Henry Tonks
On his first day at the Slade, in October 1894, Augustus was led into the Antique Room, presided over by Henry Tonks – and almost at once a rumpus broke out. Some of the new students, who had already worked for several months in Paris, were objecting at not being allowed straight into the Life Class. Professor Tonks, however, was adamant: the students’ taste must first be conditioned by Greco-Roman sculpture before it was fit to deal with the raw materials of life. And against this judgement there was no appeal.
Augustus was not one of those who objected. To him the absence of stumping was in itself wonderful enough. Far from having been to Paris, he had scarcely been to London and he felt his immense ignorance of everything. To the others he appeared a rather spruce and silent figure, white-collared, clean-shaven, guarding his dignity. Tonks placed him on one of the wooden ‘donkeys’, next to another new student, Ethel Hatch. ‘I found myself sitting next to a boy about sixteen’, she recalled, ‘with chestnut hair and very brown [sic] eyes who had the name “John” written in large letters on his paper… He was very neatly dressed, and was very quiet and polite, and on the following mornings he never failed to say good morning when he came in.’1
He seemed out of the ordinary in so far as he was quieter than other students, and perhaps more timid. But one of them, Michel Salaman, noticed that, when he called for an indiarubber one day and someone threw it to him, he caught it and began rubbing out in a single movement. He was supremely well co-ordinated.
Every student had been instructed to provide himself with a box of charcoals, some sheets of papier Ingres, and a chunk of bread. Their first task was to make what they could of the discobolus. Augustus fixed it with a stare, then using a few sweeping strokes, polished it off, as he thought, in a couple of minutes. Tonks, however, thought differently. It was bold, certainly, but far too summary. Yet he was interested by Augustus’s sketch.
Everything at the Slade dazzled Augustus. The spirit of dedication by which he felt himself to be surrounded, thrilled and abashed him. He hardly knew where to look. The girls were so eye-catching and the men apparently so self-assured that whatever imperfections he observed in their work he attributed to his own lack of understanding.
The teaching of Tonks gave Augustus the sense of direction he had so far lacked. In such a place he seemed to know who he was and the part he had to play. Whatever successes he gained later in his career, he remained to a certain extent a Slade student all his life. In its strengths and limitations, this was the single most important influence on him.
*
When Augustus John came to London, the Slade School was twenty-three years old, and about to enter one of its most brilliant phases. Its tradition was founded upon the study of the Old Masters, and laid special emphasis on draughtsmanship – on the interpretation of line as the Old Masters understood line, and of anatomical construction. ‘Drawing is an explanation of the form,’ Augustus was told. This was the Slade motto, and he never forgot it.
The school had opened in 1871, at a time when British art was at a low ebb. Cut off by its indifference from the exciting developments taking place on the Continent, the Royal Academy with its English literary tradition was all-powerful. The time was ripe for some form of revolution.
The new school took its name from Felix Slade, a wealthy connoisseur of the arts, who, on his death in 1868, had left £35,000 to found professorships of art at Oxford, Cambrige and the University of London. The Oxford and Cambridge chairs – the former taken by Ruskin – were to be solely for lecturing. In London the executors were asked to found a ‘Felix Slade Faculty of Fine Arts’, and University College voted £5,000 for building the Slade School as part of the college quadrangle off Gower Street.
The first professor, Edward Poynter, was an unlikely choice. A fellow student of George du Maurier, he was portrayed in Trilby as Lorimer, the ‘Industrious Apprentice’. In his inaugural address he attacked the teaching in schools, where months were spent upon a single elaborate drawing, and recommended ‘the “free and intelligent manner of drawing”…of the French ateliers, of which he had experience as a pupil of Gleyre...’2 He recommended other innovations too: men and women must be offered the same opportunities; students were not examined on admission; and all the teachers had to be practising artists.3
Poynter did not remain long at the Slade. He became President of the Royal Academy, and in 1876 handed over the Slade torch to Alphonse Legros. Much in the condition of British art over the next fifty years is suggested by his career.
Legros taught his students to draw freely with the point, and to build up their drawings by observing the broad planes of the model. A friend of the great French artists of the period – Degas, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Rodin – he was himself a good draughtsman, a disciple of Raphael and Rembrandt, of Ingres and Delacroix. One of his pupils, William Rothenstein, has described his methods of teaching drawing:
‘As a rule we drew larger than sight-size, but Legros would insist that we studied the relations of light and shade and half-tone, at first indicating these lightly, starting as though from a cloud, and gradually coaxing the solid forms into being by superimposed hatching. This was a severe and logical method of constructive drawing – academic in the true sense of the word… He urged us to train our memories, to put down in our sketch-books things seen in the streets… to copy, during school hours, in the National Gallery and in the Print Room of the British Museum...’4
Legros took no trouble to hide his hostility to the Royal Academy which, he believed, represented neither tradition nor scholarship, and he encouraged his students to be independent of Burlington House. He was close neither to the Salon painters nor to the Impressionists, and eventually he became an isolated figure. His instruction in painting, as opposed to drawing, was later described by Walter Sickert as ‘almost a model of how not to do it’.
Legros retired from the Slade a year before Augustus arrived, but his principles were firmly established there. He and Poynter had been trained in the studio schools of Paris, and were in a line of studio teachers stretching back to the Renaissance. This was the atmosphere in which Augustus found himself at the age of sixteen – that of a medieval-Renaissance workshop school, which launched him on his Renaissance life.
By the time Legros retired, the Royal Academy had become aware of the Slade’s growing strength, but despite its efforts to get one of its men appointed, the chair was offered to Frederick Brown. Brown was then forty-two, ‘a gruff, hard-bitten man, of great feeling, with something of the Victorian military man about him, such as the colonel who had spent his life on the North-West Frontier, surrounded by savages, which indeed his life as a progressive artist and teacher during the ’seventies and ’eighties must have rather resembled.’5 This somewhat grim figure, with his greying hair, chin-tuft, prognathous jaw and grave bespectacled eyes, was invariably dressed in a black frock coat. His teeth seemed permanently clenched, giving him the appearance of a man who would stand no nonsense – nor would he. He had studied in Paris under Robert-Fleury and Bouguereau, and for the past fifteen years had been head of the Westminster School of Art, which he expanded from evening classes and ran on the lines of a French school. He was popular with his students, many of whom followed him from Westminster to the Slade. His severe expression and high standards were complemented by great patience and he endeared himself to students by his wonderful memory – he would often refer to drawings they had done years before, and he became a great collector of their work.
One of these students who was to follow Brown to the Slade was a young Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Henry Tonks. Tonks, who had become increasingly attracted to the artist’s life, was eloquent in persuading his patients to pose as models and, when obliged to fall back on the dead, he seized every opportunity to draw the corpses that were dissected in his class. In about 1890, while Senior Resident Medical Officer at the Royal Free Hospital, he had started to attend the Westminster School of Art as a part-time student, hurrying off to its evening classes smelling strongly of carbolic.
Tonks was exactly the person Brown felt he needed to support him at the Slade. He was well educated, businesslike, and had a gift for teaching and a knowledge of anatomy that gave him special insight into the process of figure-drawing. Like Brown, he was dissatisfied with the mechanical methods of instruction employed in most art schools. If Brown resembled a Victorian colonel, Tonks, who was tall and gaunt, had the commanding presence of a nineteenth-century cardinal.
In the late autumn of 1893 Brown offered him the post of his assistant. Tonks was ‘amazed, almost beside himself with pleasure’. A few months before Augustus arrived there, he took up his new career at the Slade. So began the famous partnership of Brown and Tonks, those two lean and rock-like bachelors, which was to carry on the teaching reforms of Legros, establish the Slade tradition of constructive drawing, and influence generations of British art.
*
From morning till late afternoon, Augustus toiled over the casts of Greek, Roman and Renaissance heads. Then, initially for short twenty-minute poses, he and the other new students were allowed down into the Life Class. Augustus entered this studio for the first time with feelings of awe. Seated on the ‘throne’, he saw a girl, Italian and completely naked. ‘Perfect beauty always intimidates,’ he wrote. ‘Overcome for a moment by a strange sensation of weakness at the knees, I hastily seated myself and with trembling hand began to draw, or pretend to draw this dazzling apparition.’6 Looking round, he was astonished to observe that the other students appeared almost indifferent to the spectacle, and his respect for them mounted even higher.
The regime at the Slade was still austere. Men and women worked together only in the Antique Rooms. They were segregated elsewhere and rarely met in the evenings. ‘This is not a matrimonial agency,’ Brown told Alfred Hayward, a student whom he had come across saying good morning to a young girl in one of the corridors. Models and students were forbidden to speak to one another; older students in the Life Rooms had little communication with the new pupils, and the hierarchy was like that of a public school. Augustus seemed fixed in his work all day long and half the night. Wherever he went he took his sketchbook, filling it with rapid drawings of his fellow students.
In criticizing their monthly compositions one day, Tonks had said he wanted his students to go to the National Gallery more often and look less at the Yellow Book, with its drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. Augustus passed much of his free time at the National Gallery, the British Museum and other permanent collections in London. What he saw in these places overwhelmed him. He could not sort out his ideas, could not decide what excited him most or what suited his own talent best – the treasures of Europe were at the end of a bus ride to Trafalgar Square. He flitted from picture to picture. Should he be a Pre-Raphaelite or a latter-day disciple of Rembrandt? Or both – or something else again? Looking back at this period years later, he concluded: ‘A student should devote himself to one Master only; or one at a time.’7 His earliest master, on whom he began modelling his drawing, was Watteau.
The crowded cosmopolitan streets of London stimulated and confused him during these first months. The pervading smell of chipped potatoes, horse dung and old leather; the leaping naphtha flames along the main roads; the wood-block paving of the streets looking like squares from a Battenburg cake; the glittering multicoloured music halls; the costermongers with their barrows of fruit and flowers; the vendors of pickled eels, ices and meat pies; the jugglers and conjurors who performed for pennies: it was too foreign for him to absorb. He walked everywhere – from Bermondsey to Belgravia, from the narrow streets of cobblestones where chickens scavenged and the shabby slum children played to fashionable Hyde Park where men and women, glossily hatted, rode to and fro, their horses gleaming with health, their coachmen decked out in authoritative livery. It seemed that no encounter was impossible, and every adventure for the asking – if only he had the courage to find his voice.
But he was boorishly shy, and also poor. Most evenings he would return after dark to a dreary little villa, 8 Milton Road, Acton, where he lived with one of his ‘Jesus Christ Aunts’; and every morning he left early on his long day’s journey into town to reach the Slade long before ten o’clock when classes officially began. Occasionally his father would send him a small amount of money and he would hurry off to the music halls. In the melodramas and variety shows at the Alhambra, the Old Mogul, the Metropolitan, the Bedford, Collins’s and Old Sadler’s Wells, where a crowd of students could take a box for a shilling, he sketched the buskers and comedians, including the legendary buffoon Arthur Roberts, and the singers and dancers with their magical names, Cissy Loftus, Cadieux and Mary Belfont, who held him in thrall.8 They were more real than reality. One student later remembered him shouting out his own line in one of the songs, and the singer improvising her refrain to cap it, and then the two of them keeping up the repartee, she in her harsh cockney, he in his vibrant Welsh, among the cheering and stampeding audience. He went to these music halls whenever he could afford it, and sometimes when he could not: and once or twice was ignominiously thrown out.
But he was much alone. On Sundays he would often wander round Speakers’ Corner, listen to the orators, join the crowds and gaze at the outlandish sights – then, bursting with nervous energy, march all the way home. Often he travelled great distances, staring into people’s faces, carrying under his arm one or other of his two favourite books – Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Hamlet.
Increasingly during this first year, he sought the company of two other Slade students, Ambrose McEvoy and Benjamin Evans. McEvoy was a short-sighted youth, with a low dark Phil May fringe, an oddly cracked voice and spare, limp body, who improbably became something of a dandy, with his dancing pumps, monocle, high collar and black suit. In deference to Whistler, he converted himself into an almost perfect ‘arrangement in black and white’. His natural amiability, talent for quick design (which led to early employment as comic-strip draughtsman for a paper called Nuts), and gift for comedy all endeared him to the solitary Augustus.
Benjamin Evans, who had been at the same ‘frightful school’ as Augustus at Clifton, was an intelligent and witty draughtsman, deeply versed in Rembrandt. The three of them went everywhere together. Sometimes they would start out in the small hours of the morning and walk to Hampton Court or Dulwich; then, after breakfasting at a cabman’s pull-up, spend the rest of the day at the picture gallery. At other times they would take their sketchbooks to the anarchist clubs off the Tottenham Court Road. In the mild climate of England, the foreign desperadoes who gathered here seemed to have grown curiously genial. Augustus saw many sinister celebrities including Louise Michel, ‘the Red Virgin’, who had once fought on the barricades during the Paris Commune of 1870 in the uniform of a man, and was now a little old lady in black; and that doyen of revolutionaries, Peter Kropotkin, dressed in a frock coat and radiating goodwill to everyone. Most innocent of all were the American anarchists – not a bomb, not an ounce of nitro-glycerine, between them. The leader of the English group was David Nichols, founder of ‘Freedom’, whose rashest act was to recite some passages from Swinburne in cockney. Despite a vehement Spanish contingent, the general atmosphere was one of sturdy handclasps, singing and dancing, and voluble monologues in indistinct dialects.
Augustus’s tendency was to hero-worship those whom he liked, but since few people are natural heroes, this idolatry was often replaced by an aggressive disillusionment. Friendship with him was an erratic business. McEvoy, once known as the Shelley of British Art, whose ambition, it was later said, was to paint every holder of the Victoria Cross and every leading débutante, became the wrong type of success; and Evans who (Augustus believed) gave up art to became a sanitary engineer, turned out the wrong sort of failure.
Almost the only person who seemed capable of sustaining Augustus’s adulation was Tonks himself. Tonks was a scathing critic, his drastic comments, like amputations, cutting off many a career. ‘What is it?’ he would ask after closely examining some student’s drawing. ‘…What is it? …It is an insect?’ Mere accuracy never satisfied him. ‘Very good,’ he remarked of one competent drawing – then added with a deep sigh: ‘But can’t you see the beauty in that boy’s arm?’ He would reduce many of the students to tears. But behind the Dantesque mask lay a benevolent nature. Sometimes he would have brief flirtations with the girl students, but his lasting passion was for the teaching of drawing and, as Augustus observed, ‘the Slade was his mistress’.9
In Augustus’s second term at the Slade two new teachers arrived. Both taught painting. Philip Wilson Steer was already one of the most celebrated artists in the country, and one of the worst art teachers in the world. But Augustus liked his quiet humour. He was a large, friendly, small-headed, slow-moving man, inarticulate and easygoing. When he was appointed to the Order of Merit he took the insignia along to show Tonks and asked: ‘Have you received one of these?’ Although he was England’s most distinguished living painter, no one would ever guess he painted – or at least he hoped not. He travelled the country with his painting materials locked up in a cricket bag, explaining: ‘I get better service that way.’ It was true that he had studied in Paris, but he never troubled to learn French. England’s most revolutionary artist was a deeply conservative man. He gained a reputation for wisdom yet scarcely ever spoke. Of his own fame he seemed unaware and would refer to his job (if there were no avoiding it) as ‘muddling along with paint’. Yet he could be witty and had a sharp sense of character. ‘Will Rothenstein paints pretty well like the rest of us,’ he once murmured, ‘ – but from higher motives, of course.’ Asked one evening what was wrong with an artist who had made an attempt upon the virtue of a servant girl, and who entered his drawing-room leaning upon a stick, he hazarded: ‘Housemaid’s knee, I suppose.’ His chief enemy was draughts, and to outwit them he would dress, at the height of summer, in a heavy overcoat, yachting cap and policeman’s boots.
At the Slade, Steer gave full expression to his inertia. Students awaiting his criticism as he sat behind them would turn at last to find him apparently asleep. As a result of such methods, Augustus was never taught very seriously to paint. His technique in oils remained rather clumsy at the Slade. But he was impressed by the ‘flickering and voluptuous’ touch with which Steer reworked his students’ paintings and was part of a rococo style that had replaced his impressionistic use of colour.
The other new teacher was Walter Russell, a dry unmemorable man. Only three years after joining Brown’s team, Russell, a member of the New English Art Club, was exhibiting his work at the Royal Academy. Since the New English was the chief rallying ground for opposition to the Academy, and since the Slade of Brown and Tonks was a nursery for this opposition, Russell’s career seems to suggest an extraordinary contradiction. Increasingly he became a link between the Royal Academy and the forces that had set themselves up to oppose it. He remained at the Slade for thirty-two years and was knighted as a senior Academician, his career providing an index to the condition of painting in England.
