‘For an idea of the Academy they deplored, we can turn to the Catalogue of Harry Furniss’s spoof Academy exhibition of 1887 – Alma-Tadema’s Roman Ladies, Stacy Mark’s gnarled birds, a laborious allegory by Watts, cattle shows, whiskery portraits, a besotted cavalier, and the minutely painted floorboards of Orchardson.’
Bevis Hillier, The Early Years of the New English Art Club
The New English Art Club, by the time Augustus John officially became a member in 1903, was seventeen years old. It had been founded, after some half-dozen years of discussions, by a number of artists who had worked in the Parisian schools and who wanted an exhibiting society run on the French democratic lines of elective juries as against the appointed privileged committee of Burlington House. During the mid-nineteenth century the Royal Academy had been perfecting its policy of caution. It had been slow to welcome the Pre-Raphaelites until Pre-Raphaelitism became diluted – by which time it welcomed little else. To many of the Academy’s forty immortals, Paris was still a name of dread, to be associated with lubricity, bloodshed and bad colour.
But to the mob of disgruntled outsiders Paris was an Elysium. They found their inspiration not so much in Impressionism as in the ennobling realism of Millet and Corot, in the ‘pleinairism’ of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the Barbizon School. Their movement was formalized in 1886 when the New English Art Club came into being.
For a quarter of a century the club was to act as a salon des refusés. The exhibitions were shown at the Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, the ‘Hall of Mystery’. Its original members numbered many hardened sentimentalists. Chief among them at the start was the ‘Newlyn Group’, whose watchword was ‘values’. They were not, in any exaggerated way, revolutionaries. The pictures of Frank Bramley, in the matter of domestic sentiment, could rival those of most academicians; while George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes and H. H. La Thanghe’s large-scale, open-air paintings of country and fisher folk, which excited much popular acclaim, contained little to vex the Academy of Sir John Millais. It was not long before all these artists drifted off to Burlington House.
This dangerous contact with the open air, this accent on ‘realism’ and concentration upon rustic themes, seem at first sight to have something in common with Augustus’s spontaneous landscapes. These pleinair Victorian painters were theatrical realists, and their pictures were carefully staged. Sickert explained the artificial nature of the Newlyn Group when he wrote:
‘Your subject is a real peasant in his own natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the sack, and never a breath of air circulates around that painful rendering in the flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a real peasant. What are the truths you have gained, a handful of tiresome little facts, compared to the truths you have lost? To life and spirit, light and air?’1
Augustus abandoned storytelling altogether. Simply the thing itself was what he saw. His figures seldom touch or focus on each other. They appear as single shapes caught in preparatory gestures, or are arranged as in a ballet performed within the landscape of his imagination.
By the early 1890s control of the NEAC had passed to another group, sometimes called ‘the London Impressionists’, the leading figures of which were Steer and Sickert. They, too, looked to France for their inspiration – not to Millet and Corot, but to Monet, Manet and Degas. London Impressionism had little in common with Monet’s 1874 landscape entitled ‘Une Impression’, from which the name literally derived. It was impressionism relying on line and tonality, and dominated by the influence of Whistler. Whistler himself had ceased to exhibit at the club in 1889, ‘disapproving, perhaps, a society so less than republican in constitution as to have no president’.2 But Sickert was still a faithful disciple and, moreover, a severe critic of Bastien-Lepage. The sentiment and invention of narrative painting were on the way out before impartiality and an insistence upon ‘the thing there’. When D. S. MacColl praised Whistler on the aptness of a bit of wall-skirting in a portrait, he retorted severely: ‘But it’s there.’ And Sickert, too, shared this principle. ‘Supposing’, he explained, ‘that you paint a woman carrying a pail of water through the door, and drops are spilt upon the planks. There is a natural necessary rhythm about the pattern they make much better than anything you could invent.’
Hampered by difficulties over galleries, and weakened by their aesthetic differences, the New English failed to make an early impact. But then, in 1890, the Scottish painter D. S. MacColl became Art Critic of the Spectator, and shortly afterwards the Irish novelist George Moore was appointed to a similar post on the Speaker. Both writers gave a leading place to the NEAC shows.
