Willy would always evince a strong dislike for the world of modern culture that thrived, despite his best endeavours, throughout his reign. He never, however, displayed the least objection to any form of art that paid appropriate homage to the Hohenzollerns and his imperial self.
In 1900 – to take but one example – Wilhelm II took time off from his royal duties to pose for an admiring visitor’s portrait in the splendid Knights’ Hall of the Hohenzollern Schloss. His legs were encased in gleaming thigh-high boots; the imperial crown, globe and sceptre were displayed at his feet. His uniform, adorned with every order that the Fatherland and a savvy old English grandmother who knew Willy’s fondness for medals could confer, was dashingly set off by a crimson full-length cloak.
‘My enamel portrait of the Emperor will be gorgeous,’ an enthusiastic Sir Hubert Herkomer wrote to his students back in the village of Bushey, Hertfordshire, where he ran an art school and had built a large Bavarian schloss. The students were further informed by their ebullient tutor that the Emperor had displayed a stellar mixture of enthusiasm, intelligence, warmth and willpower: ‘qualities rarely combined in one man. His suddenness of resolution delights and suits me.’1
The Kaiser’s impetuousness charmed Sir Hubert rather less the following year. Displeased by the modest scale of an enamel portrait that, nevertheless, dwarfed the miniature originally planned, Willy declined to purchase it. Herkomer, whose vanity did not lag far behind the Emperor’s, assuaged his wounded pride by smashing his artwork with a sledgehammer.
Herkomer’s reaction is easily understood when we recall what his English contemporaries never forgot: that, distinguished Royal Academician and eminent former head of the Slade though the artist might be, he was not one of them. Journalists remarked upon the attractiveness of his olive skin, gleaming blue-black beard, bold manner and a certain ‘kittenish playfulness’: what they meant was that the polymathic and engagingly self-regarding Herkomer did not seem English.2
The artist himself would never have denied that he was pulled in two directions by his birthright. ‘My art is English and my blood is German,’ Herkomer told a friend in 1900. ‘All my ways are those of a foreigner – my enthusiasm, my outspokenness, my self-possession – my life is un-English. But my art and my feeling for art will always remain English.’3
This announcement – as with many of Herkomer’s declarations – was an attractive but limited version of the truth.
Born near Landsberg in southern Bavaria in 1849, Herkomer was two years old when his parents joined the great western exodus from Germany of those post-revolutionary years. Brought up in Southampton and London, he remembered being pursued home from school by shouts of ‘brigand’ and ‘foreigner’. A detail he never forgot was that his father, Lorenz, a woodcarver, had sold the only cloak he owned to buy clothes for his child.
Herkomer’s skill as a draughtsman developed early. Enrolled on an art course at Munich at the age of sixteen – with his uninhibited father posing nude if home-practice was required for the life study class – Hubert was twenty when he began producing regular sketches for a new illustrated weekly, The Graphic. Van Gogh never met Herkomer during his three-year stay in London from 1873–6, but the young Dutchman was inspired by Herkomer’s powerful images of suffering and loneliness. Ten years later, an admiring van Gogh told his brother Theo how he had longed to have Herkomer for his friend (‘a friend for life’).4
The turning point in the life of an English-bred Bavarian came when Herkomer revisited his homeland with his father in 1871. Staying at a cosy lodging in sleepy, medieval Garmisch, the young artist was surrounded by the glorious Alpine landscape of Bavaria. Wandering through the great pine forests and exploring the wooden-bridged, brightly decorated villages, Herkomer experienced an epiphany. ‘Something more than delight in the picturesqueness of this new ground was aroused in me,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘I felt it belonged to me, and that I belonged to Bavaria; I was of the same race, and the same blood . . .’5
Captivated, Herkomer returned to Garmisch with his parents the following year. After The Toil of Day, his first entry for the Royal Academy, was sketched in England. It was completed during that long spell in Germany, where, as Herkomer frankly admitted, he looked for English subjects in foreign surroundings: ‘I searched for English fruit trees and English peasants – in Bavaria!’6
The Toil of Day sold for £500, enough for Herkomer to buy a country home for himself and his parents at Bushey, just outside London. By 1875, his works were being shown alongside those of Alma-Tadema and Frith; by 1878, Richard Wagner was affectionately accusing him of witchcraft (‘Sie hexen’) for his skilful portrait from memory of the composer at work in London the previous year, when Wagner was attempting to recoup losses incurred by his first festival at Bayreuth.