The ties that Russell formed between the Slade and the Royal Academy enabled new talent to be directed towards the academic tradition of art in Britain. So when at last the ‘Roger Fry rabble’, as Tonks captioned them, advanced across the country after 1910 with their rallying cry of ‘Cézanna!’ they were opposed not just by the diehards at the Royal Academy, but by alert and combative reformers such as Tonks, who had behind him some of the most gifted young artists in the country and who, for the next twenty years, fought a vigorous defensive campaign against the invasion of Post-Impressionism, futurism and all abstract art. ‘It is interesting to observe, and this is a fine lesson, how degradation sets in at once with the coming in of contempt for Nature,’ Tonks wrote to the artist Albert Rutherston (5 January 1932). ‘We are no good without it, we are like children, without guardians. The last twenty years have been I believe the worst on record, speaking generally, and because of this Roger Fry has upset the applecart.’
Those who, like Augustus, owed their loyalty to Tonks, were to find that the solid ground under their feet was no longer connected to the mainland of contemporary art. ‘I was never apprenticed to a master whom I might follow humbly and perhaps overtake.’ Tonks, remarkable man though he was, could only act as go-between, pointing his way back to the Old Masters. But the Old Masters were many, and all of them were dead. Augustus needed a living master. With patience, he might have found a new guardian for his talent. But in the summer of 1895 he suffered an accident, the long-term effects of which were to remove the quality of patience he needed.
‘The Slade continues to produce geniuses, we turn them out every year.’
Henry Tonks to Ronald Gray (November 1901)
Augustus was happy at the Slade. In his second year he won a certificate for figure drawing, a prize for advanced antique drawing and, much to his father’s gratification, a Slade scholarship of thirty-five pounds a year for two years. But at home he was discontented. Never had Tenby seemed so provincial, Victoria House so mean and squalid. Whenever possible he would avoid staying there, and go off on expeditions in Wales and England, and later to Belgium and Holland, with his two friends Ambrose McEvoy and Benjamin Evans.
When it was not possible to escape, he occasionally invited a friend down to share his exile. One winter his fellow student Michel Salaman came for a week. It was an alarming holiday. Salaman was the same age as Augustus and belonged to a large and distinguished red-haired fox-hunting family that had made its fortune in ostrich feathers. The atmosphere of Victoria House was unlike anything he had experienced. Edwin, very dry and upright, made all conversation, even in whispers, sound a vulgarity. Thornton appeared to be a sort of hobbledehoy, utterly miserable when not playing cards. Winifred seemed dull and musical except in the presence of Gwen, when the two girls would giggle continuously, much to Salaman’s dismay. Gus, he thought, was quite out of place in these strange surroundings. Between dismal meals, the two boys would hurry off to the caves where Gus flew from rock to rock with the most agile and dangerous leaps. They also penetrated deep into the blackness of these caves, using up all their matches and unnerving Salaman with the thought that they’d be discovered, two heaps of bones, fifty years later. On another occasion, seeing a navvy who was bullying a child in the street, Augustus strode up and, while Salaman looked on in horror, put a stop to the affair by challenging the navvy to a fight. By the end of his visit Salaman was exhausted. He never went back.
At the beginning of the summer holidays of 1895 Augustus set off on a camping trip round Pembrokeshire with McEvoy, Evans and a donkey. It was in keeping with his Whitmanesque spirit of freedom. At Haverfordwest they fell in with a party of Irish tinkers ‘rich in the wisdom of the road’; at Solva they were taught by a tramp how to snare rabbits. They drank beer in wayside inns, entered themselves unsuccessfully in village regattas, joined with more success in old-fashioned games ‘which included a good deal of singing and kissing’,10 and painted ‘the Rape of the Sabine Women’. It was an exhilarating summer. ‘My friends and myself are encamped in a place called Newgate with two cottages and one partially built and a stretch of sand two miles long,’ Augustus wrote to another student, Ursula Tyrwhitt.
‘The Atlantic continually plays music on the beach. Outside browses the Donkey, our hope and pride. On this animal we depend to draw our cart and baggage… Outside the tent the odour of the fragrant onion arises on the summer air, it is McEvoy who cooks. One night we slept under the eternal stars, one of which alone was visible – Venus – and that I regret was placed exactly over my head.’
When they arrived back in Tenby, McEvoy and Evans left for London. Augustus expected to join them again shortly at the Slade. Meanwhile he had to steel himself for a week or two at Victoria House. The boredom was excruciating. He felt tempted to do all manner of wild things, but did nothing – there was nothing to do. One afternoon towards the end of his vacation he went to bathe on the South Sands with Gwen, Winifred and their friend Irene Mackenzie. The tide was far out but on the turn, and he decided to go off on his own and practise diving from Giltar Point. He climbed the rock and looked down. The surface of the water was strewn with seaweed. He stripped off his clothes and dived in. ‘Instantly I was made aware of my folly,’ he later wrote. ‘The impact of my skull on a hidden rock was terrific. The universe seemed to explode!’11 Possibly because of the cold water he did not lose consciousness and somehow managed to drag himself to the shore. Part of his scalp had been torn away and lay flapping over one eye. The ebb and flow of his blood was everywhere. He did what first aid he could, dressed slowly, turbaned his towel round his head and set off back to the South Sands. ‘Presently he came running back,’ Irene Mackenzie recalled, ‘with blood pouring from his forehead.’12 Edwin, who had joined his daughters on the beach, was greatly alarmed. They must get him back to the privacy of the house as discreetly as possible. Augustus was already feeling very weak. They hurried him back by a curious zig-zag route to his bed. Here he seems to have lost consciousness for a time. The next thing he knew was that he was being examined, rather to his gratification, not by the family’s usual practitioner, but by Dr Lock, a far more eminent and romantic figure. Dr Lock stitched his wound, told him that he probably owed his life to his uncommonly thick skull, and left. Little more needed to be done. It was essential, however, that he have a period of convalescence in Victoria House. This ‘durance vile’13 was by far the worst part of his accident. ‘As my brain clears I find my confinement here more galling,’ he complained to Ursula Tyrwhitt.
‘But I’m healing like a dog – the doctor is amazed at the way I heal. The wound is the worst of its kind he has had to deal with. If I appear at all cracked at any time in the future, I trust you will put it down to my knock on the head and not to any original madness. The worst part of it is the beef tea, I think. I am not allowed to remain long in peace without the slavey bearing in an enormous cup of that beverage… Man cannot live by beef tea alone.’
The students gathered at the Slade, but Augustus was not among them. Even Gwen had gone to London. He perspired with impatience. His wound was healing, it seemed, by the force of willpower. Even so it was a slow business. For a time Augustus tried working on his own. ‘I have been doing sketches for a Poster for cocoa,’ he told Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘…It’s great fun, but difficult – like everything else.’ Then suddenly he tired of this: ‘I’m sick of doing comic sketches… I don’t feel in a comic mood at all.’ His feelings were of colossal tedium and colossal revolt. Once he was free from this appalling imprisonment he would do such things… In the meantime: ‘I am horribly dull. I was hoping for some signs that my brain was affected – a little madness is so enlivening. I do hope this dullness is not permanent.’
His handwriting in these letters to Ursula Tyrwhitt grows increasingly wild and there are drawings of himself, like a wounded soldier, with a bandage round his head and the beginnings of a beard. ‘You must have lots of news to tell me, if only you would,’ he pleads. ‘I am insatiable.’ And when Ursula does write to him he calls her ‘an angel’ and feels better. ‘In fact I got up this morning before the doctor came and he was quite annoyed… they’ve cut away a great patch of my hair which will look funny I daresay. I’m longing to see a good picture again… I’m going to paint next term. Hurrah! How exciting it is… I feel sure another letter would complete the cure.’
His own letters also contain a rather tentative declaration of love. He recalls the last romantic evening of the summer term. ‘How the strawberries sweetened one’s sorrow! – how the roses made one’s despair almost acceptable! How you extinguished everybody at the Soirée! Before you came it was night – a starry beautiful night, but you brought as it were the dawn which made the stars turn pale and flee, remaining alone with its own glorious roseate luminescence. Selah!’
At first he is merely in love with love itself, but soon he becomes more practical. He wants to extract from her ‘like a tooth’ the pledge that he may keep company with her once he returns. Is he to be allowed ‘to take you home’, he asks. ‘I mean to accompany you?’ In return he will lend her his Rembrandt book. They must have an understanding.
When he does go back to the Slade that autumn he is transformed. Upon his head he wears a smoking-cap of black velvet and gold embroidery to conceal his wound; and round his cheeks and chin sprout small tufts of red hair. He had become, Ethel Hatch noticed, extremely untidy – quite unlike the spruce, clean-shaven youth whom she had met the previous year.
The Augustus John legend was beginning.
This legend is a good example of how a remarkable man may be simplified into a popular myth. In the public imagination he was to represent the Great Artist, the Great Lover and the Great Bohemian. It was an ironic comment on his actual career, one which he did not accept himself but never effectively contradicted.
The story is perhaps more succinctly told on the back of a Brooke Bond tea card, as one of a series of fifty Famous People. Here Virginia Shankland wrote that Augustus John ‘hit his head on a rock whilst diving, and emerged from the water a genius!’14 To this must be added one further ingredient of the legend, perhaps not palatable to Brooke Bond tea drinkers. ‘As a man he was larger than life-size,’ wrote a Daily Telegraph leader writer. ‘Even while still young his prowess with the fair sex was legendary and the stories about him legion. He attacked everything with vigour.’15
It seems clear that from 1897 onwards Augustus was a changed man. He was changed not only in appearance, but also in his work and behaviour. In his first year at the Slade, Tonks had described his work as ‘methodical’. Now his drawings, remarkable for their firm, fluent, lyrical line, and executed with assurance and spontaneity, seemed to promise a new force in British art. What excited his contemporaries was ‘his skill in making very beautiful line drawings of nudes and of portrait heads’, writes the critic A. D. Fraser Jenkins. His large life studies revealed great delicacy and he continued ‘compulsively to draw from the female nude. In drawing with line rather than shadow, John turned his attention to the rhythm of the outline, and his fascination with this later became dominant.’16 Spencer Gore, who went up to the Slade in 1896, remembered him making ‘hundreds of the most elaborate and careful drawings… sketch-books full of the drawings of people’s arms and feet, of guitars and pieces of furniture, copies of old masters’. Whenever he moved his rooms, people would go and pick up the ‘torn-up scraps on the floor which was always littered with them & piece them together. I know people who got many wonderful drawings that way.’17
As his beard formed, so his clothes became shabbier, his manner more unpredictable. For long periods he was still very quiet: but suddenly there would be a rush of high spirits, some outrageous exploit: then again silence. In his earlier years, according to Edwin, he had been ‘a happy healthy child, not at all given to brooding or moodiness, who loved games and in every way was much the same as other children… a docile tractable child not subject to passionate outbursts’.18 Edwin was anxious to present the picture of an ordinary respectable family. But Augustus’s energies were increasingly directed against everything he held in common with his father, and in appearance he now began to resemble what Wyndham Lewis was to call ‘a great man of action into whose hands the fairies had stuck a brush instead of a sword’.
Augustus disliked this description, for much the same reason that he disliked the portrait painted of him in 1900 by William Orpen,19 which did not show the uncertain, dreamy person he knew himself to be. Already by then he was paling to invisibility in the sunlight of the John reputation. ‘I am just a legend,’ he once said. ‘I am not a real person at all.’
The essence of Augustus’s performance at the Slade, which was to nourish this larger-than-life legend, was impatience. His bang on the head had not infected him with a genius for draughtsmanship. Augustus himself described the theory of a rock releasing hidden springs of genius as ‘nonsense’, and he added: ‘I was in no way changed, unless my fitful industry with its incessant setbacks, my wool-gathering and squandering of time, my emotional ups and downs and general inconsequence can be charitably imputed to this mishap.’20
The claustrophobia of his convalescence was what most strongly affected him. It did not confer extra qualities, but magnified certain traits, leaving him with an obsession against being confined and an additional sense of isolation. He was unable to tolerate stress, but had to outpace his anxieties. The assurance of his early drawings testifies to the speed with which he did them. His natural doubts and hesitations had no time to crowd in on him and when they began to do so, he put on an extra burst of speed. In a letter written by Charles Morgan to the art critic D. S. MacColl, he recalled some words of Wilson Steer’s: ‘Do you remember that drawing by John? It was done at a time when he drew with many lines and many of those lines were superfluous or even wrong, but then at the last moment, he would select among them and emphasize those which were right, and so, by an act of genius save a drawing which, in the hands of any other man, would have become a mess and a failure.’ This technique of acceleration served him magnificently while he was still young. He raised the standard of work at the Slade, lifted other students to a new level. ‘We can’t teach students,’ acknowledged Frederick Brown, ‘they learn from one another.’
It was the vitality and restlessness that impressed other students. Everything seemed to contribute to his God-like aspect: his very name, Augustus, suggested the deified Roman Emperor.21 By his eighteenth birthday he was an imposing figure: a picturesque figure nearly six feet tall, with a Christ-like beard, roving eyes and beautiful hands with long nervous fingers that gave a look of intelligence to everything he did. He was not talkative. But sometimes his eyes would light up, and he would speak eloquently in a deep flowing Welsh voice.
Physically he was the stuff from which heroes are made, and the age was right for theatrical heroes. From Oscar Wilde, who put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, to the Sitwells with their genius for publicity, English civilization was presenting a fantastic gallery of ‘characters’ – dandies and eccentrics, prophets and impresarios of the arts. The age was becoming more mechanical, personal liberty restricted, behaviour uniform. The collective frustration of Edwardian England was soon to focus upon Augustus and elect him as a symbol of free man. Through him people lived out their fantasies; for what they dared not do, it seemed he did fearlessly and instinctively. There was nothing mechanical, nothing restricted or uniform about him; there was mildness. Wyndham Lewis, who first saw him at the Slade, was to describe Augustus as ‘the most notorious nonconformist England has known for a long time.
‘Following in the footsteps of Borrow, he was one of those people who always set out to do the thing that “is not done”, according to the British canon. He swept aside the social conventions, which was a great success, and he became a public lion practically on the spot. There was another reason for this lionization (which is why he has remained a lion): he happened to be an unusually fine artist.
Such a combination was rare… Here was one who had gigantic ear-rings, a ferocious red beard, a large angry eye, and who barked beautifully at you from his proud six foot, and, marvellously, was a great artist too. He was reported to like women and wine and song and to be by birth a gypsy.’22
The triumphal progress had started.
‘We were much together on and off.’
Augustus John, Chiaroscuro
No one could have appeared more at odds with Augustus than his sister Gwen. Physically, she looked fragile. Her figure was slender; she had tiny hands and feet; her oval face was very pale, and her soft Pembrokeshire voice almost inaudible. She dressed carefully in dark colours, and latterly in black. Her hair was brown, neatly arranged, with a bow on top. But this modest impression was corrected by a look of extreme determination. The receding John chin, which Augustus now camouflaged, seemed to symbolize Gwen’s withdrawn nature. Socially ill at ease, she presented an air of aloofness.
Both their personalities were elusive: hers, in its reticence, manifestly so; his, more deceptively behind the theatricality of his ‘reputation’. Despite appearances, they had much in common – an essentially simple interpretation of life, a singular sensitivity to beauty: the beauty of nature and of people, especially women, sometimes the same women. ‘With our common contempt for sentimentality, Gwen and I were not opposites but much the same really, but we took a different attitude,’ Augustus later wrote. ‘I am rarely “exuberant”. She was always so; latterly in a tragic way. She wasn’t chaste or subdued, but amorous and proud. She didn’t steal through life but preserved a haughty independence which people mistook for humility. Her passions for both men and women were outrageous and irrational.’23
Both, in their fashion, were set apart. But Augustus’s separateness had been complicated by his partial deafness and made hysterical by the aftermath of his bathing accident. There was a disconnectedness to much that he did. Unlike Gwen, he could not bear to contain his emotions, but had to disburden himself immediately. So, although they were confronted by many similar problems, their methods of dealing with them differed.
Before Augustus had been at the Slade many months, he was urging Gwen to join him. Her need to escape from Victoria House was as compelling as his had been, and, as he later implied, she would have joined him anyway: ‘She wasn’t going to be left out of it!’24 But there was the matter of persuading her father. Finishing schools for girls, especially in London, were a mark of social prestige. But art schools were more problematical. The Female School of Art and Design turned out to be mainly a craft academy training students as professional designers, while Queen’s and Bedford Colleges offered only a few drawing classes for women. There were also some private art schools which prepared women for the Royal Academy Schools, which had reluctantly admitted them ten years earlier – yet they still excluded them from the Life Room. The Slade was an obvious choice. The insistence on high seriousness and its connection with a university were reassuring. The women came from good families and were said to be brought there each morning by carriages or escorted by servants – a duty that Gus could freely undertake for Gwen. The Life Class itself was always conducted in silence, with the professor alone permitted to speak. Altogether it sounded an excellent establishment.
