they would suspect that I know of their pawnings’.
He was to become familiar with the workings of the Mont de Piété, which would in turn loom large in importance for the German protagonist of his first novel, Tarr. Like Otto Kreisler, he would leave his ‘frac’ as hostage in the heavily guarded establishment on the corner of the rue de Rennes and the boulevard Raspail.
Meanwhile, he was anxious to find somewhere else to live. ‘I can’t work [at the Schelfhouts’] for various and obvious reasons that I needn’t detail’, he told his mother. The acquisition of a studio was therefore a priority.
A valuable source of information on this subject was a man who had been with him at the Slade. D.I.V. Gatty from Rotherham was an enviable figure: on an allowance of only £3 a week he had a good studio and ‘models more or less in abundance’. Studios in Paris were cheap, Lewis was told, ‘you can get a studio here for £28 a year that would be £50 or £60 in London’, and once installed there would be no shortage of models. On the corner of the rue de la Grande-Chaumière and the boulevard du Montparnasse, they stood on the pavement waiting for casual hire: ‘le Marché aux Modèles’. National distinctions were a consideration for the discerning painter. ‘Italian models here are very cheap, – you can often arrange with them for a napoleon a week, – the french models a franc an hour.’
The 22-year-old who saw Paris in the autumn of 1904 was gauche and easily unsettled by female company. Walter Sickert had given him a letter of introduction to the sculptress Kathleen Bruce, later to marry the Arctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. She gave him tea in a room lit only by a fire, the gloom hiding his embarrassment. He felt that she had hardly enough clothes on for the time of year. She was four years his senior and had lived in Paris since 1901 – an ideal contact for a young man who needed an introduction to the city and, perhaps, a little mothering. He asked her about the Bohemian fundamentals: ‘the likelihood of getting a studio and a mistress, and the price of cigarettes’. She was able to arrange the first requirement in the week before Christmas, leaving him to acquire the second for himself.
Lewis’s first Paris studio was below Miss Bruce’s, at 22 rue Delambre, just round the corner from the Café du Dôme. Its great advantage, as he explained to his mother, was that it was being let for only one or two months. A more conventional let in Paris was for the minimum of a year, involving a much greater payment of rent in advance. His proximity to the English sculptress, however, caused him some initial disquiet: ‘I don’t much relish that aspect of it.’ Although exploiting the benefits of Miss Bruce’s local knowledge to the full, he seemed to distance himself from her, to maintain his privacy and present the image of a man with no attachments or encumbrances. This would be a characteristic trait in all his future relationships with women.
The studio was light enough, furnished with bed, cups and saucers, and a good stove; ‘the only thing that seems expensive here are coals’. The rent was 50 francs per month; ‘10 or 11 shillings a week’. This, he told his mother, was cheap. ‘There is a femme de ménage that does your room any morning for trente centimes: that, four times a week, would be 1/-, which is cheap also.’
So far as the studio and its rent are concerned, it is instructive to consider the experience of another young painter, one year older than Lewis. Pablo Picasso settled in Paris in the spring of 1904. The studio he occupied for the next five years in the legendary ‘Bateau Lavoir’ in Montmartre cost him 15F a month. It had no furniture, no gas or electricity. There was one filthy toilet and one water tap serving 30 studios. This was a cheap studio. Lewis’s, by comparison, was positively salubrious.
He took over the studio on 19 December but continued to sleep and take his meals at 41 rue Denfert-Rochereau, ‘till the Schelfhouts get a bit settled’, he explained. The Spaniards were expected to arrive on New Year’s Day.
He had also become infested with a type of vermin: ‘where I got them heaven knows, but I have a species of crabs in my head.’ This necessitated a haircut, the purchase of a comb and also a bottle of poisonous lotion to be rubbed into the scalp night and morning. He included a sketch of the offender, enlarged by a third and enclosed in a small square in the text of a letter to his mother: a dot with legs. ‘Are they lice, think you?’
Now that he had the use of a studio he was able to start work in earnest. The project was a grandiose one: ‘a series of paintings and drawings of the creation of the world’. How far the series progressed is not known because nothing from this period has survived. He must have been astute enough to realise that painting and drawing on the theme of the creation of the world would, in all likelihood, not lead to immediate prosperity. He was accordingly also pursuing more commercial goals. ‘I have been busy trying drawings (caricatures) for the Paris papers, which certainly seem very successful in themselves, but the french joke is the difficulty.’ There is no evidence that he succeeded in placing any of this material.
He had secured the services of a model: six days a week for 24F. Once he had moved into the studio and shaken off the expense of bed and board chez Schelfhout he worked out he would be 15F or so to the good, and ‘be able to afford a few other models for an hour or so occasionally’.
Meanwhile Miss Bruce was introducing him to the Montparnasse community. He went with her to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in the company of a French artist, a Member of Parliament and an Irish girl. Afterwards, they all went back to the French painter’s studio and drank champagne.
On 3 January 1905 he abandoned his room in the rue Denfert-Rochereau and began sleeping in his studio, thereby making a considerable saving and leaving the Schelfhouts to their fate.
* Now Chalcot Square.
† (1881–1943)