By 1884, Herkomer could do no wrong. The art school he had founded at Bushey was praised and well attended; a lecture on art given at All Souls led to the rare honour of a college fellowship; Ruskin invited Herkomer to take over as Slade professor of art at Oxford.
And then tragedy struck. Herkomer was away from Bushey when his pregnant wife, Lulu Griffiths, caught sight of a village child wandering out in front of an approaching carriage. Running to the child’s rescue, Lulu herself was knocked down. She died, not of her injuries, but of shock. Her unborn baby did not survive.
Publicly, the widower registered his loss in a striking portrait, as he had done at the start of their short marriage. The Woman in White – for which Wilhelm II put in an unsuccessful bid when it was displayed in Berlin – was now succeeded by Woman in Black, represented by a Mrs Silsbee, from Boston. Privately, Herkomer took consolation from summoning his relations to help create the house on which he conferred the name of his dead wife: Lululaund.
Few houses can have been created by a single family with such loving attention to detail as the sturdy Bavarian schloss built by the Herkomers just off Bushey High Street. The result was remarkable. Lululaund stood in three acres of gardens that included fish ponds, lily ponds and a small Tannenwald, intended to evoke the Bavarian woods. The house, based around a massive central arch, flanked by two sturdy turrets, was clad in white tufa limestone, imported from Munich and picked for its unique ability to reflect the play of light.
Within the solid walls of Lululaund, things became a little wilder. A frieze of life-size female figures hammered from copper and aluminium looked down into a rectangular well of oiled oak. The bedrooms were adorned by cupboards covered by tiny squares of pure gold leaf, while the ceiling of Herkomer’s own chamber boasted the added refinement of a surface of burnished copper. A velvet-curtained music gallery overhung the drawing room and – an unexpectedly practical touch – the kitchen was located upstairs, protecting Herkomer’s dinner guests from the odour of cooking.
Nothing had been overlooked; everything was designed to please the eye. Among the decorative houses that Victorian architects built for their own pleasure, Lululaund stood at the zenith, beside the London homes of Lord Leighton and William Burges. Arguably, it surpassed them.
Herkomer had intended to live at Lululaund with his beloved second wife. Instead, he shared it with her sister. In 1888, Herkomer married Margaret Griffiths in a sunrise ceremony at the Mutterturm, a hundred-foot tower at Landsberg by which, nine years earlier, Herkomer had paid homage to his Bavarian mother. Ten trumpeters and horns were imported from the Munich Opera House to play the ‘Wedding March’ from Lohengrin. The couple’s son, a second Lorenz, was born the following year.
Bushey, during the years of Lorenz’s childhood, was like nowhere else in England. The residential art students who worked on Herkomer’s grounds in small stove-heated studios were given clear rules: students could not exhibit their work in shows and they could not imitate their teacher. For recreation, after Herkomer turned a local chapel into a theatre, students were encouraged to take part in electrically lit pageants that painstakingly recreated scenes from the artist’s own paintings. On a typical afternoon, the cast might find Herkomer’s friend Hans Richter conducting a thirty-strong orchestra in a Wagner-inspired score, before dashing back to London for his evening concert. On other occasions, the amateur performers might look out from a medieval street (authentic cobbles ensured that the actors walked in a convincing manner), to see themselves being watched by – in Herkomer’s typically immodest words – ‘the most prominent men in art, science, literature, and music’.7
The exaggeration was not great. William Archer, the drama critic, was a keen attendant of Herkomer’s plays. Dame Ellen Terry gushingly declared that she wanted to see his second production, An Idyl, again and again, while her illegitimate son, Edward Gordon Craig, gathered valuable tips on stagecraft for his own future work.
Tirelessly energetic, Herkomer embraced the technology of the new century with delight. An early motoring enthusiast, he founded the world’s first annual road race in 1905, providing this Bavarian event with a silver trophy that showed the driver being urged on by a naked muse. A painting of a blindfolded, near-naked girl lassoed to the front of the artist’s shiny Daimler was mischievously titled Die Zukunft (The Future). At Bushey, Herkomer created England’s first film studio, from which six films emerged, starring Sir Hubert in short episodic dramas that ranged from Dick Turpin to love in a teashop.