So Gwen came to London, staying first at ‘Miss Philpot’s Educational Establishment’ at 10 Princes Square, Bayswater. But during the autumn of 1895, when she started to attend the Slade, she moved to 23 Euston Square,*1 near University College. By this time Augustus had left Acton, his paganism having proved too much for his aunt, and was living at 20 Montague Place, a superior lodging house in a street of temperance hotels, private apartments and the occasional bootmaker or surgeon. In Chiaroscuro he described himself and Gwen sharing rooms together a little later and, like monkeys, living off fruit and nuts. Early in 1897 they took the first-floor flat of 21 Fitzroy Street, a house that had recently been bought by a Mrs Everett, mother of one of their friends at the Slade, who hurriedly converted it from a brothel (the proprietress of which had described herself as ‘feather dresser’) into a series of flats and studios. Here they seem to have lived intermittently for over a year, sharing it with Grace Westray, another Slade student, and with Winifred John who had then come up to London to study music. Apart from this, and a flat over a tobacconist’s in which they lived briefly after leaving the Slade, the only rooms they shared were other people’s. They were close to each other, yet it was not practicable for them to remain together long.
Although Gwen seldom appeared to take Gus’s advice and sometimes ridiculed his opinions (such as that she substitute an ‘athletic’ for her ‘unhygienic’ way of life) she was agitated by his presence, being unable to retain her single-mindedness when he was near. In any case they dared not stay too close – there was the danger of emotional trespass with all its trailing difficulties of guilt and regret. In her letters to him Gwen would occasionally call Gus ‘dear love’ and Gus would occasionally send her ‘a kiss’. They understood each other: but their ‘attitudes’ being so different they also upset each other. Gus’s impatient and demanding personality influenced Gwen when they were together so that she would adopt his ‘attitude’ rather than developing her own. Like him, she loved the sea, but later trained herself to paint indoors, often solitary figures, even empty rooms, sometimes a child praying in church, a vase of flowers on a table, a wide-awake cat on a cushion – all simple love objects. But Gus could never bear to stay indoors. ‘I feel acutely what I am missing all the time shut up in my studio,’ he told Robert Gregory, ‘ – all the sights & delights of the high road or any road...’25 So while she, shunning delight and living laborious days, would gather herself in solitude, he was off along all roads and any roads that might lead him to visions and symbols of what he missed: phantasmagorical gatherings of open-air men and women – gypsies, strollers, musicians and mothers with children of around the age he had been when his mother died: all dreams of wish-fulfilment. In actual life Gus agreed with Gwen that ‘loneliness is a great thing… let your neighbour be at the other end of the earth.’26 But he wanted to transcend actual life in his imagination and to lose himself perpetually in other people; whereas Gwen, desiring a more interior life, wanted to ‘go and live somewhere’, as she confided to their friend Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘where I met nobody I know till I am so strong that people and things could not affect me beyond reason’.27
People were frequently threatening to affect Gwen beyond reason, and she did not recover from her passions so easily as Gus appeared to do. ‘I was born to love,’28 she wrote, but how could she put all this energy of loving into her work? While at the Slade she formed an attachment to another girl.29 When this girl began a love affair with a married man, Gwen decided that it must be stopped. Failing to persuade her, she declared an ultimatum: either the affair must cease or she herself would commit suicide. There was no doubting her sincerity. ‘The atmosphere of our group now became almost unbearable,’ Augustus records, ‘with its frightful tension, its terrifying excursions and alarms. Had my sister gone mad? At one moment Ambrose McEvoy thought so, and, distraught himself, rushed to tell me the dire news: but Gwen was only in a state of spiritual exaltation, and laughed at my distress.’30
From dramatic involvements of this kind Gwen had to protect herself. Only then could she control her energy, limit misfortunes and pursue her search for ‘the strange form’.31 She had to fight the terrible tendency towards ‘impatience and angoisse’32 she shared with Gus, learn to prepare slowly and paint quickly. In this lifelong acquiring of patience lay her belief that ‘my vision will have some value in the world… I think it will count because I am patient and recueillée in some degree.’33
She was not naturally sombre – Augustus testifies to her ‘native gaiety and humour’. Ruthless towards those who bothered her – ‘I will not be troubled by people’34 – she remained obstinately vulnerable to those whom she loved and admired. ‘I am ridiculous,’ she wrote. ‘I can’t refuse anything that is asked of me.’35
About Augustus’s pictures Gwen said little – neither of them talked to each other much about painting. Besides she was always being sent newspaper cuttings from her father about Gus’s spectacular successes. But in a letter she sent Ursula Tyrwhitt in the winter of 1914–15 she wrote: ‘I think them rather good. They want something which perhaps will come soon!’ Of her work Augustus was a consistent admirer from early days. ‘Gwen has done a wonderful masterpiece,’ he wrote to Michel Salaman of her ‘Self-Portrait in a Red Blouse’36 in 1902. In his last years, after Gwen had died, this admiration curdled into a sentimentalized concoction – ‘Fifty years after my death I shall be remembered as Gwen John’s brother’ – reminiscent of Bernard Shaw’s theatrical exit line after his visit to Meudon (‘Shaw, Bernard: subject of a bust by Rodin: otherwise unknown’).37 Yet Augustus’s admiration was genuine, often expressed and acted upon during her lifetime. ‘I have seen him peer fixedly, almost obsessively, at pictures by Gwen as though he could discern in them his own temperament in reverse,’ John Rothenstein recalls: ‘as though he could derive from the act satisfaction in his own wider range, greater natural endowment, tempestuous energy, and at the same time be reproached by her single-mindedness, her steadiness of focus, above all by the sureness with which she attained her simpler aims.’38
*
Round Gwen and Gus there soon gathered a group of talented young artists. A new spirit of comradeship, unknown in Legros’s time, invaded the Slade. ‘The girls were supreme,’ Augustus recalled. Among this ‘remarkably brilliant group of women students’, in what Augustus called ‘the Grand Epoch of the Slade’, were Ida Nettleship and Gwen Salmond,39 the latter a self-possessed and outspoken girl whose ‘Descent from the Cross’ was much admired. But perhaps the most precocious of all was Edna Waugh, very pretty and petite and with long hair down to her waist, who had gone there in 1893 at the age of fourteen, won a scholarship and in 1897 scored a dramatic triumph with her watercolour ‘The Rape of the Sabines’, showing women in traumatic positions being carried off by strange men for ‘purposes unspecified’. She was proclaimed an infant prodigy, another Slade School ‘genius’. The poetic imaginings with which she filled her notebooks particularly impressed Tonks, with whom she was a favourite and who predicted she would be a second Burne-Jones, to which she replied that on the contrary she would be ‘the first Edna Waugh’. But to many people’s dismay she did not long remain Edna Waugh.
For no one, unless it was to be Augustus’s own wife, better illustrated the heavy burdens of domesticity upon artistic endeavour. In the spring of 1896, a young barrister, William Clarke Hall, had written to Edna’s parents formally requesting permission to propose marriage to her. He was more than a dozen years older than she was, but had admired her since she was thirteen – ‘the child for whom of all things in the world I care most’. This was a big shock for Edna. She liked Willie when he used to come and see her father. She was struck by his piercing blue eyes, but could not tell whether or not she loved him. Did she like him simply because he worshipped her so extravagantly? She was so young she did not know what she felt. ‘You occupy more than half my imaginings,’ she assured him. But he, offended by her fractional hesitation, accused her of being ‘completely self-absorbed’; and because he ‘seemed so much more mature than myself, she felt he must be able to ‘understand so truly what is wrong with me’. Her mother considered her to be engaged and so apparently did everyone else. So presumably she was – at any rate it seemed inevitable. ‘Don’t bother your head whether you care for Willie with lasting love,’ her friend Ida Nettleship counselled her, ‘…when you love you will know.’ But Edna did not know, perhaps because, as Ida explained to William Clarke Hall, ‘it’s a child’s love that Edna bears you.’40
In her last year at the Slade, Edna asked Gwen John for advice on oil painting. Gwen had learnt from Ambrose McEvoy the Old Master technique of putting on fluid paint in layers, modifying the underlying colour (a green monochrome wash) with a series of semi-transparent glazes. But Edna found that this ‘was not the right medium for me’, and that ink and watercolour suited her best. Her talent had more in common with Augustus’s. ‘I wanted to draw a subject quickly,’ she wrote, ‘seize it, convey my impression.’41 The aim of all these students on leaving the Slade was to have their pictures exhibited by the New English Art Club. Early in 1899 Gus and Edna, the two hares in the race, would be the first to get their work accepted. It was the beginning and almost the end of Edna’s artistic life. For, a few months earlier, on 22 December 1898, she became the first of this group of students to be married. William Clarke Hall was thirty-two, Edna nineteen: a confused Victorian adolescent bride desperately missing her artistic friends and feeling ‘in a shadow full of weight and strange lurking despair’.42
Beside these women, according to Augustus, ‘the male students cut a poor figure.’ Chief among them was William Orpen, the son of an Irish solicitor, who arrived at the Slade in 1897 encrusted with prizes from the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. With his arrival, a new force made itself felt in Gower Street. It was the force, primarily, of tireless industry and ambition. Orpen was a gnome-like, slim and active figure, very popular with the other students. His high cheekbones were given prominence by sunken pale cheeks, light grey eyes, and thick brown unkempt hair. He wore a small blue serge jacket without lapels – of a type usually worn by engineers. In 1899, he was to win the Summer Composition Prize with his outstanding ‘The Play Scene in Hamlet’, which uses the open auditorium of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre to depict a rehearsal of Act III with diverse groups of figures, including Augustus embracing Ida Nettleship. But his father had by now had enough of his son’s painting and gave him the alternative of taking up some serious business or being cut off with a hundred pounds. Orpen took the hundred pounds and never looked back. There seemed nothing he could not accomplish. He was a devoted disciple of William Rothenstein, and after a successful proposal of marriage was to become his brother-in-law. Later, while in Ireland working as an art teacher, he met an American patron, a specimen comparatively rare before the transatlantic jet. This was the stylishly beautiful Mrs St George, who became his mistress and the guide to his successful professional career. ‘You are certainly the most wonderful thing that ever happened,’ he acknowledged.43
At first Augustus took to Orpen. He was an easy companion, spontaneous, whimsical, high-spirited. But after Orpen became what Augustus called ‘the protégé of big business’, their ways diverged. Orpen himself was modest about his talent. He did not seek to rival John Singer Sargent whose position as England’s pre-eminent portrait painter nevertheless would come to him as next in succession. ‘I am not fit to tie Augustus John’s shoe-laces,’44 he told Robert Gregory in 1910. Yet even in these early days at the Slade, people, it was said, came to praise John’s pictures but went away with Orpen’s.*2 He cut his hair short as a soldier’s, perched on his shaven dome a small bowler hat, encircled his neck with a stiff white collar and worked like a businessman. The artist, Augustus believed, was lost to sight.
Orpen had few prejudices, fewer opinions. His rapid-fire, staccato conversation had about it the suggestion of epigrams but was confined to subjects of triviality. If the talk threatened to turn serious, he would fall into extravagant feats of horseplay. It was not beyond him to get down on all fours at dinner and bark like a dog, or to produce from his pocket some new mechanical toy and set it spinning across the table. He also developed, his nephew John Rothenstein remembers, a ‘habit of speaking of himself, in the third person, as “little Orps” or even as “Orpsie boy”. It would be difficult to imagine a more effective protection against intimacy.’45 He caricatured the collective wish of all these Slade students to stay young forever. Even his professional career was somehow juvenile. Money, fame, success were like delicious sweets to him: he could not resist them.
Orpen and Augustus were often together during these student days, and in 1898 they were joined by a third companion, Albert Rutherston.*3 ‘Little Albert’, as he was called, was the younger brother of William Rothenstein, very pink and small and regarded as rather a rake. ‘Not content with working all day,’ William Rothenstein recorded, ‘they used to meet in some studio and draw at night. They picked up strange and unusual models; but I was shy, after seeing John’s brilliant nudes, of drawing in his company.’46
Above the studio at 21 Fitzroy Street lived their landlady, Mrs Everett, an improbable woman in her forties, fat and vigorous, her cheeks aflame, her eyes intensely blue, unevenly dressed in widow’s weeds and men’s boots. Her son Henry and niece Kathleen Herbert had recently gone to the Slade where she now attempted to join them, arriving with a Gladstone bag containing one large bible, a loaf of bread, Spanish dagger, spirit lamp and saucepan, and a dilapidated eighteenth-century volume on art. Here was a phenomenon unique in Tonks’s experience. In desperation he banished her to the Skeleton Room in the cellar of the Slade. Interpreting this as a privilege, she garishly transformed the place by introducing there various brass Buddhas, stuffed peacocks and a small organ, two grandfather armchairs loosely covered with gold-encrusted priests’ vestments and a slow-dying palm tree, like a monstrous spider, from which she suspended religious texts decorated and mounted on cardboard. Some nights she slept there; some days she entertained her pack of dogs there; often, night or day, her voice could be heard among the skeletons singing lustily: ‘Oh, make those dry bones live again, Great Lord of Hosts!’ – to which the students above would add their refrain, clapping wildly and chanting ribald choruses.
Excommunicated at last from the Slade, Mrs Everett started a ‘Sunday School’ in the converted brothel at Fitzroy Street. Here, and later at 101 Charlotte Street, she encouraged the art students to gather for bread and jam, hot sweet tea and intimate talk of the Almighty. These teas or ‘bun-worries’, as they were called, were lively affairs, especially when Augustus and Orpen turned up, and would last late into the night, culminating in the singing of ‘Are You Washed?’ with its confident refrain: ‘Yes, I’m washed!’ For Augustus the atmosphere was uncomfortably like that surrounding his Salvationist aunts, but Mrs Everett was such a fascinating subject to draw from so many angles that he often came. ‘One lovely day early in May,’ Ethel Hatch remembered,
‘Mrs Everett invited us all to a picnic in the country… she met us with a large yellow farm cart, she herself was wearing a sun-bonnet, and the driver a smock… After lunch we wandered about in the lovely park and grounds, and some of them ran races round the trees; John was a very good runner, and most graceful. I can see him now, chasing a red-haired girl through the trees at the bottom of the lawn.
…afterwards a photograph was taken of the party in the wagon, with John sitting astride a horse. I shall never forget the journey home in the train, when John and Orpen entertained us by standing up in the carriage singing all the latest songs from Paris, with a great deal of action.’47
At another of her gatherings, Mrs Everett, drawing on her artistic knowledge, extolled John’s great talent and informed him: ‘God loves you.’ But Augustus, suddenly embarrassed, mumbled: ‘I don’t think he has bestowed any particular favours on me.’ He was overwhelmed during this period by avalanches of flattery. When Tonks declared that he would be the greatest draughtsman since Michelangelo, he replied simply: ‘I can’t agree with what you said.’ It was this modesty that helped to endear him to his fellow students. One summer big baskets of roses were imported to decorate the gaunt walls of the Slade. ‘Several of us were standing about outside the Portrait Room with baskets of festoons,’ Edna Clarke Hall remembered.48 ‘…We were considering a pedestal, from which the statue for some unknown reason had been removed, when Profesor Tonks came suddenly out of the Portrait Class. He stopped and from his height looked down on me, and with one of his sardonic smiles and indicating the empty pedestal asked “Is that for John?”’49
Excelling au premier coup, Augustus went on collecting certificates and prizes at the Slade; and Gwen, too, was successful, most notably winning the Melville Nettleship Prize for figure composition.50 When Sargent, the American portrait painter then at the height of his fame in London, visited the Slade, he said that Augustus’s drawings were beyond anything that had been done since the Italian Renaissance. ‘Not only were his drawings of heads and of the nude masterly,’ wrote William Rothenstein, ‘he poured out compositions with extraordinary ease; he had the copiousness which goes with genius, and he himself had the eager understanding, the imagination, the readiness for intellectual and physical adventure one associates with genius.’51
After leaving the Slade in the late afternoon, Gus and his friends McEvoy and Salaman, Ursula Tyrwhitt and Edna Waugh, would go back to his rooms and continue drawing and painting and acting as one another’s models. ‘Their faces, seen through one another’s eyes,’ wrote Mary Taubman, ‘and especially through the eyes of Augustus John, are part of our consciousness of that famous epoch in the Slade’s history.’52 On one famous occasion when Augustus lost his key, he leapt on to the railings in front of the house and then, like a monkey, scaled up the outside of the building to the top floor. Having got through an attic window, a minute later he was opening the door to the other students standing there amazed by his acrobatics.