Moore, who had studied as a painter in Paris, re-emphasized the French influence of the NEAC over the lingering Nazarene culture in Burlington House. He had been educated, he liked to point out, not round the lawns and cloisters of Oxford or Cambridge but at the marble tables of the Nouvelles Athènes, a café on the Place Pigalle, sitting through the morning idleness and long summer evenings until completely ‘aestheticized’ by two o’clock the following morning. D. S. MacColl revived the antagonism between the club and the Academy, provoking anger among academic reactionaries. Sir Frederic Leighton predicted that the club would soon be disbanded. Sir William Richmond was heard to say of John Singer Sargent: ‘I should like to set him copying Holbeins for a year.’ The climax came in 1893 over Degas’s inaccurately named picture ‘L’Absinthe’. During one of the fiercest aesthetic battles in the history of modern art, MacColl, Degas and the whole of the NEAC were abused ‘from Budapest to Aberdeen’. This controversy had the result of placing the New English Art Club at the forefront of non-academic painting – even Aubrey Beardsley joined it. ‘Degradation to suit a decadent civilization,’ thundered the Westminster Gazette. ‘No longer does nobility of idea dictate subjects to authors; sex is over-emphasized; the peak of abomination has been reached by the Yellow Book… All this relates to the evil at work as expressed by the New English Art Club.’
By the turn of the century, when Augustus began to exhibit, the club was about to enter a new phase in its history. Alphonse Legros had disliked the aims of the NEAC, but Brown was an original member, a close associate of Sickert’s, and the man who had drafted the club’s rules. Tonks, too, became a member in 1895 and was elected to the jury, on which he represented the revolutionary element in many an argument with Roger Fry – roles that were later dramatically to be reversed. It was therefore not surprising that the Slade should emerge as the chief nursery of young talent, and that people should look to Augustus, as the spoilt child of this crèche, to lead the way.
He and Gwen and other ex-students were soon exhibiting there. ‘Gwen has had a portrait hung in the NEAC,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman from Swanage. ‘I don’t know yet whether they have hung mine… Orpen has sent also and Everett so that there should be a healthy inoculation of new and Celtic blood into the Aged New English at last. The jurors have rejected both Mr Nettleship and Ida’s works. I can’t see why the former should wish to seek laurels in this direction… I have returned now… The New English has opened its doors on the flabber-gasted.’3
From this time onward a change began to pass over the appearance of the NEAC exhibitions: more drawings and watercolours were seen and the club became, in the words of D. S. MacColl, ‘a school of drawing’.4 Then Roger Fry’s appointment as Art Critic of the Athenaeum gained for the New English another platform. The Winter Exhibition of 1904, Fry wrote, was its most important one yet. ‘Mr Sargent, Mr Steer, Mr Rothenstein, Mr John, Mr Orpen, to mention only the best known artists, are all seen here at their best.’ But the older members belonged to a group, he continued, ‘whose traditions and methods are already being succeeded by a new set of ideas. They are no longer le dernier cri – that is given by a group of whom Mr John is the most remarkable member.’
There was nothing inimical in Augustus’s work to Sickert’s London Impressionists whose pursuit was ‘life’ and whose object was to draw it feverishly, Quentin Bell has explained, ‘capturing at high speed the essentials of the situation’.5 Between Sickert and himself there developed a respect tinged with irony. Sickert was amused by Augustus’s moody character. ‘I am proud to say’, he boasted, ‘that I once succeeded in bringing a smile to the somewhat difficult lips of Mr Augustus John.’6 Yet he saw the value of his work, describing him as ‘the first draughtsman that we have… the most sure and able of our portrait painters’.7 And in the New Age he paid generous tribute to Augustus’s ‘intensity and virtuosity [which] have endued his peculiar world of women, half gypsy, half model, with a life of their own. But his whole make-up is personal to himself, and the last thing a wary young man had better do is to imitate John… [he is] incessantly provisioning himself from the inexhaustible and comfortable cupboard of nature.’8
Perversely, Augustus dismissed Sickert’s writings as ‘elegant drivel’.9 Though he liked Sickert’s work, he felt impatience with his aesthetic intrigues. Augustus seldom interested himself in art politics. While other painters held stormy meetings about New Rules and Old Prejudices, the only record of Augustus intercepting their discussions is in the spring of 1903 when, so Orpen told Conder (2 May 1903), he ‘demanded to know why after accepting Miss Gwendolen John’s pictures – they [the NEAC Committee] had not hung them. But alas this question was out of order...’10
But Gwen was thankful to be free of the New English. ‘I think I can paint better than I used – I know I can,’ she told Ursula Tyrwhitt (8 July 1904); ‘it has been such a help not to think of the N.E.A.C. – and not to hurry over something to get it in – I shall never do anything for an exhibition again – but when the exhibitions come round send anything I happen to have.’