Herkomer died in 1914, just before the outbreak of war. Anti-German feeling had not yet seeped into the obituary pages and The Times declared that Herkomer’s portraits could be placed beside the finest works of Frans Hals.
Today, Herkomer is a forgotten name. Even back in 1923, when the memory of war was sharp, his biographer expressed concern about the future of the extraordinary Bavarian schloss in Bushey and pleaded for its preservation.8 In 1939, as a second war with Germany approached, a vote was taken by Bushey’s parish leaders: preservation or demolition? The demolishers won by a single vote. Lululaund was pulled down. Its wooden interiors were burnt; its rubble was carted away for use at a local airfield. A Herkomer relation succeeded in rescuing a few items: the Herkomer Room at Bushey Museum still displays one handsome gilded cupboard, together with some scraps of hangings, a set of carved chairs, some film reels and a row of pewter dining plates.
The entrance arch to Lululaund survives, clamped to the front of a defunct outpost of the British Legion. The steel and glass roof structure of the old film studio is still in place, and a rose garden has been restored, following Herkomer’s own design. Walking over the tangled site of Lululaund’s lost estate, a visitor can still stumble across a piece of glinting white tufa, half buried in the earth.
Back in 1906, writing an article called ‘Beauty in the Home’ for an evangelical monthly, Sir Hubert was prepared to concede that sentiment might play as important a role in the decoration of a family home as, say, a gilded cupboard or a copper ceiling. ‘The greatest decorator of a home, rich or poor,’ he announced to readers of the Home Messenger, ‘is happiness.’9
Herkomer’s thoughts about sentiment would have won the approval of his German contemporary, Hermann Muthesius, an architect who carried home from England his admiration for the comfortable style of housing being built, around the turn of the century, for England’s newly arisen and increasingly prosperous middle class.
Born in 1861, Hermann Muthesius trained briefly as a stone-mason – his father’s trade – before studying philosophy in Berlin and attending the city’s highly regarded technical institute at Charlottenburg. A designer, architect and future historian of the Victorian house, Muthesius arrived in England in 1896 with a diplomat’s commission to produce a report on English culture and technology. The task – a plum – echoed the one given to the great architect Schinkel in 1826, but, whereas Schinkel had compressed a frenetic tour of industrial England into four months, Muthesius and his equally Anglophile wife, Anna (a former concert singer), stayed on for seven contented years.
From the moment of his arrival in England, Muthesius displayed the independence of spirit that gives Das englische Haus, his great three-volume work, such vitality and charm. Officially, he should have resided in an extension of the German Embassy in Carlton House Terrace; instead, he and his wife set up home in semi-rural Hammersmith, where an artists’ colony had grown up beside the Thames. Here, at the Priory, Hermann and Anna created a cosily wallpapered shrine to the Arts and Crafts style of William Morris. Surviving photographs from 1896 show Anna putting her feet up by the fire, while her bearded husband (using his own little Japanese teapot) chats across their tiny table or buries his nose in a new book.
Noticeably absent from the Priory photographs are the heavy velvets and baroque swags of the high Victorian style that Muthesius detested. Praising Ruskin and the recently dead Morris for taking inspiration from medieval church architecture, he scolded them for failing to consider the expense of decorating a house in the finest Gothic style. A Herkomer could afford to indulge his wish to create a cloister or to decorate his ceiling with beaten copper panels; the egalitarian Muthesius wanted recognition for the needs of a class who wanted comfortable homes at affordable prices.