In 1897, when Augustus was nineteen, Tonks offered his students a prize for copies after Rubens, Watteau, Michelangelo and Raphael. Augustus won it with a charcoal study after Watteau. His dexterity was dazzling. Whatever style he adopted, he did it supremely well and his work seemed to act on the other students as a catalyst. Before joining the Slade he had studied reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in magazines and been enormously impressed by them. Now this influence was passing. Gainsborough had become his favourite British artist; but he had also developed an admiration for Reynolds, in particular his power of combining fine design with psychological insight. The more he saw, the more he admired. He would, he told William Rothenstein, have given ‘five years to watch Titian paint a picture’. But at the same time he claimed that ‘J. F. Millet was a master I bowed before.’ But Watteau was probably still the chief influence upon him, though he was about to be introduced by William Rothenstein to the work of Goya whom he later considered superior to all these. Rothenstein’s book on Goya opened up for Augustus a venturous world on which he would have liked to model his own career.
He was contemptuous of convention but admired tradition. ‘We may say that the whole of art which preceded it has influenced the work of John, in the sense that he has continued a universal tradition,’ wrote the critic T. W. Earp. But although he was an amalgam of so many Old Masters, he was beginning to produce unmistakable ‘Johns’. After years of anecdotal Victorian pictures, his lightning facility was extraordinarily refreshing. He wanted to register the mood of a passing moment in a fit of seeing. His drawings were less analyses of character than aesthetic statements. Draughtsmanship was not primarily for him an intellectual exercise, but a matter of passionate observation involving the co-ordination of hand, eye and brain.53 ‘Does it not seem,’ he once asked, ‘as if the secret of the artist lies in the prolongation of the age of adolescence with whatever increase of technical skill and sophistication the lessons of the years may bring?’54
But while his drawings and pastels improved, his paintings remained uncertain. He found it difficult to control his palette. The Slade had taught him little of the relation of one colour to another and he had no natural sense of tone. Sometimes he would ruin a picture for the sake of a gesture which took his fancy.
In the autumn of 1898 he set off with Evans and McEvoy for Amsterdam, where a large Rembrandt exhibition was being held at the Stedelijk Museum. ‘This was a great event,’ he recorded. ‘As I bathed myself in the light of the Dutchman’s genius, the scales of aesthetic romanticism fell from my eyes, disclosing a new and far more wonderful world.’55 They slept in a lodging house, wandered by the canals of old Amsterdam, lived off herrings and schnapps, and every day went to the galleries and museums. It was now that the last wraiths of Pre-Raphaelitism, the spell of Malory’s dim and lovely world, faded in his imagination and began to be replaced by the poetry of common humanity. Not long afterwards, he travelled through Belgium with the same companions, immersing himself in the Flemish masters for whom he also felt an affinity. ‘Bruges, Anvers, Gand, Bruxelles have seen me and I have beheld them,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘Rubens I have expostulated with, been chidden by, and loved. Jack Jordaens has been my boon companion and I have wept beside the Pump of Quinton Matzys.’
He returned to Tenby. Edwin had recently moved from 32 Victoria Street to a house round the corner in South Cliff Street. Southbourne, as it was called, was almost identical to Victoria House: a similar narrow, dark, cube-like prison. Augustus felt all the old sensations of claustrophobia, the panic and emptiness. ‘An exile in my native place I greet you from afar and tearfully,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein.
‘Rain has set in and I feel cooped up and useless. What we have seen of the country has been wonderful. But it is ten minutes walk to the rocky landscape with figures.
Pembrokeshire has never appeared so fine to me before, nor the town so smugly insignificant, nor the paternal roof so tedious and compromising a shelter. Trinkets which in a lodging house would be amusing insult my eye here and the colloquy of the table compels in me a blank mask of attention only relieved now and then by hysterical and unreasonable laughter.
The great solace is to crouch in the gloom of a deserted brick kiln amongst the debris of gypsies and excrete under the inspiration of lush Nature without, to the accompaniment of a score of singing birds.
I hope to quit this place shortly and come home to London where I can paint off my humours.’
In a letter to Michel Salaman of about the same date Augustus wrote: ‘I intend coming up to London in a week or so when I shall start that Holy Moses treat.’ He had chosen, from among the alternatives set for the Slade Summer Competition that year, Poussin’s theme ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’. The bustling bravura composition he now produced, five feet by seven feet, was by far his most ambitious painting as a student. Heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance, the composition is very obviously an exercise – ‘an anthology of influences’ Andrew Forge described it – and, though not wholly imitative, it lacks the originality of, say, Stanley Spencer’s prize paintings at the Slade a few years later, ‘The Apple Gatherers’ and ‘The Nativity’. Built up from individual life studies and showing Augustus’s debt to Wilson Steer, its dramatic effect resembles a sixteenth-century mannerist painting. ‘It is a competition style in which the figures are drawn in particularly difficult poses,’ writes A. D. Fraser Jenkins, ‘and in many of them are pastiches, no doubt unintentionally, of figures by Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Raphael and other old masters.’56 This tour de force of eclecticism won Augustus the Summer Prize and he left the Slade in glory.
Two years before, while he was at work in the Life Class, Augustus had seen Brown usher in a jaunty little man in black, wearing a monocle: James McNeill Whistler. ‘It is difficult to imagine the excitement that name aroused in those days,’ he recalled.57 They had all heard and read so much about this miniature Mephistopheles; had spent so many hours in the Print Room of the British Museum studying his etchings of the Thames and of Venice; had seen in the galleries from time to time some reticent new stain from his brush – the image of a tired old gentleman sitting by a wall, or a young one obtruding no more than cuffs and a violin; or of a jeune fille poised in immobility, or some dim river in the dusk, washed with silver. ‘An electric shock seemed to galvanize the class: there was a respectful demonstration: the Master bowed genially and retired.’ A few years later Augustus himself would be an idol of the Slade. The students loved him for his good, bad and indifferent drawings, for his undiscriminating vitality, his willingness to destroy so much that he did and his challenge to them to take risks. For those in need of a hero, he was the obvious choice, and his entrance into the Slade Life Class at the beginning of the twentieth century was as exciting to the next generation of students as that of the fin-de-siècle butterfly with his famous sting. ‘When I first saw this extraordinary individual was while I was a student at the Slade school,’ Wyndham Lewis later wrote:
‘…the walls bore witness to the triumphs of this “Michelangelo” …A large charcoal drawing in the centre of the wall of the life-class of a hairy male nude, arms defiantly folded and a bristling moustache, commemorated his powers with almost a Gascon assertiveness: and fronting the stairs that lead upwards where the ladies were learning to be Michelangelos, hung a big painting of Moses and the Brazen Serpent…
…One day the door of the life-class opened and a tall bearded figure, with an enormous black Paris hat, large gold ear-rings decorating his ears, with a carriage of the utmost arrogance, strode in and the whisper “John” went round the class. He sat down on a donkey – the wooden chargers astride which we sat to draw – tore a page of banknote paper out of a sketch-book, pinned it upon a drawing-board, and with a ferocious glare at the model (a female) began to draw with an indelible pencil. I joined the group behind this redoubtable personage… John left as abruptly as he had arrived. We watched in silence this mythological figure depart.’58
‘And women, young and old, were fond
Of looking at the man Flammonde.’
Edward Arlington Robinson
Augustus’s growing renown in the late 1890s and early 1900s was partly based upon his extreme visibility. In a uniform world of braced and tied, well-waistcoated, buttoned-down men, it was impossible to overlook him. His shoes, created specially to his own design, were unpolished; the gold earrings he was soon to pin on were second-hand; he wore no collar and was contemptuous of those who did – in its place he fastened a black silk scarf with a silver brooch; he did wear a hat but it was of gypsy design, patina’d with age; his eyes were restless, his hair alarmingly uncut. ‘We are the sort of people’, he told another Bohemian Welsh artist, Nina Hamnett, ‘our fathers warned us against.’
He walked the streets with a terrific stride, as if raising his own morale, protecting himself against other people. One day a gang of children fell in behind him shouting: ‘Get yer ’air cut, mister.’ He halted, turned on them, and growled: ‘Get your throats cut!’
His reputation seemed to depend on deliberate neglect. He neglected to shave; he neglected caution and convention and common sense. There was no telling what he would say or do next – though very often he said and did nothing. The barometer of his moods shot up and down with extraordinary rapidity. Periods of charm, even tenderness, would vanish suddenly before convulsions of temper; days of leaden gloom suddenly dispersed, and he would glow with geniality. There seemed nothing to account for these alterations, or to connect them.
Wherever he went he struck sparks of romance. William Rothenstein remembered him at the age of twenty-one, looking like ‘a young fawn. He had beautiful eyes, almond-shaped and with lids defined like those Leonardo drew, a short nose, broad cheek-bones, while over a fine forehead fell thick brown hair, parted in the middle. He wore a light curling beard (he had never shaved) and his figure was lithe and elegant. I was at once attracted to John… A dangerous breaker of hearts, he would be, I thought, with his looks and his ardour… [He] was full of plans for future work; but he was poor and needed money for models.’59
Augustus was indeed ambitious. He felt eager to develop his talent as a means of fixing his identity. His world was full of echoes and reflections. He saw himself in other people’s looks, heard himself in their replies, recognized himself through their attitudes. Many of his portraits, such as ‘The Smiling Woman’, were in this oblique fashion autobiographical.
Under the flamboyant exterior there was much uncertainty. He invented a part, complete with theatrical costume, that acted as an eye-catching form of concealment. Unsure of so much, he was dynamic in one thing: the pursuit of beauty, in particular beautiful women. Round him there gathered, wrote Lord David Cecil, a following of ‘magnificent goddesses who, with kerchiefed heads and flowing, high-waisted dresses, stand gazing into the distance in reverie or look down pensively at the children who run and leap and wrestle round their feet. Wild and regal, at once lover, mother and priestess, woman dominates Mr John’s scene.’
Like his maternal grandfather Thomas Smith, Augustus was a man ‘of full habit of body’. But his view of women was idealistic rather than sensual, and had been formed by the early death of his mother. Back in Tenby, he had been drawn towards full-bosomed mature women, admiring from afar and usually while in church their rich proportions that seemed to offer the warmth and consolation he desired. Typical of these women had been the headmaster’s wife at his unsympathetic school near Bristol, on whose generous bosom, he remembered, ‘in great distress, I once laid my head and wept’.60
With adolescence his world had become invaded by disturbing forces. Whether upon the beach or in the streets of Tenby, it seemed his fate to encounter at every turn the mocking glance of some girl. His awkwardness was painful and the old-fashioned clothes his father made him wear an unspeakable constraint. He would have felt less sensitive if, while wandering alone on the marshes, he had come across some faerie’s child lingering disconsolately amid the sedge. For she, like him, would have been silent, would not have laughed, but taken him into her embrace. Such phantoms peopled his imagination. Prevented by his timidity from making contact with actual girls, he kept company with imaginary creatures who had travelled from the reveries of Burne-Jones and Rossetti.
The conflict between reality and his fastidiously romantic dreamland gradually intensified. On Sunday afternoons in the early 1890s Geraldine de Burgh, her elder sister and a friend of theirs used to walk from Tenby over the sand dunes and rough grass tracks of the Burrows towards Penally and Giltar. And almost every Sunday they were secretly met by ‘Gussie’, Thornton and their friend Robert Prust. Geraldine was partnered by Gussie – the routine was invariable – though she would have preferred Robert Prust. Gussie, she thought, was terribly backward: they did not even hold hands. But as the youngest, it was not hers to choose. Over sixty-five years later, Augustus wrote to her: ‘You are one of the big landmarks of my early puberty. I was intensely shy then, besides you generally had your brother with you to add to my confusion. Perhaps your noble name intimidated me too. But I was always afraid of girls then – girls and policemen...’
By this time Augustus had experienced what he called ‘the dawn of manhood’. The mysteries of reproduction were explained to him with much raucous humour by the other boys in Tenby. He was horrified. It was impossible to imagine his father involving himself with his mother in this way. Gloom, terror and bewilderment mounted in him. To such improbable coupling did he owe his very existence! It seemed as if he would never be free from the burden of his origins. It was with this knowledge that he tortured Gwen.
But gradually the guilt and disgust receded. ‘Further investigations both in Art and Nature,’ he wrote, ‘completing the process of enlightenment thus begun, brought me down from cloud cuckooland to the equally treacherous bed-rock of Mother Earth.’61
To Augustus, all women were mothers, with himself either as child or God-the-Father. Not long content to figure in the public eye as doubtful or baffled, he presented himself as robustly pagan with a creed that personified Nature as a mother. She was an object of desire, but also a goddess of fertility, a symbolic yet physical being capable of answering all needs: a woman to be celebrated and enjoyed. This he was to express most lyrically in the small figure-in-landscape panels – usually not more than twenty inches by fifteen inches – that he painted in the years before the First World War. Here women and children, like trees or hills, appear as an integral part of the Mother Earth – a connection he specifically and sexually makes in some of his letters. ‘This landscape,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis (October 1946) from Provence, ‘like some women I have heard of, takes a deal of getting into. I am making the usual awkward approaches – and soon hope to dispense with these manoeuvres and get down to bed-rock, but the preliminaries are tiresome.’
These preliminaries grew increasingly tiresome after his third year at the Slade. An occasional glass of wine or whisky or, when in France, of absinthe or calvados or even, at the Café Royal, hock-and-seltzer or crème de menthe frappé, helped him to accelerate past this awful shyness. His first serious girlfriend was the bird-like Ursula Tyrwhitt who, responding to his letters of entreaty, allowed him to walk her home after school. When they were together they drew and painted each other’s portraits; and wrote love-letters to each other when they were apart. ‘How is it pray, that your letters have the scent of violets? Violets that make my heart beat,’ Augustus asked her. ‘…Write again sans blague Ursula Ursula Ursula.’ She was six years older than he was and she dazzled him. He wrote praising her ‘glorious roseate luminescence’. But their affair ended when, in panic, her clergyman father sent her off to Paris. In one of his last letters to her, while they were both still students, Augustus enclosed a charming self-portrait, pen and brush in black ink, inscribed ‘Au Revoir, Gus’.
Before leaving the Slade, Augustus had taken up with another student, Ida Nettleship, one of Ursula’s best friends. Ida, with her ‘beautiful warm face’, was a sexually attractive girl, with slanted eyes, a sensuous mouth, curly hair and a dark complexion. There seemed an incandescent quality about her, yet for the time being the fires flickered dreamily. She was very quiet – ‘tongueless’ she calls herself – and when she did speak it was with a soft, cultured voice. She had been brought up in a Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere and, at the age of four, was snatched from the nursery floor to be kissed by Robert Browning – an experience she was told never to forget. By her mother, who made clothes for ladies connected with the theatre, including Ellen Terry and Oscar Wilde’s wife Constance, Ida was worshipped and perhaps a little spoilt. Her father, Jack Nettleship, once the creator of imaginative Blake-like designs, had by now turned painter of melodramatic zoo-animals, leopards and polar bears, hyenas and stallions, all lavishly reproduced in Boy’s Own Paper. ‘Father is painting a girl and a lion,’ Ida wrote to Gus. He had preferred painting to a career as a writer62 and became one of a group known as ‘the Brotherhood’ which included John Butler Yeats, Edwin Ellis and George Wilson. ‘George Wilson was our born painter,’ Yeats used to say, ‘but Nettleship our genius.’ But as the Pre-Raphaelite spirit ebbed out of British art, Jack Nettleship had lost confidence and painted only what Rossetti called ‘his pot-boilers’.
He sent Ida to the Slade in 1892; in 1895 she won a three-year scholarship and remained there altogether six years. From most of the students she held aloof, cultivating a small circle of friends – Gwen Salmond, Edna Waugh and the Salaman family. They were known collectively as ‘the nursery’ because they were, or behaved as if they were, younger than the other students. Kipling’s two Jungle Books had come out in the mid-1890s and were immensely popular with these children of the Empire. Ida, having grown up surrounded by her father’s pictures of animals, named each of her special friends after one of Kipling’s jungle creatures, she herself being Mowgli, the man cub. Her early letters seem exaggeratedly fey. She is frequently exchanging with ‘Baloo’ the big brown bear (Dorothy Salaman) tokens of ‘friendship for always’ which take the form of rosaries made from eucalyptus, pin cushions, ivy leaves and lavender and all manner of flowers and plants ‘rich in purple bells, a joy to the eyes’. She ends these letters on a high note of jungle euphoria: ‘Bless you with jungle joy, Your bad little man cub, Mistress Mowgli Nettleship’. When ‘Bagheera’, the pantheress (Bessie Salaman) marries, Ida writes: ‘I think you are a charmer – but oh you are married – never girl Bessie again. Do you know you are different?… Mowgli will be so lonely in the jungle without the queen panthress. Oh you’re worth a kiss sweet, tho’ you are grown into a wife.’