Gwen finally ceased showing her pictures at the club in the winter of 1911. ‘I paint a good deal,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson after the last show (5 December 1911), ‘but I don’t often get a picture done – that requires, for me, a very long time of a quiet mind, and never to think of exhibitions.’
Augustus continued regularly showing his work at the NEAC until the large Retrospective Exhibition of 1925, and intermittently afterwards.*1 His attitude to the New English was the same as his attitude would be to the Royal Academy. ‘Over here paltry little clubs & exhibitions agitate the artistic climate,’ he wrote to Gwen in 1904. As for the Royal Academy, it was unthinkable that he would ever belong to an institution whose shows were simply ‘a vast collection of wrong-minded stuff. Sargent, who had joined the Royal Academy in 1897, was he told Gwen, ‘the cleverest of the spoilers, moilers & toilers [who] with infallible judgement leaves out everything that makes a face interesting. His art is merely “the glass of fashion” but hardly “the mould of form”.’
Augustus envied Gwen’s quiet as opposed to his own agitated atmosphere. He wanted her to be recognized and he worried about her neglect, over which he sometimes felt odd sensations of responsibility. But she was almost impossible to help either with gifts of money, which put her awkwardly in his debt, or with offers to manage exhibitions on her behalf, which troubled her as much as the exhibitions themselves. His moods of responsibility came and went, and she was affected both by their coming and their going.
And he was affected by Gwen’s tenuous self-sufficiency. Her attitude, if he could have attained it, would surely have furthered his own talent. But with such a lifestyle, such an entourage, he could never afford it. For she, in her prison-like rooms, was comparatively free; while he, restlessly patrolling here and darting somewhere else, would be encumbered by the claims of voluminous and irregular families.
‘I become more rebellious in Liverpool.’
Augustus John to Alice Rothenstein (December 1905)
‘We have taken the most convenient flat imaginable in Fitzroy Street,’ Augustus wrote to his sister Winifred a few days after his marriage. ‘It has an excellent studio. The whole most cheap.’
By the time they returned from their honeymoon at Swanage, this flat – three rooms and a huge studio in the top part of 18 Fitzroy Street – had been redecorated and stood ready for them. But no sooner had they got there than Ida fell ill with the Swanage complaint – measles – and returned to Wigmore Street, leaving Augustus alone. It was not a good omen.
Money was now their chief worry. Well though Augustus’s work had sold at his exhibitions, it was not admired by everyone and could scarcely earn him enough to keep a wife, let alone children. He applied for a British Institute scholarship but did not get one. Then, that February 1901, shortly after Ida returned, a new opportunity for making a living suddenly presented itself. Albert Rutherston, having staggered round to deliver his wedding present of a kitchen table, reported that ‘there is just a chance of John going to Liverpool for a year to act as Professor in the school of art there during the absence of the present one – it would be very nice for him as he will get a studio free and at least £300 or £400 [equivalent to £15,500–£20,500 in 1996] for the year.’
What had happened was that Herbert Jackson, the art instructor at the art school affiliated to University College, Liverpool, had gone off to the Boer War. When asked to recommend someone temporarily to fill his place, D. S. MacColl had put Augustus’s name forward;11 and, since there was no time to be lost, his proposal was at once accepted.
Augustus arrived in Liverpool late that winter, ‘a heartening sight’, one student recalled, ‘…striding across the drab quad to the studios in his grey fisherman’s jersey and with golden rings*2 in his ears’.12 The university staff were rather flustered by this spectacle, enhanced by the beard, long hair and large magnetic eyes, and by the sonorous voice with which he sang his repertoire of ballads romantic and bawdy – rollicking songs from the old troubadours and suggestive ones imported from Parisian cabarets, little verses from Villon and whining cockney limericks with their cringing refrain:
‘I’m a man as done wrong to my paryents’.