If Muthesius visited Lululaund, he must have admired the medieval ethos of communal workmanship, while frowning at Herkomer’s florid taste. His own avant-garde preference was for the austerely graceful designs of a group of young Glaswegians.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh married his fellow artist Margaret Macdonald in 1900, just one year after his friend Herbert MacNair married Margaret’s sister, Frances, designer of the ravishingly decorative cover of Das englische Haus. A friendship with the German visitors was quickly established; in his book, Muthesius championed the Mackintosh combination of sound workmanship and restrained decoration with a unifying sense of ‘spacious, grandiose, almost mystical repose’.10
Hermann and Anna Muthesius paid regular visits to Glasgow and displayed a comforting enthusiasm for the beauty of their friends’ achievements; as tea-lovers, they especially adored Miss Cranston’s Willow Tearooms. But Muthesius’s larger task was to carry news to Germany of the houses being built in England by Voysey, Webb, Lutyens and, above all, Norman Shaw. Here, in Muthesius’s view, were the examples from which Germany could also learn to create a sympathetic, comfortable and sometimes downright cosy environment.
For social historians, Muthesius’s great book – first published in England, abridged, only in the 1970s – provides a treasure trove. No detail is overlooked in the German’s courteous prowl through the Englishman’s dwelling, from the nursery filled with bright picture books and cheerful jugs of flowers, through the bedroom (wooden bedsteads; immaculate dressing-table) to the ensuite bathroom that German readers were urged to replicate, with especial attention to the wonders of Victorian plumbing.
Muthesius’s praises smothered a few sharp asides. The Englishman required no private study, since he had nothing to think about. His bookshelves were a sham. Bath towels were always as damp as the weather, while the ubiquitous grand piano was a waste of space, given ‘a lack of critical judgment of quality in music that would be impossible in any other country’.11
Sharing Theodor Fontane’s admiration for London’s handsome parks and leafy squares – in contrast to arid, land-hungry Berlin – Muthesius also agreed with Fontane’s complaints about the stifling uniformity of the terraced streets that had begun to smother London’s outlying hills and hamlets. Muthesius might have had Dickens’s Mr Wemmick in mind as he compared this soulless architecture of the suburbs to the charm of Raymond Unwin’s pioneering and communally owned model town at Letchworth, Hertfordshire – the inspiration for Dresden’s enchanting Hellerau – and honoured every English citizen’s unspoken right to create ‘his own little kingdom in which he may rule, spread himself and blossom’.12
Returning to Germany in 1903, after seven years away, Muthesius joined forces there with twelve architects of the avant-garde. Prominent among them was Peter Behrens, a recent graduate from the dynamic colony of artists at Darmstadt who worked under the enlightened patronage of Princess Alice’s son, Grand Duke Ernst of Hessen-Darmstadt. Working in collaboration with Behrens, Muthesius and a group of colleagues set out to wed traditional crafts to industrial technology, turning the decorative genius of Morris and Mackintosh into exportable artefacts with a range summed up in its ambitious motto: vom Sofakissen zum Städtebau (from sofa cushions to city-making). Founded in 1907, the Deutscher Werkbund became a forerunner of the amazing Bauhaus of 1913, creating Germany’s first garden city at Hellerau and helping the nation forward in a bid to become the world’s most successful exporter of home-produced goods. Thanks to the efforts of Muthesius and his colleagues, the English-born Princess Daisy of Pless would soon discover that it was quicker to buy an English-designed watch in Germany than back in London – and that the watch was better-made.
The cultural exchanges of the late Victorian era continued to flow in both directions. Herkomer, finding inspiration in the Bavarian landscape, imported it to England. Muthesius, enchanted both by the English style of house-building and by the new concept of the garden city that he saw at Letchworth, carried his observations back to Germany. Ethel Smyth, born in 1858 to a thoroughly unmusical family in Woking, travelled out to Leipzig in 1877 in search of a new life and the kind of musical education that was simply unavailable to an English girl at that time.
Ethel is best known today for the suffragette anthem which Sir Thomas Beecham found her conducting, with a toothbrush, from the window of a Holloway cell, when he visited her there in 1912 (Ethel was serving a two-month sentence for disruptive behaviour).
Ethel’s powerful personality was already apparent when Tchaikovsky, visiting Leipzig in 1887, was introduced to Marco, the massive St Bernard dog by whom Ethel was invariably escorted to rehearsals and concerts. English women, Tchaikovsky sagely observed, must always have their peculiarities, and there was no doubting the flamboyant peculiarity of Miss Smyth.