Ida herself carefully avoided growing into a wife. All her intimate friends were girls. They lived in a golden world with the timeless prospect of being girls eternal. Their mood was that of Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale:
We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun,
And bleat the one at the other: what we chang’d
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrines of ill-doing, no, nor dream’d
That any did.
Men had no place in this sentimental paradise. The only creature to be apportioned some degree of masculinity was Ida herself, the man cub. At the Slade she had many admirers, but she shrugged them all off – all except one. This was Clement Salaman, elder brother of Augustus’s friend Michel Salaman, who had got to know her through his sisters. It was not long before he fell in love and, for a short time, they were rather unrealistically engaged to be married. Ida seems to have consented to this partly for his sister’s sake. Since she was not in love with him, she could not really believe he was in love with her. Naturally she would always want to be his friend, as she was Baloo’s and Bagheera’s friend. But he was not part of her jungle life. She created more trouble by discussing it all with Edna Waugh. This displeased Edna’s fiancé William Clarke Hall, who accused Ida of ‘falseness and fickleness’ and of causing him to lose his faith in women. But Ida believed she must ‘go through life aiming for the highest’. When Clement’s sister Bessie became engaged, Ida had exhorted her not to ‘fall from what is possible for you… don’t slip – strive high for others’. But was Clement the highest? Was she herself not falling from what was possible?
In February 1897 she formally broke off the engagement, explaining in a letter to the pantheress Bagheera that this was ‘a good and pleasant thing for both’. ‘Don’t you think a great friendship could come out of it?’ she queried. ‘The soft side surely can be conquered – indeed I think he has conquered it. It would be a life joy, a friendship between us. Think how splendid. No thought of marriage or softness to spoil.’
Shortly before the end of this engagement, Ida’s sister Ethel ‘happened to go into the room where they were spooning and I roared with laughter’, she recalled, ‘and afterwards Ida said to me: “You mustn’t laugh at that, it’s holy.”’63 From both parents she had imbibed religion. Jack Nettleship had once confessed: ‘My mother cannot endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus Christ; whereas I like the God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus Christ; and we have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch.’64 Ida herself was very High Church when young. In vermilion and black inks she prepared a manual for use at Mass and Benediction, ‘The Little Garden of the Soul’, seventy-five pages long and done with scrupulous care: ‘Ida Nettleship her book’. In everyday matters she was not above sermonizing to her friends. Girls still at school were warned to beware of ‘affections’, advised to walk a lot and play plenty of lawn tennis. She herself had taken to practising the fiddle as a means of avoiding temptation. ‘Keep a brave true heart and be brave and kind to all other people,’ she instructed Bessie Salaman, ‘ – And think of making happiness and not taking it.’
In March 1897, following the break-up of her engagement, Ida left England for Florence, moving among various pensioni and reassuring her ‘dear sweet mother’ that she must not ‘let the proprieties worry you – I do assure you there’s nothing to fear’. Superficially there did seem cause for anxiety since here, as at the Slade, Ida quickly attracted a swarm of young admirers, poets and Americans, who brought her almond blossom, purple anemones and full-blown roses; and a red-haired student, less romantic and with a funny face, ‘who began talking smart to me – and ended by being melancholy and thirsty’. Most persistent of all was a peevish musician called Knight, ‘very friendly and bothersome’, who, she explained to her sister Ethel, ‘plays the piano, and reads Keats and cribs other people’s ideas on art. He looks desperately miserable… His complaints and sorrows weary my ears so continually – and “oh, he is so constant and so kind”. They all are.’ But her virtue vanquished them all.
Ida’s letters from Italy65 show that, on the whole, the girls in the pensione took her fancy more than the men – one very beautiful ‘like a Botticelli with great grey eyes’; and a pretty American one, ‘dark eyed and languid in appearance’, who sat next to her at meals and ‘says sharp things in a subdued trickle of a voice’; even ‘the little chambermaid here with little curls hanging about her face and great dark eyes’ who ‘takes a great interest in me’. Almost the only woman she did not find sympathetic was the fidgety little Signorina who gave her lessons in Italian and self-control, and who ‘says eh? in a harsh tone between every sentence – I pinch myself black and blue to keep from dancing round the table in an agony of exasperation’.
When she was not learning Italian she was drawing and painting – ‘dashing my head against an impenetrable picture I am attempting to reproduce in the Pitti’, as she described it. ‘…I am so bold and unafraid in the way I work that all the keepers and all the visitors and all the copyists come and gape… they think I am either a fool or a genius.’ Every day she worked six or seven hours, copying Old Masters or sketching out of doors. But, she warned her mother, ‘don’t expect great things – it’s fatal… it’s no easier to do in Italy than in England’.
Yet Italy enchanted her: bells on the mules passing below her window; chatter of carts and of people that carried along the stone streets on the evening air; sight of a dazzling green hill under olive trees; the river careering down by the pensione, swollen and yellow with rain – all these sights and sounds stirred longings in her, she scarcely knew for what. ‘I simply gasp things in now, in my effort to live as much as possible these last weeks,’ she wrote towards the end of her time there. ‘I can’t believe I shall ever be here again in this life – anyway it’s not to be counted on. And it’s like madness to think how soon I shall be away, and it going on just the same… I suppose Italy must have some intoxication for people – some remarkable fascination. She certainly has converted me to be one of her lovers.’
After her return to England, Ida felt flat. Her drawing and painting left her dissatisfied. ‘We have a model like a glorious southern sleek beauty, so hard it is to do anything but look,’ she wrote to Bessie Salaman. ‘To put her in harsh black and white – ugh, it’s dreadful.’ Tonks had become rather discouraging. She grew uncertain in a way she never had been. ‘Some days I look and wonder and say “Why paint?”’ she admitted to Dorothy Salaman. ‘There are such beautiful things, are they not enough? It seems like fools’ madness to ever desire to put them down.’
Always before she had been swept upwards by gushes of enthusiasm. Now she felt herself being suffocated by an ‘eternal ennui’ which seemed to come between her and the life her vigorous nature needed. There must be more to living than copying Old Masters and exchanging flowers. Her boredom – ‘a giant who is difficult to cope with’ – overshadowed everything.
It was about this time that she started to become involved with Augustus. His personality was like a light that flooded into her life, banishing this gloomy giant. He was made for open spaces. He strode capaciously through the streets, taking her arm with a sudden thrust of initiative, as one who might say: ‘Come on now, we’ll show them what we can do!’ Never had she known such an exhilarating companion. He was unlike any of the rather starched and stiff young men who had admired her – and so funny she sometimes cried with laughter. He did not treat her as a child, was never superior, but seemed to have a penetrating need of her to which she could not help opening up. ‘When she is passionate,’ her friend Edna Waugh told the disapproving William Clarke Hall, ‘she is wonderful. She rises like a wild spirit.’ Many people felt overwhelmed by her: but Augustus was not overwhelmed. The stale familiarity of London vanished when they were together and sudden energy flooded through her. He was, she thought, a wonderfully romantic creature with just that trace of feminine delicacy which made him so sympathetic. It was as if they were discovering life together as no one else had done. Without him, existence grew doubly tedious. She was also beginning to recognize certain frontiers that she must cross. ‘There are myriads of things one can give oneself to,’ she told Dorothy Salaman, ‘ – one can make oneself a friend of the universe – but talking is no good. A want is a want – and when one is hungry it’s no good – or not much – to hear someone singing a fine song.’ Only Augustus, it seemed, could assuage her hunger. Once, when she was playing with her sisters the game of ‘What-do-you-like-doing-best-in-the-World’, Ida gave her choice in a low whisper: ‘Going to a picture gallery with Gus John.’
Augustus was the first and only man Ida loved. They did not become engaged. Their situation was awkward, for the Nettleships would have much preferred their daughter to remain engaged to Clement Salaman who came from a wealthy family and, like William Clarke Hall, had qualified as a barrister. Augustus’s introduction into their Victorian household had been a disaster. It was Ada Nettleship,66 Ida’s mother, who chiefly objected to him; and her objections were not easily to be overcome. Since her husband’s lions and tigers did not sell, she had become the ‘business person’ in the family. Her dressmaking trade took up almost the whole of their house – a barrack-like building at No. 58 Wigmore Street. Her husband and daughters were confined to the fourth floor, ill lit by gas-jets, and her domestic life was likewise thinly sandwiched in between her business pursuits.
Ada Nettleship was fat and soft and looked older than her age. For many years she had been careful to take no exercise and moved, when obliged to do so, with extreme slowness. She appeared a formidable dumpling of a woman, with short grey hair, a round face, retroussé nose and plump capable hands. She dressed in a uniform of heavy black brocade made in one piece from neck to hem, with a little jabot of lace and a collar of net drawn up and tied under her chin with a narrow black velvet ribbon. Her voice was high-pitched but rather flat; her expression serious; her temper not at all good – except towards her family for whose welfare she was responsible. She worked her staff of skirt-girls, pin-girls and the embroideresses whom she had imported from the Continent very hard and, before their hours were altered by Act of Parliament, very long. But though feared, she was respected by these girls for she was an imaginative dressmaker and competent businesswoman, her one weakness being a liking for society people with titles who often postponed paying their bills.
Ada Nettleship was horrified by Augustus. It is doubtful whether, in her opinion, anyone would have been good enough for her favourite daughter, but Augustus was too bad to be true – she had no use for him at all. The person she saw was no romantic Christ-like figure, simply a lanky unwashed youth, shifty-eyed and uncouth to the point of rudeness, with a scraggy, reddish beard, long hair, and scruffy clothes. She could not understand what Ida saw in him. She was confident, however, that her daughter’s peculiar affection would not last. As for Jack Nettleship, he was more dismayed than horrified. ‘I do wish he’d clean his shoes,’ he kept complaining, ‘ – it’s so bad for the leather.’ But he spoke with little authority, generally going barefoot round the house himself.
‘I always felt’, Ida’s sister Ethel Nettleship later wrote, ‘that Gus being so young, & with so much fine feeling, perhaps his breaking into our Victorian family might not have caused such a wreckage!’67 But Augustus was at his worst in Wigmore Street. His love for Ida, combined with her mother’s antagonism, made him wretchedly ill at ease. Max Beerbohm, who saw him there, noted that he was ‘pale – sitting in window seat – sense of something powerful – slightly sinister – Lucifer’. Old Nettleship, though everyone agreed he was the salt of the earth, only added to this embarrassment. With bald head, grey-bearded chin and nose ‘like an opera-glass’,68 he presented an eccentric spectacle within this conventional setting. ‘Years before he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time,’ wrote another visitor to the house, W. B. Yeats. ‘A little whisky would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great deal and he found himself a drunkard.’69 Having put himself into an institution for some months, he emerged completely cured, though still with the need for some liquid to sip constantly. This craving he assuaged by continual cocoa, hot or cold, which he drank from a gigantic jorum eight inches in diameter and eight inches deep. An alarmingly modest man, he would show Augustus his carnivorous paintings, begging for criticism. These pictures left Augustus cold, but if he ventured any criticism, Nettleship would rush for his palette and brushes and begin the laborious business of repainting. It was blasphemy for Augustus to hear him describe Beardsley’s creatures as ‘damned ugly women’. Yet he first met many celebrities here, from the old William Michael Rossetti to the young Walter Sickert, ‘the latter just emerging from the anonymity of élève de Whistler’.70
In a rough synopsis71 for his autobiography, scribbled on Eiffel Tower Restaurant paper some time during the 1920s, Augustus introduces Ida’s name together with the word ‘torture’. He was violently attracted to her. Her mature body, so chaste and erotic, the muted intensity of her quiet manner, those strangely slanting eyes, that ingenuous mind: all this was throbbingly exciting to him. His happiness seemed to depend upon possessing the secret of her beauty, and he pursued her with unpredictable persistence. One day, for example, he turned up at St Albans, where she had gone to a party of Edna Clarke Hall’s. ‘Ida and I had not seen each other for some time, so, to get away from the others, we climbed up a ladder to the top of a great haystack… We had hardly settled there when up the ladder came Augustus John,’ Edna remembered.
‘Ida told John very definitely that we wanted to be alone and he told us no less definitely that he wanted to be there, and to put an end to the matter he gave a great heave and it [the ladder] fell to the ground. And there we were! Ida was extremely vexed and told him so in no uncertain terms. John took umbrage and said that if we did not want him he would go. He flung himself on to the steep thatch and proceeded to slide down head first. We were horrified! The stack was a very high one, and the ground seemed a long way off. Securing ourselves as best we could, we both got hold of a foot – his shoes, then his socks came off, – we frantically seized his trousers. He wriggled like an eel and his trousers began to come off. Then we cried aloud for help and some of the party came running, put up the ladder and rescued the crazy fellow!
But the peace of our solitude was completely shattered.’72
Augustus was tortured not by unrequited love but unconsummated sex. Ida loved him, but she refused to commit herself to him. She still hoped that her mother would come to like him. Meanwhile their love affair, for all its passion, seemed to have reached a dead end. Augustus was not faithful. He behaved as nature intended. Sight was mind, and out of sight was sometimes out of mind. On his journey through the Netherlands with Evans and McEvoy he responded to the beauty of the people he saw as much as to the Flemish masters. The two were jumbled together in his letters as if there were no difference. He writes, for example, of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia van Uylenborch:
‘She was sweeter than honey, more desirable than beauty, more profound than the Cathedral. And in Brussels lives an old woman with faded eyes who made me blush for thinking so much of the young wenches.
But there was one in Antwerp I think Rembrandt would have cared for, Gabrielle Madeleine by name. She had azure under her eyes and her veins were blue and such a good stout mask withal, and she spoke French only as a Flamande can. Unfortunately she wore fashionable boots of a pale buff tint. (Besides which her room lay within that of her white haired bundle of a Mama.) You will shrug your shoulders hearing of my aberrations but I feel more competent for them, and that is the main thing.’
Women continued to inspire Augustus as custodians of a happiness he could divine but never completely enjoy. They symbolized for him an ideal state of being that formed the subject of his painting. Yet his most immediate need was for a physical union that would dissolve his loneliness. But while his body was comforted by these affairs, his spirit lost something. The penalty he paid for being unable to endure isolation was a gradual theft from his artistic imagination of its stimulus. For his ideal concept of ‘beauty’, once divested of its symbolic majesty and enigmatic life, was in danger of becoming sentimental and empty.
‘Wonderful days and wonderful nights these were.’
William Rothenstein, Men and Memories
‘I am taking a studio with McEvoy,’ Augustus had written to Michel Salaman in the summer of 1898. This was 76 Charlotte Street, once used by Constable, and now, over the next two years, to be shared intermittently with Orpen, Benjamin Evans and Albert Rutherston. All of them were desperately poor, but full of plans for future work. Most helpful to Augustus was Albert’s elder brother William Rothenstein. His admiration for Augustus’s work was tireless. To his many artist friends, including Sargent, Charles Conder and Charles Furse, Rothenstein began showing Augustus’s drawings, and a number were sold in this way – though Furse was taken aback at the price of two pounds apiece. It was mainly on this money, together with what he received each quarter through his grandfather Thomas Smith’s will, that Augustus subsisted.
‘John – Orpen – McEvoy and myself are going to get up a class,’ Albert Rutherston wrote to his father (20 January 1899), ‘and have a model in John’s studio once a week at night – it will come to about 7d each.’