‘Liverpool is a most gorgeous place,’ Augustus immediately wrote to Michel Salaman. He had been warned that it was an ugly city but he did not find it ugly. It enthralled him. Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it had been rising from a ‘black hole’ as Nathaniel Hawthorne, the US Consul there in the 1850s, called it, into a prosperous and dignified Victorian trading city. Its prosperity depended upon its port, one of the largest in the world, which made it a cosmopolitan meeting place ‘full of European enclaves and strange languages, while the steamships and sailing barques brought sailors’ stories, rhymes and riddles from all over the world’.13
Lytton Strachey, who left the university a few months before Augustus John arrived there, had recoiled from the groups of starving children, drunken sailors, beggars with their dingy barrel organs, that infested the stinking slum streets and tenements that lay behind and around Liverpool’s grand façade. The crowds at the docks were ‘appalling’, he noted, and ‘all hideous. It gave me the shivers and in ten minutes I fled.’14 But Augustus revelled in this spectacle of human diversity: the knife grinders, umbrella makers, ship owners, Celtic scholars, soap kings. The only place that gave him the shivers was the Walker Art Gallery – ‘a stinking hole’15 he called it in a letter to Michel Salaman.
‘The docks are wondrous,’ Augustus was soon writing to Will Rothenstein. ‘The college is quite young, so are its professors and they are very anxious to make it an independent seat of learning… The town is full of Germans, Jews, Welsh and Irish and Dutch.’ Everything seemed to delight him. Whatever was new appeared exciting – and there was much that was new to him, much that smelt of adventure here. He explored the sombre district of the Merseyside with its migrant population of Scandinavians on their way to the New World, and reported to Alice Rothenstein, ‘the Mersey is grand – vast – in a golden haze – a mist of love in the great blue eye of heaven.’ He nosed around the Goree Piazza, still faintly reeking of the slave trade; he reconnoitred the Chinese Quarter off Pitt Street and Upper Frederick Street, with its whiff of opium, and looked in on the lodging houses of the tinkers round Scotland Road. Even the art school – a collection of wooden sheds on Brownlow Hill – appealed to him. ‘It is amusing teaching,’ he told Will Rothenstein.
Over the first few weeks he and Ida put up at 9 St James’s Street, and it was here that Augustus’s one complaint lay. ‘It has been impossible to do much work yet – living as a guest in somebody’s house – a great bore.’ He was hungry for work, especially since there was soon to be another show of his pictures at the Carfax Gallery. But already by April they had found ‘very good rooms’, he reported, ‘in the house of an absent-minded and charming Professor, one Mackay’.
‘Some of the College professors are charming men,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman. John MacDonald Mackay, Rathbone Professor of Ancient History, was ‘the leading spirit of the College’, he assured Will Rothenstein shortly after moving to his house at 4 St James’s Road. ‘He avoids coming to the practical point most tenaciously – when arranging about taking these rooms he refused to consider terms but referred us to the Swedish Consul – who was extremely surprised when Ida spoke to him on the subject.’
Mackay combined two qualities that appealed to Augustus’s divided nature: comedy and idealism. With his right hand raised, half to his audience, half to the sky visible through the window, a faraway look in his eyes, he would discourse in a weird moustachioed chant, interrupting himself with bursts of sing-song laughter or rhetorical indignation, often abandoning the line of his argument, yet always struggling back to First Principles. Within the chemistry of his strange, broken-back eloquence, Liverpool was transformed into a new Athens destined to save the country from materialism by the luminescence of its thought, the excellence of its work, the beauty of its art and architecture. Whatever nominal positions others may have held, Mackay was the patron of the university while Augustus lived there.
Mackay was important to Augustus in two respects. First, he became the subject of one of his strongest portraits. He had a magnificent head, with fair unkempt hair, a powerful jaw and square chin, and the broad shoulders and torso of someone altogether larger. Augustus’s ‘official’ portrait – a three-quarter view of him decked out in his red academic robes – catches the spiritual energy of the man.16
Secondly, he introduced Augustus and Ida to people whom, in their peculiar shyness, they might otherwise never have known. A number of these Augustus drew and painted, and a few became close friends. ‘We are to dine with the Dowdalls on Friday which I dread,’ Ida wrote to her mother. ‘They are very nice, but I would rather hide.’ A little later she is writing: ‘We had a nice little dinner with the Dowdalls on Saturday. He is a lawyer, I think, with a taste for painting – and he has a little auburn-haired wife who spends most of her time being painted by different people. Gus is to draw Dowdall’s mother.’