Ethel was unnerved by the occasional displays of furious nationalism that she encountered in Leipzig, where her references to Vicky as an English princess went down especially badly. ‘“She married our Crown Prince and is a German . . . A GERMAN . . . a GERMAN!! do you understand?”’13 Nevertheless, she settled swiftly into an intensely musical town, where the pleasures of hearing Clara Schumann execute Smyth’s own fiercely demanding piano compositions and attending splendid weekly performances of Shakespeare at the Leipzig theatre compensated for the grimness of a muddy-booted Ball of the Professors – a snake-pit of venomous smiles and unspoken rivalries.
Ethel had placed great faith in the treatment of her operatic works in Germany, a country that – unlike England – would never allow a performance to go ahead on the strength of a couple of hasty rehearsals.
Ethel was not lucky. Fantasio, adapted from an Alfred de Musset comedy, received a bad press when it premiered at Weimar in 1898 and her one-act opera, Der Wald, was actually hissed at its Berlin debut in 1902. The Wreckers was her ominously named first full-length work. Performed for the first time at Leipzig in 1906, it had been so aggressively amended by the conductor that an infuriated Ethel marched down into the pit, seized all the scores from the orchestra and carried them off on a train to Prague, where she hoped for – but did not find – better fortune.
Although given a performance by Beecham in 1910, the continental fate of The Wreckers was heartbreaking to Smyth. Mahler, having promised to conduct the unabridged opera in Vienna in 1907, resigned his post that same year. Plans for a staging at Munich in February 1915 were, inevitably, cancelled ahead of time.
The Wreckers became a casualty of war. The hissing of Der Wald in 1902, by a sophisticated musical audience, seems less explicable – especially since the orchestra had already praised the piece as Grossartig, stupendous – until the performance is placed in the broader context of Germany’s attitude to England at the time.
Germany, at the end of the nineteenth century, was torn two ways in its view of Britain. The elite – a cross-blend of aristocrats, diplomats and artists – felt a profound attachment to a charming island: England was a pleasant outpost where they kept their hunters, did business, maintained friendships and owned agreeable country houses. A larger and more vocal group, led and abetted by an Anglophobic German press, sought a larger stage and bigger markets for a thrusting young German Empire towards which (they reasonably felt) some show of deference from an ageing Britain was in order.
Animosity, within this second group, was heightened almost to frenzy point by the Boer War. England, in her own righteous opinion, was protecting nothing more than her own imperial due (the massive gold and diamond reserves discovered in the Cape during the 1880s) when she launched a full-scale attack upon 25,000 Boer farmers. England, as perceived by the shocked readers of German newspapers, was behaving with unforgivable brutality towards a peace-loving minority, a minority that had strong links to Germany herself.
Visiting Munich at the turn of the century, Ethel was disconcerted to hear a boy using the words ‘du Engländer’ (the italics are her own) as an insult. Staying with friends in Berlin during 1901, she was horrified when German friends showed her a newspaper picture of an English soldier twirling a Boer baby upon the tip of his bayonet. Rebuked by Ethel in her usual trenchant tones for their credulity, the Berliners refused to yield: ‘Es steht ja in meinem Blatt: Look: it’s here in my paper.’14 Dining at the house of the German Chancellor, Count von Bülow, Smyth was assured that the Anglophobic speech he had recently given in the Reichstag was not his fault. Nothing was his fault. It was the Junkers, not he, who controlled the country. ‘The German Chancellor is not der Herr Gott,’ von Bülow pleaded. ‘. . . I can’t muzzle the Press.’15
It was at von Bülow’s home that Ethel first met the German Emperor, and he charmed her. True, Wilhelm II’s ignorance about culture surpassed belief: ‘incredible borné [sic], stupid, military things about art . . .’16 But the Emperor did not strike Ethel as a stupid man. His dream of turning barracks-like Berlin into a Paris or a second London was absurd when one considered the Emperor’s horror of modernity (Willy kept his distance from the underground Berlin where August Strindberg held court and Edvard Munch was exhibiting his work), but it was also touching. And who could resist the charm of a ruler who, when offered the wobbliest of curtseys as the Emperor’s newest car swept past Ethel on her bicycle, responded with a cheery, thoroughly un-Prussian wave of his hand?17 What, really, could Britain fear from a leader who – setting aside his notorious tantrums – remained so devoted to England, the country that Wilhelm spoke of as his second home?