Because the studio was small, Augustus spent a good deal of time roaming the streets with his sketchbook. He had been reading Heine’s Florentine Nights and was particularly drawn to a tattered band of strolling players he met in Hyde Park, and eventually succeeded in persuading the principal dancer to pose for him. ‘Those flashing eyes, that swart mongolian face (the nose seemed to have been artificially flattened), framed in a halo of dark curls, made an impression not to be shaken off lightly.’73
‘I hate Gus doing replicas’, Ida was to write. Yet he had to paint portraits to make money. His first commission was to paint an old lady living in Eaton Square for a fee of forty pounds (equivalent to £2,140 in 1996), half of which was paid in advance. ‘As the work went on I began to tire of the old lady’s personality,’ he remembered; ‘she too, I could see, was bored by mine, and getting restless. She even spoke rather sharply to me now and then. This didn’t encourage me at all. One day, having made a date for the next sitting, I departed never to return. I had got her head done pretty well at any rate and the old lady got her picture at half price.’74 Looked at today, the picture seems surprisingly close in style and feeling to some of Gwen John’s portraiture. The colour has been toned down – monochrome with silvery-white flesh tones and slight touches of warm ochre. In the middle of an area of black dress, the old lady holds a red book. An orange frill on the cushion behind her head gives colour to her face and follows the line of her smile. Augustus’s treatment of the face, which is modelled in the yellow-brown against darker brown of Rembrandt, conveys an air of beauty in decay, and the impression is one of restrained sadness. But Augustus could not endure sadness – he had to get away. His ‘tiredness’, like the ‘boredom’ that assailed him during his convalescence in Tenby, was a phobia that would threaten all his loves and friendships, and change the impetus of his work.
About the same time, through the mediation of a fashionable lady in Hampstead, Augustus was commissioned to do some drawings in the west of England. His first destination was a large mausoleum of a house set in parkland that resembled a cemetery. On arriving there, he was struck by the good looks of his young hostess, which seemed, after a cocktail or two, very visibly to increase. After the drawing was done she took him upstairs to show him her home-made chapel fitted into the attic. Her husband was away shooting, she explained – he often was – and during the dull days she would seek consolation here. Within the wall, Augustus spied a recess – perhaps a confessional, or a boudoir… But soon he had to be on his way for the next assignment. Here, too, there was much architectural magnificence. His new hostess, unencumbered with religiosity, was as amiable as the first. There seemed to be an epidemic of ‘shooting’ in the district, for her husband also had been carried off by it. When the drawing was done, Augustus returned to London with two cheques in his pocket, and richer in more ways than one.
Perhaps because of the emotional deprivation of his mother, Augustus seemed to be missing a source of self-esteem. He was like a leaking vessel that needed continual attention. But now, to his surprise and delight, other people were beginning to find him to be a marvellous proper man. He sensed some of the power he could exert. So much that he had missed at Tenby, even at the Slade, seemed within his possession. It was dangerous knowledge. Such was the charm of his presence that old ladies on buses, it was rumoured, would get up blushing to offer him their seats; and young girls at the Café Royal fainted when he made his legendary entrances there.
The letters that Augustus and his friends wrote at this time show them drawing and painting all day. In the evening they would hurry off to the Empire to listen to Yvette Guilbert sing, or go to the Hippodrome to see a splendid troupe of Japanese acrobats, tightrope walkers, nightingale-clowns and high-diving swimmers. Best of all, Augustus loved the Sadler’s Wells music hall in Islington, London’s oldest surviving theatre. He went almost every week, taking there for a shilling a box from the front of which he would fling his hat in the air whenever he approved of a turn. The crowd in the stalls, believing him to be a tremendous swell, nicknamed him ‘Algy’. One night, when their teasing became too personal, Augustus rose and delivered a drunken speech. The crowd, after listening for a minute, went for him, but he emptied his beer over them and, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, escaped.
After such breathless entertainments, whenever they could afford it, Augustus and his friends would go to the Café Royal, eat sandwiches, drink lager beer and sit up late gazing at the celebrities. Orpen, Albert Rutherston and Augustus were together so much of the time that they became known as ‘the three musketeers’; but on less rowdy evenings they would be joined by McEvoy and Gwen John, Ida Nettleship and some of her special friends. Sometimes, too, by Mrs Everett, her hair decorated with arum lilies, anxious to spirit them away to Salvationist meetings where men with sturdy legs and women with complexions joined in brass and tambourine choruses.
On 14 September 1898 Ida and Gwen Salmond crossed over to Paris, Gwen to stay there for six months, Ida for three. They put up temporarily at what Ida called a ‘very old lady style of pension’ at 226 boulevard Raspail on the outskirts of the Latin quarter; ‘such a healthy part of Paris!’ she reassured her mother (15 September 1898) who was worried by their proximity to the bars and restaurants of the boulevard Montparnasse. They had invited Gwen John to join them, but when she mentioned the plan to her father, Edwin automatically opposed it. She was, however, undeterred; went round the house singing ‘To Paris! To Paris!’; and wrote to Ida in the third week of September announcing that she was on her way. ‘Gwen John is coming – hurrah,’ Ida told her mother. ‘…We are so glad Gwen is coming. It makes all the difference – a complete trio.’75 Gwen arrived carrying a large marmalade cake, and the three of them set off to look at flats – ‘such lovely bare places furnished only with looking-glases’76 – soon finding what they wanted on the top floor of 12 rue Froideveau, or ‘Cold Veal Street’ as Ida called it. In a letter to her mother she described the moral architecture of the place, which was
‘on the 5th floor – overlooking a large open space [the Montparnasse cemetery] – right over the market roof. It has 3 good rooms, a kitchen and W.C. and water and gas – and a balcony. Good windows – very light and airy. Nothing opposite for miles – very high up. The woman (concierge) is very clean and exceedingly healthy looking. The proprietress is rather swell – an old lady – she lives this end of Paris and we went to see her. She asked questions, and especially that we received nobody – ‘Les dames oui. Mais les messieurs? Non! Jamais!‘…She wants to keep her apartments very high in character. All this is rather amusing, but it will show you it is a respectable place. It is over a café – but the entrance is right round the corner – quite separate… We want all the paper scraped and the place whitewashed… It is near the Louvre and Julian’s – and is very open.’77
Gwen Salmond had sixty pounds and wanted to study at the Académie Julian under Benjamin Constant. Ida had thirty pounds and thought of going to either Delécluze or Colarossi, both of which were less expensive. Gwen John had less money still and could not afford to attend any school. But by a fortunate chance another studio was just opening in Paris that autumn – the Académie Carmen at 6 passage Stanislas. It was to be run by a luxuriant Italian beauty, Carmen Rossi, the one-time model of Whistler who, it was announced, would himself attend twice a week to instruct the pupils. Such was Whistler’s reputation that many students came from the other schools, the carriages of the more wealthy ones blocking the narrow entrance. The price was the same as Julian’s – too expensive for Ida: but Gwen Salmond, changing her mind at the last moment, decided to go there. ‘Whistler has been twice to the studio – and Gwen finds him very beautiful and just right,’ Ida wrote to her mother. ‘…[he] is going to paint a picture of Madame la Patronne of the studio, his model, and hang it in the studio for the students to learn from. Isn’t it fine? He’s a regular first rate Master and, according to Gwen, knows how to teach.’ So enthusiastic was Gwen Salmond that she insisted that Gwen John accompany her, smuggling her in as an afternoon pupil and helping her financially.
The rules of the Académie Carmen were stricter than those of the Slade. Smoking was outlawed; singing and even talking prohibited; charcoal drawings on the walls forbidden; studies from the nude in mixed classes banned – and the sexes segregated into different ateliers. Whistler himself insisted on being received not as a companion in shirtsleeves, but as the Master visiting his apprentices. What Gwen John learnt from him was the ‘good habit’ of orderliness. He offered no magical short cuts: on the contrary he would have liked to teach his students from the very beginning, even the grinding and mixing of the colours. Tintoretto, he reminded them, had never done any work of his own until he was forty, and that was the way he wished them to work for him. His larks, which always contained some serious matter, often bewildered them. The palette, not the canvas, was the field of experiment, he told them, and he would sometimes ignore their pictures altogether, earnestly studying their palettes to detect what progress was being made. His monocled sarcasms and the need which his rootless nature felt for a band of dedicated disciples, antagonized the men. But many of the women students adored him, understanding the poignancy and hidden kindness of his character and responding to his courtesy and wit. ‘Whistler is worth living for,’ Gwen Salmond declared simply in a letter to Michel Salaman. At any criticism, she and the others rushed to Whistler’s defence. ‘I hear there is a blasphemous letter about Whistler’s teaching in one of the English papers,’ Ida fulminated to her mother. ‘It is very stupid and unkind.’78
In Augustus, too, Whistler inspired the veneration due to one who has been a famous rebel victorious against the social conventions, and a dedicated Master in his own right. With the money he had won for ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’,*4 he followed the three girls to Paris that autumn, and in the Salon Carré of the Louvre the two painters met formally for the first time: Whistler a small, neat, erect old gentleman in black, with crisp curly hair containing one white lock, and a flashing monocle; Augustus tall, dishevelled, trampish. After some ceremony and a contest of compliments on behalf of Gwen, Augustus ventured to suggest that his sister’s work showed a sense of character. ‘Character? What’s character?’ Whistler demanded. ‘It’s tone that matters. Your sister shows a sense of tone.’
Augustus seems to have spent his short time in Paris looking at Rembrandt, Leonardo, Raphael and Velázquez. His sister also took him to meet Carmen, and together they visited Whistler in his studio, then at work on an immense self-portrait – a ghostly face set upon a body hardly discernible in the gloom. To explain her attendance at the Académie Carmen, Gwen had written home to say that she had won a scholarship there. By this imaginary triumph she may have hoped to reconcile Edwin to the notion of giving her a small allowance. But Edwin decided to do better than this – that was, to come and see for himself how she was getting along. His arrival probably accounted for Augustus’s quick departure from Paris. To welcome him, Gwen arranged a small supper party, putting on a new dress designed by herself from one in a picture by Manet – possibly his ‘Bar at the Folies Bergère’. ‘You look like a prostitute in that dress,’ Edwin greeted her: after which she decided she could never accept money from such a man. Despite this setback, she continued going to Whistler’s school and, in order to earn enough money, began posing as a model.
Whistler’s teaching was a perfect corrective to that of Brown and Tonks at the Slade. Painting, not drawing, came first. ‘I do not teach art,’ Whistler declared, ‘ – I teach the scientific application of paint and brushes.’ In this laboratory atmosphere, to which Augustus never subjected himself, where students could paint in the dark if need be, Gwen developed her methodical technique ‘to a point of elaboration undreamt of by her Master’.79 It was a short period of vital importance in her career, though much of her work was done independently. ‘Gwen John is well and has not been lonely,’ Ida reported to her mother. ‘She has many more friends – one Alsatian girl [Mlle Marthe] whom we are painting in the mornings. Such a beauty she is.’80
Breakfast-time in Cold Veal Street was given over to reading Shakespeare: King Lear and King John; while in the evening the three of them sometimes ate at an anarchists’ restaurant where grubbily dressed girls fetched their own food to avoid being waited upon. Between these times they painted. ‘Gwen S. and J. are painting me,’ Ida told her mother, ‘and we are all 3 painting Gwen John.’ Their life together, with all its excitements and difficulties, dedication and triviality is charmingly described in a letter of Ida’s to Michel Salaman:
‘We are having a very interesting time and working hard. I almost think I am beginning to paint – but I have not begun to really draw yet. We have a very excellent flat, and a charming studio room – so untidy – so unfurnished – and nice spots of drawings and photographs on the walls – half the wall is covered with brown paper, and when we have spare time and energy we are going to cover the other half… Gwen John is sitting before a mirror carefully posing herself. She has been at it for half an hour. It is for an “interior”. We all go suddenly daft with lovely pictures we can see or imagine, and want to do… We want to call Gwen John “Anne” – but have not the presence of mind or memory. And I should like to call Gwen Salmond Cynthia. These are merely ideals. As a matter of fact we are very unideal, and have most comically feminine rubs, at times; which make one feel like a washerwoman or something common. But as a whole it is a most promising time...’
It came to an end early in 1899. Ida returned to Wigmore Street and Gwen John established herself in a cellar below the dressmakers and decorators of Howland Street. Augustus, who disapproved of most places in which his sister decided to live, tried to include her in some of the invitations he was now receiving and the following spring the two of them went down to stay at Pevril Tower, a boarding house which Mrs Everett had opened at Swanage. Suffering from conjunctivitis, Augustus could do little work; and Gwen too was listless, wandering along the cliffs by moonlight, catching fireflies and putting them in her hair and in Mrs Everett’s. ‘I have not done anything,’ she confessed to Michel Salaman. Most days she would go off into the country, through an old wood full of anemones and primroses to the sea three miles away – and plunge in. ‘The rocks are treacherous there, & the sea unfathomable,’ she wrote to Michel Salaman, ‘…but there is no delicious danger about it, so yesterday I sat on the edge of the rock to see what would happen – & a great wave came & rolled me over & over which was humiliating & very painful & then it washed me out to sea – & that was terrifying – but I was washed up again. Today the sky is low, everything is grey & covered in mist – it is a good day to paint – but I think of people.’81
Augustus, too, seemed involved with people. Together with Orpen, Albert Rutherston and others, he had helped to organize a revolutionary campaign against the mosaic decorations of St Paul’s Cathedral by Sir William Richmond. During April and May he was busy dragooning students from all the art schools round London into meetings, trying to raise funds for the printing of notices and arranging for a public petition to be presented to the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral. ‘Sir William Richmond R.A. has for five years been decorating St Paul’s Cathedral and last year the mosaics were discovered to the Public,’ Albert Rutherston explained to his father. ‘The place has been utterly spoilt and looks now like a 2nd rate Café – it is a mass of glittering gold etc. – he has also had the cheek to cut away pieces of Wren’s sculpture and replace it by his own mosaics… Even Sir Edward Poynter P.R.A. has asked Richmond to stop his decorations.’*5
The other excitement of these months was Augustus’s first one-man show at the Carfax Gallery in Ryder Street, off St James’s. This gallery had recently been opened by John Fothergill, a young painter, archaeologist and author, famous for his dandified clothes and later as a connoisseur of innkeeping.82 Robert Sickert, younger brother of Walter, acted as manager: and the choice of artists was left to William Rothenstein. Rodin, Conder, Orpen, Max Beerbohm all held exhibitions there as well as Rothenstein himself. By the spring of 1899 it was Augustus’s turn. ‘There is to be a show of my drawings at Carfax and Co.,’ he had written from Swanage to Michel Salaman. ‘I hope to Gaud I shan’t have all back on my hands. There is however not much fear of that as Carfax himself would probably annex them in consideration of the considerable sum advanced to me in the young and generous days of his debut.’ Singled out for praise by the didactic New English Art critic D. S. MacColl, the show was a success, earning Augustus another thirty pounds (equivalent to £l,600 in 1996).
With this sum in his pocket he set off to join a large painting party at Vattetot-sur-Mer, a village near Étretat on the Normandy coast. William Rothenstein and his new wife, the former actress Alice ‘Kingsley’; his brother Albert Rutherston, now prophetically nicknamed ‘All but Rothenstein’; Orpen and his future wife (Alice Kingsley’s sister), Grace Knewstub, unfortunately known as ‘Newslut’; Arthur Clifton, the business manager of the Carfax Gallery, and his red-haired wife: all these Augustus knew already. But in Charles Conder he met a wistful, tentative, ailing man, his hair luxuriant but lifeless, a brown lock perpetually over one malicious blue eye, who admitted in an exhausted voice to being a little ‘gone at the knees’.
Every morning the company rose at half-past seven, drank a cup of chocolate, and painted until eleven. Conder worked at his exquisite silk fans; Orpen was still labouring over his ‘Hamlet’ and making preliminary studies for his oil portrait of Augustus; Rothenstein painted ‘The Doll’s House’ in which Alice Rothenstein and Augustus posed on the little staircase leading up from the sitting-room;83 Augustus himself did no painting, but drew, mostly landscapes. ‘As for us,’ he wrote to Michel Salaman, ‘we grow more delighted with this place daily. The country is wonderfully fine in quality. In addition we have a charming model in the person of Mrs R’s sister [Grace] who serves to represent Man in relation to Nature. Orpen and I have been drawing with a certain industry, I think. Albert reads Balzac without cessation. Occasionally his brother drives him out into the fields with a stick but he returns in good time for the next meal with half a tree trunk gradated with straight lines to show.’
Vattetot was a village of austere buildings with small windows and steeply pitched roofs set on the cliffs above Vaucottes and shielded by double and triple lines of trees from the persistent winds. Farms and apple-orchards surrounded them, gentle hills and, along the coastline a quarter of a mile away, small shingle bays. Among the local farmers and fishermen the visitors attracted a good deal of notice. At eleven o’clock on most mornings, the colony would lay down brushes, make for the rocky cliffs, and dive into the breakers. Augustus was a fearless swimmer, crawling far out until he became a speck in the distance. ‘Albert and I were seduced by that old succubus the Sea – the other day,’ he wrote to Michel Salaman. ‘The waves were tremendous and the shore being very sloping there was a very great backwash – it required all our virtue to prevail in the struggle.’