Harold Chaloner Dowdall, later to become a County Court judge and, as Lord Mayor of Liverpool, the subject of one of Augustus’s most controversial portraits, was a pompous good-natured barrister, very loyal to the Johns but with a tendency to dilate, perhaps for an entire day, on the extreme freshness of that morning’s eggs at breakfast. His wife Mary, nicknamed ‘the Rani’, was ‘the most charming and entertaining character in Liverpool’, Augustus asserted. She soon became Ida’s most devoted confidante. ‘The Rani has beautiful browny-red hair and is quite exceptional, and reminds me of the grass and the smell of the earth,’ Ida wrote. As always with those she admired, she likened the Rani to an animal in its natural surroundings. ‘Certainly you belong to the woods and where creatures start and hide away at any alien sound.’
As the daughter of Lord Borthwick, the Hon. Mrs Dowdall was Liverpool’s aristocrat. But she shocked Liverpool society dreadfully. Respectable people were put out by her habit of walking barefoot through the mud – ‘the gentle stimulant of cold mud welling between one’s toes is a clarifier of thought’, she informed them, ‘after a day’s perfect irresponsibility’. They were dismayed when, at the fashionable hour, she was to be seen swinging her stockingless legs from the back of a gypsy caravan trundling down Bold Street. They disliked her involvement with the repertory theatre which gave theatrical performances on Good Friday, her frequent modelling for dubious artists such as Charles Shannon, her awful wit, her sheer attractiveness, her unaccountable failure to take Liverpool society seriously. Above all, Liverpool was appalled by the books she wrote – novels they were, with such titles as Three Loving Ladies and, most notoriously, The Book of Martha, which, embellished with a frontispiece by Augustus, dealt with tradesmen and servants. She was also the author of Joking Apart, and her jokes, delivered in the mock-magisterial tones of her husband, were introduced by: ‘All virgins will kindly leave the Court.’ No wonder she emptied the drawing-rooms of Edwardian Liverpool.
Augustus’s contacts with the university staff were not pushed to extremes, but among the exceptions were the Professor of Modern Literature, Walter Raleigh, who abashed him with his early morning brilliance – ‘he shone even at breakfast!’17 – Charles Bonnier, the French professor, a victim to the theory and practice of pointillisme, who ‘has been producing a most astoundingly horrible marmalade of spots yellow, purple, blue and green in my studio’;18 and Herbert MacNair, Instructor in Design and Stained Glass, a lusty bicyclist who, in later life, became a postman. He and his wife Frances, working in perfect unison, involved themselves with a peculiar form of art nouveau, producing, to Augustus’s dismay, friezes of quaint mermaids designed after the MacNair crest, staircases encrusted in sheet lead, lamps of fancifully twisted wrought iron, symbolic watercolours on vellum, embroideries depicting bulbous gnomes and fairies prettily arranged, and as their pièce de résistance a burly door-knocker 18 inches long, the delight of small boys who used it ‘to keep themselves in constant touch with the most advanced Art movement’, Augustus told Will Rothenstein. ‘…Between them [they] have produced one baby [Sylvan] and a multitude of spooks – their drawing-room is very creepy and the dinner-table was illuminated with two rows of nightlights in a lantern of the “MacNair” pattern...’
By far the most valuable new friend Augustus made was the university Librarian, John Sampson. A portly man, almost twice Augustus’s age, Sampson was ponderous in his manner but at heart a poet, a romantic and a rebel. His influence on Augustus over the next two years was to change his life. The two men met in the late spring of 1901 and struck up an immediate friendship.