Conder preferred Orpen’s work, but everything Augustus did appealed to Rothenstein. His drawings proclaimed an amazing genius, his actions an incredible recklessness. One day he jumped into a bucket at the top of a deep well and went crashing down to the bottom. It was all that the others could do – Rothenstein perspiring with admiration among them – to haul him back to the surface. And when he sprinted, stark naked, along the beach, it seemed to Rothenstein, paddling and prawn-catching near by, that he had never seen so faun-like a figure. The coastguards, too, ogled these antics through their glasses, and all the more attentively when the girls undressed in a cave under the cliffs and raced through the waves. There was a threat of court action – but the pagan goings-on went on.
‘Under this discipline we all ripened steadily,’ Augustus recorded.84 In the evenings they sat, Orpen, little Albert and himself, in the café singing, smoking, drinking their calvados, and listening to Conder, a bottle of Pernod at his elbow, telling his muffled stories of nights with Toulouse-Lautrec and sinister experiences in Paris. He used these stories to hold his young friends late into the night, dreading to be alone. But Orpen would steal away early to get on with his work, while Augustus was always last to leave. Conder’s reliance on Pernod, which he used both as a drink and as a medium for his brush, sent tremors of apprehension through Augustus, and he told the Rothensteins that, in the event of his ever feeling tempted to drink, Conder’s example would be a powerful disincentive. As for calvados, that was rather different: he felt bound to use its quickening properties to draw nearer the soil and, by a kind of chemical magic, grow fruitful. Seeing the way things were going, Alice Rothenstein began to import quantities of restorative tea from England.
Sometimes they would set off for long walks: to Fécamp, for the sake of the incomparable pâtisserie; to the little casino at Vaucottes, Conder always leading; to Étretat, a charming place with high cliffs at both ends of the promenade, full of smart people and mixed bathing (‘the women all wear black silk stockings with their bathing costumes’, Albert Rutherston reported); and to Yport, four miles away, where lived a tailor who decked Augustus out in a dazzling pale-blue corduroy suit with tight jacket and wide pegtop trousers. ‘He looks splendid,’ Orpen had reported to John Everett, ‘and is acting up to his clothes’ – much to the terror of Alice Rothenstein. Fearful that he or Conder would seduce her sister Grace, she decided to send her back to London in what she supposed to be the more harmless company of Orpen. Late at night, and chaperoned by the Rothensteins, they would all wander back from Yport along the beach, sometimes bathing again by moonlight: ‘wonderful days and wonderful nights these were,’ remembered Will Rothenstein,85 who had begun his honeymoon with hay fever and ended it with jaundice.
In August, Orpen returned to complete his ‘Hamlet’ and Augustus travelled with him and Grace Knewstub as far as Paris. They stayed close to Montparnasse station, and the two painters spent their nights on the town, their days half-asleep in the Louvre. ‘It was so pleasant there,’ Augustus wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘I wish you had been with us to wander in the Louvre, after the hot sun and dazzling light outside to be in the cool sculpture galleries… I envy the sleeping Hermaphrodite its frozen passion, its marble self-sufficiency, its eternal languor.’
Augustus’s own passions were sleepless. He returned to Vattetot and was soon addressing rhapsodies to Grace Knewstub’s chiffon scarf. ‘Seeing it round your neck and tinted with your blood, it was unto me even Beauty’s embellishment.’ But his drawing of Grace, done in his new etching style, was to be given with ‘unhesitating devotion’ to Orpen’s new young model Emile Scobel. ‘Mr Augustus is very well,’ Orpen reported to Michel Salaman on his return from France. ‘I left him with a lady! He was to come to the station to see me off (myself and Miss Knewstub) but did not turn up.’ Everything seemed to be going wrong for Orpen. He was using Augustus’s studio in Charlotte Street which had no gas stove. ‘When I return I’ll get a more presentable machine,’ Augustus assured him, ‘which will make the house sweet and render the studio an absolute trap for pretty girls.’ But Orpen was then more interested in his summer composition for the Slade. ‘My Hamlet would kill high morality,’ he wrote in another letter to Salaman that September, ‘ – Hamlet ought to be treated like a “Day of Judgement”. Miss John is settled in 122 Gower Street. She is a most beautiful lady! Miss Nettleship I have seen but she has not posed yet, to tell the truth I am afraid to ask her to take the pose as she has seen my Hamlet – I will wait till Gus comes back I think – Miss John says she would not take it.’
Ida, however, agreed to take the pose which would involve her and Gus leaning together, with their arms round each other. Then Orpen fell ill. ‘The wretched Orpen has got jaundice or verdigris or something horrible,’ Augustus later told Ursula Tyrwhitt. According to Orpen his complaint was more complicated, and not unconnected with Augustus. ‘My illness [jaundice] has been very severe. I was not able to eat for nearly ten days, but everything has started going down now! – I am still yellow – I have also got some nasty animals on a certain portion of my body – Gus’s doing – Dog that he is – this is my judgement for Paris! Tell him not!’
Augustus himself appeared wonderfully unaffected by these adventures, as if protected by unthinking innocence. ‘How he escaped getting the Ladies Fever we couldn’t make out,’ John Everett noted with irritation in his journal (1899). ‘Tonks used to say it must be his natural dirt.’
At the end of September, Augustus, Conder, Alice and the convalescent Will left for Paris where, over the next ten days, they fell in with that ‘distinguished reprobate’ Oscar Wilde. Wilde had recently been released from prison and was living in a small hotel on the Left Bank. Though appreciative of him as ‘a great man of inaction’ and a ‘big and good-natured fellow with an enormous sense of fun, impeccable bad taste, and a deeply religious apprehension of the Devil’,86 Augustus felt embarrassed by his elaborate performances of wit, not knowing how to respond. ‘I could think of nothing whatever to say. Even my laughter sounded hollow.’ Despite this, Wilde seems to have been much taken with ‘the charming Celtish poet in colour’,87 as he described Augustus. Alice Rothenstein, noticing this friendliness, grew unexpectedly fearful for his reputation and hurried Augustus along to the hairdresser. Next day Oscar looked grave. ‘You should have consulted me’, he said, laying a hand reproachfully on Augustus’s shoulder, ‘before taking this important step.’
Stifled by these long unspontaneous lunches at the Café de la Régence and the Café Procope, Augustus was on the lookout to escape with Conder and find ‘easier if less distinguished company’. The two of them would go off ‘whoring’, as Conder called it, visiting a succession of boîtes de nuit in Montmartre until the first pale gleams of the Parisian dawn showed in the sky, and each with a companion went his way. Once again much of the waking and sleeping day was spent in the Louvre, of which Augustus never seemed to tire. ‘Imagine,’ he wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘we were on the top of the Louvre yesterday! On the roof, and grapes and flowers are there. The prospect was wonderful – Paris at one’s feet!’
Two painters made a special impression on him. The first was Honoré Daumier who ‘reinforced with immense authority the lesson he had begun to learn from Rembrandt, of seeing broadly and simply, and who taught him to interpret human personality boldly, without fearing to pass, if need be, the arbitrary line commonly held to divide objective representation from caricature’.88 The second was Puvis de Chavannes whose pictures of an idealized humanity and the relationship between figures and landscape were to be a lifelong inspiration to him.
After he had spent his money from the Carfax exhibition, Augustus borrowed twenty pounds from Michel Salaman with the intention of travelling back via Brussels and Antwerp. But the life in Montmartre held him until his last pound note was gone. ‘I’ve had a fantastic time here,’ he told Ursula Tyrwhitt (October 1899) ‘ – we spent all our money and can’t go to Belgium so we’re off home tonight.’
‘I have no ability for affairs.’
Augustus John to Michel Salaman (1902)
The legend that was sown when Augustus dived on to a rock at the age of seventeen had by now bloomed. Only after he left the Slade, and the exterior discipline of Tonks and Brown had been removed, did he, in Michel Salaman’s words, ‘kick over the traces’. This transformation particularly astonished John Everett,89 who had met Augustus in October 1896, shared 21 Fitzroy Street with him during part of 1897, and who had left England for a year at sea in 1898. On his return to London in 1899 the first person he met was Orpen, who eagerly apprised him of all the scandalous things Augustus was up to: how he went pub-crawling and got gloriously drunk; how he knew a prostitute who would always go back to him if she could not pick up anyone in the streets; how he had careered all over the flowerbeds in Hyde Park with the police in hot pursuit – and other marvels. Remembering his companion of two or three years ago – ‘a poor physical specimen [who] never played any games… a very quiet boy, a great reader, a studious youth’ who avoided all the organized rags and tugs-of-war and was thought by some to be ‘a nonentity’ – Everett was nonplussed. ‘If you had told me that of any man at the Slade I’d have believed you,’ he replied to Orpen. ‘But not John.’
Over the next year Everett saw a lot of Augustus. ‘All the things Orpen had told me about John were true,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘His character had completely changed. It was not the John I’d known in the early days at the Slade.’ He was getting commissions for portraits and drawings and the quality of his work had never been higher. He seemed, however, quite irresponsible. In some ways he was like the sailors Everett rubbed shoulders with during his voyages. He would make an appointment with some sitter for the following morning, go off drinking half the night with his friends, then wake up grumpily next afternoon. Yet he was not really a heavy drinker. Very little alcohol got the better of him and he could quickly become morose; unlike Conder, who drank far more, remained cheerful, but had a tendency to see yellow-striped cats. Sometimes Augustus stayed out all night, and more than once he was arrested by the police and not released with a caution until the next day. Despite his broken appointments, he was making a reasonable income, though often obliged to borrow from his friends. Money had only one significance for him: it meant freedom of action. To his friends he was open-handed, and when in funds it was generally he who, at restaurants, demanded the bill, or was left with it. Other bills, such as the rent, he sometimes omitted to pay. ‘Gus says you need never pay Mrs Everett!’ Orpen assured Michel Salaman. Some landladies were more exigent. ‘I want to talk to you about this studio [76 Charlotte Street],’ Orpen wrote in another letter to Salaman on his return from Vattetot. ‘There is great trouble going on about Gus. I’m afraid he will not get back here.’ Mrs Laurence, who kept the house, had grown alarmed by what she called ‘Mr John’s saturnalias’. One night, simply it appears in order to terrify her, he had danced on the roof of the Church of St John the Evangelist next door. Other times he was apparently more conscientious, working late into the night with a nude model over his composition of ‘Adam and Eve’, and, in the heat of inspiration, stripping off his own clothes. Woken from her sleep by sounds of revelry from this Garden of Eden, Mrs Laurence, chaperoned by her friend old Mrs Young, went to investigate and, without benefit of art training, was shocked by what she found. When Augustus had left suddenly for France with the Carfax money in his pocket, he had paid her nothing; and so, when he returned in October, she refused him entry. He retreated, therefore, to old territory: 21 Fitzroy Street – ‘comfortless quarters’, as Will Rothenstein described them, but economical.
Here was Will Rothenstein’s cue once more to hurry to the rescue by generously offering his own house, No. 1 Pembroke Cottages, off Edwardes Square in Kensington, to Gus and Gwen. Augustus used the house only spasmodically, preferring to sleep in Orpen’s Fitzroy Street cellar rather than trudge back to Kensington late at night. The springs of this bed had collapsed at the centre, so only the artist who reached it first and sank into the precipitous valley of the mattress was comfortable. Neither liked early nights, but Orpen was eventually driven by lack of sleep to extra-ordinary ingenuities, falling into bed in the afternoon twilight, bolting doors, undressing in the dark, anything at all, to win a restful night. Augustus would then mount the stairs to John Everett’s room, drink rum in front of his fire till past midnight, and suddenly jump up exclaiming: ‘My God! I’ve missed the last train!’ For weeks on end he slept on two of Everett’s armchairs.
When Will Rothenstein returned to London, ‘I found the house empty and no fire burning. In front of a cold grate choked with cinders lay a collection of muddy boots… late in the evening John appeared, having climbed through a window; he rarely, he explained, remembered to take the house-key with him.’90 This was a sincere test of Rothenstein’s hero-worship. ‘There were none I loved more than Augustus and Gwen John,’ he admitted, ‘but they could scarcely be called “comfortable” friends.’91 As for his wife Alice, she insisted that the walls must be whitewashed and the floors scrubbed before their little home would again be habitable.
Will Rothenstein had recently finished, for the New English Art Club, a portrait of Augustus92 that won the difficult approbation of Tonks and, more difficult still, avoided the disapprobation of Augustus himself. It shows a soft and dreamy young man whose efforts to roughen and toughen himself are visibly unconvincing. Yet the life he was now leading was certainly rough. After a last effort to recapture 76 Charlotte Street – from which he was repelled ‘with a charming County Court summons beautifully printed’93 – he took up fresh quarters at 61 Albany Street, by the side of Regent’s Park. ‘I’ve abandoned my kopje in Charlotte Street,’ he told Will Rothenstein in the new Boer War language, ‘trekked and laagered up at the above, strongly fortified but scantily supplied. Generals Laurence and Young hover at my rear… the garrison [is] in excellent spirits.’
He had briefly taken up with a Miss Simpson who, dismissing him as hopelessly impoverished, decided to marry a bank clerk – and invited Augustus to her wedding. Except for his pale-blue corduroys he had nothing to wear. What happened was described by Orpen in a letter to John Everett:
‘I met John last night – he had been to Miss Simpson’s wedding, drunk as a lord. Dressed out in Conder’s clothes, check waistcoat, high collar, tail coat, striped trousers. He seemed to say he was playing a much more important part than the bridegroom at the wedding and spoke with commiseration at the thought of how bored they must be getting at each other’s society… He almost wept over this, gave long lectures on moral living, and left us.’
Augustus’s theories of ‘moral living’ had strained his relationship with Ida almost to breaking point. He was painting a portrait of her which ‘has clothed itself in scarlet’, she told Michel Salaman (1 February 1900), adding: ‘Gwen John has gone back to 122 Gower Street.94 John sleeps, apparently, anywhere.’
The break between them came after an eventful trip Augustus took with Conder that spring to Mrs Everett’s boarding house at Swanage. His hair was now cut short, his beard trimmed and he went everywhere in part of Conder’s wedding equipment – tail coat, high collar and cap. After the dissipations of London, both painters tried hard to discipline themselves. ‘I am quite well now and had almost a providential attack of measles which left me for some days to do my work,’ Conder wrote from Swanage to Will Rothenstein. Not since his early days had he worked so consistently out of doors, painting at least nine views of Swanage.95 He seemed to have found a technique for combining life and work. He would sit painting at the very centre of a rowdy group of friends. ‘There would be a whole lot of us smoking, talking, telling good stories,’ Everett optimistically recorded. ‘Conder would join in the conversation, talk the whole time, yet his hand would go on doing the fan. At times it really seemed as if somebody else was doing the watercolour.’
‘We drink milk and soda and tea in large quantities,’ Augustus solemnly confided to Orpen. ‘I must confess to a pint of beer occasionally on going into the town.’ As at Vattetot, both painters worked hard. Conder reported that Augustus was painting ‘a decoration 8 ft by 6… with a score of figures half life size’. Though this was ‘no easy matter’, he nevertheless appeared to ‘work away with great ease’ and, Conder concluded, large composition ‘seems to be his forte’.
Augustus too was impressed by Conder’s painting ‘which becomes everyday more beautiful’, he told Will Rothenstein. ‘The country here is lovely beyond words. Corfe Castle and the neighbourhood would make you mad with painter’s cupidity!… I have started a colossal canvas whereon I depict Dr Faust on the Brocken. I sweat at it from morn till eve.’ Not even an attack of German measles could interrupt such work. ‘Conder had them some weeks ago,’ he reported to Will Rothenstein.
‘I had quite forgotten about it when I woke up one morning horrified to find myself struck of a murrain – I have been kept in ever since, shut off from the world. In the daylight it isn’t so bad, but I dread the night season which means little sleep and tragic horrors of dreams at that. I mean in the day I work desperately hard at my colossal task. I can say at any rate Faust has benefited by my malady. In fact it is getting near the finish. There are about 17 figures in it not to speak of a carrion-laden gibbet.’96
Illness benefited their painting, but the renewal of good health, seasoned by the salt air, brought its problems. Mrs Everett, protected from a knowledge of their world by her harmonium, had invited down two fine-looking Slade girls, Elie Monsell and Daisy Legge, to keep them all company. John Everett, who visited Pevril Tower during weekends, watched the danger approaching gloomily. It seemed inevitable that some romantic entanglements would develop, and before long Conder, to his dismay, found himself engaged to the Irish art student Elie Monsell. Hauled up to London for a difficult interview with the girl’s mother (who seems to have been younger than himself), he shortly afterwards fled across the Channel to join Orpen in France. The engagement appeared to lapse, and the following year Conder found himself married to Stella Bedford.
Augustus was also experiencing what he called ‘the compulsion of sea-air’97 directed towards ‘a superb woman of Vienna’,98 Maria Katerina, an aristocrat employed by Mrs Everett in the guise of parlourmaid. ‘A beautiful Viennese lady here has had the misfortune to wrench away a considerable portion of my already much mutilated heart,’ was how he broke the news to Orpen. ‘Misfortune because such things cannot be brooked too complacently… Conder is engaged on an even more beautiful fête galante.’
In a letter written nearly twenty years later (2 February 1918) to his friend Alick Schepeler, Augustus was to make a unique admission. ‘The sort of paranoia or mental hail storm from which I suffer continually’, he told her, ‘…means that each impression I receive is immediately obliterated by the next girl’s, irrespective of its importance. Other people have remarked upon my consistent omission to keep appointments but only to you have I ever confessed the real and dreadful reason.’
This new mental hailstorm temporarily obliterated his feelings for Ida. It was as if he had never met her, as if he had been blinded and could no longer see her. Possibly his confinement with measles – ‘German measles please!’ he reminded Will Rothenstein, ‘I did not catch them in Vienna’ – had helped to bring about the dreadful impatience of his emotions; and this impatience was exacerbated by the girl’s elusiveness. The letters he wrote to his friends reverberate with the echoes of this passion. ‘It was without surprise I learnt she was descended from the old nobility of Austria. Her uncle, the familiar of Goethe, was Count von Astz,’ he admitted to Michel Salaman. ‘This damnably aristocratic pedigree, you will understand, only goes to make her more fatally attractive to my perverse self… She wears patent leather shoes with open work stockings and –’
On Conder’s advice, he bought a ring and presented it to her one dark night at the top of a drainpipe that led to her bedroom window. This gesture had a telling effect upon Maria Katerina’s defences, which ‘proved in the end to be not insurmountable’.99 She ‘has sucked the soul out of my lips’, Augustus boasted to Will Rothenstein. ‘I polish up my German lore. I spend spare moments trying to recall phrases from Ollendorf and am so grateful for your lines of Schiller which are all that remain to me of the Lied von der Glocke.’ But with the very instant of success, perhaps even fractionally preceding it, came the first encroachment of boredom.
‘Sometimes when I surprise myself not quite happy tho’ alone I begin to fear I have lost that crown of youth, the art of loving fanatically. I begin to suspect I have passed the virtues of juvenescence and that its follies are all that remain to me. Write to me dear Will and tell me… those little intimacies which are the salt of friendship and the pepper of love.’
On his last night in Swanage, Augustus and Maria met secretly on the cliffs. She was wearing her ring and promised to meet him in France where he was shortly to go with Michel Salaman. Back in London he felt desolate, and more than usually unself-sufficient. On 18 May, Mafeking Night, he strolled down to Trafalgar Square to see the fun, as people celebrated the lifting of the seven-month siege of Mafeking by the Boers. London had gone mad with excitement. Bells rang, guns were being fired, streamers waving; people danced in groups, clapping, shouting, kissing. The streets filled with omnibuses, people of all sorts, policemen without helmets. As if by magic, whistles appeared in everyone’s mouths, Union Jacks in their hands, and in the tumult of tears and laughter and singing complete strangers threw their arms about one another’s necks; it was, as Winston Churchill said, a most ‘unseemly’ spectacle. Some were shocked by such a ‘frantic and hysterical outburst of patriotic enthusiasm’, as Arnold Bennett called it. ‘[Trafalgar] Square, the Strand and all the adjacent avenues were packed with a seething mass of patriots celebrating the great day in a style that would have made a “savage” blush,’ Augustus wrote.
‘Mad with drink and tribal hysteria, the citizens formed themselves into solid phalanxes, and plunging at random this way and that, swept all before them. The women, foremost in this mêlée, danced like Maenads, their shrill cat-calls swelling the general din. Feeling out of place and rather scared, I extricated myself from this pandemonium with some difficulty, and crept home in a state of dejection.’100
*
‘You have evidently forgotten my address,’ Augustus remarked with surprise to Michel Salaman. This was not difficult. By June 1900, shortly before he was due to join Salaman in France, he had reached the same point of crisis at Albany Street as had been achieved the previous year in Charlotte Street, and by much the same methods. ‘We all went back to John’s place in Albany Street,’ John Everett wrote in his journal. ‘On the way they picked up an old whore, made some hot whisky. The result was John fell on the floor paralytic, the old whore on top of him in the same condition… Orpen and [Sidney] Starr tried to pull the old whore’s drawers off, but she was too heavy to move.’
‘I cannot come just yet,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman in France, ‘ – I have some old commissions to finish amongst other deterrents to immediate migration. Yet in a little while I have hopes of being able to join you. I have had notice to quit this place. I think I will take a room somewhere in Soho if I can find one – a real “mansarde” I hope – I want to hide myself away for some time… I shall have to see my Pa before I would come as it is now a long while since I have seen him… it would be nice if Gwen could come too and good for her too me thinks.’ Salaman had taken rooms at a house called Cité Titand in Le Puy-en-Velay, a medieval village in the Auvergne built about a central rock and dominated by a colossal Virgin in cast iron with doors opening into her body. Augustus arrived early in August. ‘It is a wonderful country I assure you – unimaginably wonderful!’ he wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt on 19 September 1900.
‘…There are most exquisite hills, little and big, Rembrandtesque, Titianesque, Giorgionesque, Turneresque, growing out from volcanic rocks, dominating the fat valleys watered by pleasant streams, tilled by robust peasants bowed by labour and age or upright with the pride of youth and carrying things on their heads. I have bathed in the waters of the Borne and have felt quite Hellenic! At first the country gave me indigestion; used to plainer fare it proved too rich, too high for my northern stomach; now I begin to recover and will find a lifetime too short to assimilate its menu of many courses...’101
To the golden-haired Alice Rothenstein, who had recommended Le Puy, he wrote with equal enthusiasm. ‘Really, you have troubled my peace with your golden hills and fat valleys of Burgundy!...
‘I work indoors mostly now. I am painting Michel’s portrait. I hope to make a success of it. If when finished it will be as good as it is now I may count on that. I am also painting Polignac castle which ought to make a fine picture...102
The very excellent military band plays in the park certain nights, and we have enjoyed sitting listening to it. It is very beautiful to watch the people under the trees. At intervals the attention of the populace is diverted from following the vigorous explanatory movements of the conductor by an appeal to patriotism, effected by illuminating the flag by Bengal lights at the window of the museum! It is dazzling and undeniable! The band plays very well. Rendered clairvoyant by the music one feels very intimate with humanity, only Michel’s voice when he breaks in with a laborious attempt at describing how beautifully the band played 3 years ago at the Queen’s Hall that time he took Edna Waugh – is rather disturbing – or is it that I am becoming ill-tempered?’
Where Augustus went, could Will be far behind? He turned up with Alice early in September and stayed two weeks at the Grand Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. ‘Every day we met at lunch in a vast kitchen, full of great copper vessels, a true rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque,’ Will Rothenstein remembered, ‘presided over by a hostess who might have been mother to Pantagruel himself, so heroic in size she was, and of so genial and warm a nature.’103
On their bicycles, the four of them pedalled as far south as Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, where Stevenson had once stayed on his travels with a donkey. Augustus on wheels was a fabulous sight, and Will noticed that the girls minding their cattle in the fields crossed themselves as he whizzed past, and that the men in horror would exclaim: ‘Quel type de rapin!’ At Arlempdes, a village of such devilish repute it went unmarked on any map, they were entertained by the curé, who commented ecstatically upon Augustus’s fitness for the principal role in their Passion play. ‘Who does he remind you of?’ he asked his sister. ‘Notre Seigneur, le bon Dieu,’ she answered without hesitation. ‘I take it as a compliment,’ Augustus remarked, but refused the part – understandably, since the previous year, in the heat of the occasion, Christ had been stabbed in the side. On reaching Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Alice took sanctuary at an inn while the three men spent the night in a Trappist monastery where Will believed he might see Huysmans. Though rising early, he saw no one. Augustus lay abed in his cell where he was served by the silent monks with a breakfast of wine and cheese.
After returning to Le Puy, Will and Alice wheeled their machines over the horizon and were gone. ‘Is it that I am becoming ill-tempered?’ Augustus had queried. His temper was affected by the failure of Maria Katerina to appear. He had written long letters urging her to meet him in Paris, but these were intercepted by Mrs Everett who, after Augustus left Swanage, had discovered hairpins in his bed. Brandishing these instruments she had extracted from her servant a full confession. Her duty now was clear. From reading Augustus’s letters it was a small step to writing Maria’s, the tone of which, Augustus noticed, suddenly changed. ‘When you will no longer have me – what will I do then?’ she asked. ‘What will become of me then? Repudiated by my husband who loves me? Can you answer that?’ Augustus did answer it according to his lights, but at such a distance, and screened by Mrs Everett, they were not strong enough. ‘Women always suspect me of fickleness,’ he explained to Alice Rothenstein, ‘but will they never give me a chance of vindicating myself? They are too modest, too cautious, for to do that they would have to give their lives. I am not an exponent of the faithful dog business.’
Michel Salaman, who was financing their holiday, suffered grievously from his disappointment. Almost every day Augustus complained of ailments and accidents. His womanizing brought out in him a satyr-like quality. Some women were alarmed, others hypnotized. Michel Salaman was shocked.
Augustus did his best to pull himself together. ‘I am painting beyond Esplay,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein.104 ‘…I want to travel again next year hitherwards and be a painter. I am, dear Will, full of ideas for work.’ He read – in particular Balzac’s Vie conjugale which ‘pains and makes me laugh at the same time’. He travelled – to Paris for a few days to see some Daumiers and Courbets and ‘was profoundly moved’.
He was soon joined by ‘the waif of Pimlico’ as he called his sister Gwen, and by ‘the gentle Ambrose McEvoy’. Salaman was rather on his guard with Gwen. She had once had a crush on him and he found her exacting. When she and McEvoy arrived at Le Puy, he returned to England. ‘I am conducted about by McEvoy and Gwen,’ Augustus wrote to Salaman, ‘who explain the beauties and show me new and ever more surprising spots.’ After a long evening walk they would hurry back ‘to cook a dinner which is often successful in some items’. Sometimes the two men – ‘the absinthe friends’ – would sit in a café where, Augustus told Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘a young lady exquisitely beautiful, attired as a soldier, sings songs of dubious meaning’.
By October, Augustus had become, according to McEvoy, a ‘demon’ for work, refusing to budge from his easel. He was as quick to infatuation as to anger: and quick to forget both. But for McEvoy and for Gwen it was a less happy time. McEvoy seemed in a dream. ‘After a strange period of mental and physical bewilderment I am beginning to regain some of my normal senses,’ he wrote to Salaman. ‘…At first I felt like some animal and incapable of expressing anything. Drawing was quite impossible. I should like to live here for years and then I might hope to paint pictures that would have something of the grand air of the Auvergne – but now! Gus seems to retain his self-control. Perhaps he has been through my stage. He constantly does the most wonderful drawings. Oh, it is most perplexing.’
During this month at Le Puy, McEvoy’s relationship with Gwen appears to have reached some sort of crisis. For much of the time he was silent, ‘a mere wreck’, drinking himself gently into oblivion; while Gwen, who spent many days in tears, seemed inconsolable. Having known Whistler, McEvoy had been able to give Gwen help with her oil painting technique at the Slade; but she had nothing more to learn from him after returning from Whistler’s own tuition at the Académie Carmen. She seemed too demanding, he too immature – besides, he was under Gus’s spell.
‘It will be a frightful job seeking for rooms in London,’ Augustus wrote to Salaman shortly before his return. But by November he had found what he wanted at 39 Southampton Street above the Economic Cigar Company. This was no ‘mansarde’, but would serve for a time. Many of the drawings he had done at Le Puy were now put on exhibition at the Carfax Gallery. ‘Tonks has bought 2 drawings. Brown thinks of doing so too,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘I have a great number if you like to come and amuse yourself.’ It was again partly owing to Rothenstein’s advocacy that the drawings sold so well. ‘John is the great one at present,’ Orpen assured Everett, ‘making a lot of money and doing splendid drawing.’ Augustus himself was delighted by this success – in a restrained way. ‘The run on my drawings tho’ confined to a narrow circle has been very pleasant,’ he wrote in another letter to Will Rothenstein that autumn. ‘People however seem better at bargaining than I am.’
People also seemed better, it struck him, at arranging their lives. He was growing increasingly dissatisfied by the series of pursuing landladies and girlfriends in retreat. Perhaps, after all, there was something to be said for ‘moral living’. At any rate the novelty was appealing.
He began to see Ida again. Although she had few illusions about the sort of life he had been leading, she still loved him. But he was dangerous. He knew he was dangerous and did not attempt to conceal it. In one of the limericks he was fond of composing, he scribbled:
There was a young woman named Ida
Who had a porcelain heart inside her
But she met a young card
Who hugged her so hard
He smashed up her crockery, Poor Ida!
Soon the two of them were together again on the old basis. ‘John is once more in the embrace of Miss Nettleship – the reunion is “Complet”,’ Orpen informed Everett. ‘Marie (la Belle) has faded into the dark of winter, and disappeared...’
But the old basis was no longer good enough. Since the Nettleships would never agree to their ‘living in sin’, and since Ida would never consent to distressing them in this way, ‘moral living’, as Augustus had called it, seemed the one solution. Having decided this, he acted at once. He conceded the formality of a civil ceremony but insisted on an elopement, and set off with Ida early one Saturday morning for the Borough of St Pancras where they celebrated the event in secret. ‘I have news to tell you,’ he wrote the following week to his sister Winifred. ‘Ida Nettleship and I got spliced at the St Pancras Registry Office last Saturday! McEvoy and Evans and Gwen aided and abetted us. Everyone agreed it was a beautiful wedding – there was a wonderful fog which lent an air of mystery unexpectedly romantic.’ This letter he illustrated with a drawing of himself standing on his head.
Jack Nettleship, when he discovered what had happened, took the news philosophically: his wife less so. ‘It might have been worse,’ Augustus commented.105 That evening Ida went up to the bedroom of one of her mother’s employees, Elspeth Phelps. ‘I want to tell you something, Elspeth,’ she said, taking her hands. ‘I want to tell you –’ and then burying her face in her hands she broke into great heaving sobs. After a few moments she continued: ‘I want to tell you I’ve married Gussie – and I think I’m a little frightened.’106
She gave no sign of this fear in public. After the wedding they went round to tell Will and Alice Rothenstein the news. ‘How pleased we were, and what mysterious things Ida and my wife had to talk over!’ Will wrote.107 That evening the Rothensteins gave them a party. Ida looked ‘exquisitely virginal in her simple white dress’. ‘Mr & Mrs Nettleship, Mrs Beerbohm and Neville [Lytton], Miss Salmond, Misses John, Salaman, Messrs Steer, Tonks, McEvoy, Salaman and myself were there,’ Albert Rutherston wrote to his parents. But Augustus himself was not there. The last anyone had seen of him was on his way that afternoon to a bath. Late that night, he turned up wearing a bright check suit and earrings. ‘We were very gay,’ remembered Albert Rutherston. ‘We had scherades [sic] towards the end of the evening which was great fun. Mr and Mrs John were radiant.’ One of these charades represented Steer teaching at the Slade – a long silence, then: ‘How’s your sister?’ This, Augustus swore, was a perfect example of Steer’s methods.
‘I pray the marriage may be a splendid thing for both parties,’ Orpen wrote to Will Rothenstein. Augustus himself had no doubts. At last someone had given him the chance of vindicating himself. Though Ida and he had undergone a more or less conventional wedding, neither of them were conventional people: they simply loved each other.
For their honeymoon, he took his wife to Swanage, and they stayed at Pevril Tower.
*1 On the University College, London, form she crossed out ‘10 Princes Square’ and substituted ‘23 Euston Square’, apartments rented by a Charles Smith.
*2 Hence E. X. Kapp’s masterly clerihew:
When Augustus John
Really does slap it on,
His price is within 4d.
Of Orpen’s.
*3 Albert Rothenstein changed his named to Rutherston during the First World War, and is generally now remembered by that name. To avoid unnecessary complication I have called him Rutherston throughout.
*4 ‘We have now the news of John’s prize,’ Ida wrote from 12 rue Froideveau to Michel Salaman. ‘He sent a delicious pen and ink sketch of himself with 1st prize £30 stuck in his hat as sole intimation of what had befallen him. We were so awfully glad.’
*5 See Appendix One, ‘Desecration of Saint Paul’s’.