Sampson was almost pedantically self-taught. He had left school at fourteen, been apprenticed to a lithographer and engraver in Liverpool, read literature at night and, having learnt the aesthetic disciplines of typography and design, set up a small business as printer in the Liverpool Corn Exchange. He had ambitions to become an artist – ambitions which Augustus quickly quelled. But his abiding passion was the pursuit of lost languages, the unknown vocabularies and grammars of ancient mother tongues still miraculously to be heard across woods and fields and mountainsides in the heart of Wales. These fugitive words – ‘ablatives or adverbs or queer things of that sort’ – spread through him an extraordinary pleasure, especially when their curators turned out to be those ‘exasperating lovely creatures’, the gypsy girls; for ‘man does not live by philology alone.’ Sampson seemed to regard the rhyming slang and ‘flying cant’, the beautiful grand syllables of forgotten tongues, as orchestrated clues to some treasure. It was, he later said, ‘like finding a tribe of organ-grinders who among themselves spoke Ciceronian Latin’. He particularly relished the challenge of locating Shelta, the obscure uncorrupted jargon in which the tinkers communicated their secret messages, tracking it down ‘from one squalid lodging house and thieves’ kitchen to another’.19 His search had led him to a great Celtic scholar from Leipzig, Kuno Meyer, then teaching German at University College, Liverpool. It was through Meyer’s influence that Sampson was appointed the first Librarian at the university.
There was much in the huge and gentle figure of Sampson for Augustus to admire: the sardonic humour, the irresistible lure of the fields and hills, the vast accumulation of odd knowledge. ‘You are a learned man,’ Walter Raleigh wrote to Sampson (16 July 1908), ‘and a rogue, one of the sort of fellows who think they can conduct the business of life on inspirationist principles, and who run an office pretty well much the same way as they make love to a woman.’20 He was said to write seventy-seven love letters a year, and looked a commanding figure as he strode through the streets of Liverpool in his old velvet jacket, disgracefully baggy trousers, with his muff and gin bottle and a battered slouch hat set at an angle, his chest thrust out, legs moving powerfully. He knew how to drink, was a great smoker, liked reading Romany poems amid clouds of strong tobacco smoke. ‘A heavy figure with a florid countenance’, Geoffrey Keynes remembered him, ‘hunched in an armchair at a great desk covered with papers, a gold-rimmed pince-nez dripping off his nose over a wide waistcoat scattered with portions of food...’21 Despite his intimidating scholarship, a rather overbearing manner and fierce temper, there was something lovable about him: a gentleness in his voice and much boyish ardour. He was followed everywhere by devoted women with exotic names – Damaris, Doonie, Kish – who dedicated themselves to him and his work.
‘The majestic Sampson’ reminded Augustus of ‘a magnificent ship on a swelling sea’. His chief influence in the first year or two of their friendship lay in the refreshing new model of married life he presented. Augustus was fearful of domesticity; the long dark imprisonment of wedlock filled him with unease. Sampson, though never indiscreet, showed him a freer, more open-air version of marriage. Seven years ago he had married a pretty Scottish girl, Meg Sprunt, much younger than himself and famed for her flying hair. Now they had two sons and a daughter. ‘I really must abandon these casual wandering ways now that I am a husband and parent,’ Sampson admitted. But he could not help slipping off for a day or a week to the favoured camping places of the travellers, gazing at their long black hair glittering with gold coins, their fields ablaze with quilts and tents. He would sit eating the delicious otchi-witches (hedgehogs) and listen in ecstasy to their riddles, folk-tales and songs played on harps and on fiddles improvised from an ashplant and a few hairs from the tail of a horse. To hear the lovely words, the marvellous rising sounds of their language, became a linguistic passion for Sampson, guiding him to happiness or to madness – perhaps both. His face lit up, he was overcome by an immense emotion. ‘Did you hear him use the ablative – how perfectly beautiful!’ He was a very perfect Rai (gentleman scholar): ‘the large and rolling Rai’, Augustus called him, or ‘Rai of Rai’s’ as he was known in wild places beyond the university.
Augustus had a quick ear for languages and under Sampson’s tutelage he soon picked up the English dialect of Romany and later something of the deep inflected Welsh dialect. When he arrived in Liverpool he had been reading the novels of Turgenev in the recent translations by Constance Garnett, and Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Now he turned to Kriegspiel, the unique gypsy novel by Francis Hindes Groome, and to the picaresque romances of George Borrow, ‘the prince among vagabonds’, who could make his readers hear ‘the music of the wind on the heath’. Like Augustus, Borrow had suffered from ‘the Horrors’; and like Sampson he found relief in ‘a dream partly of study, partly of adventure’. For both Augustus and Sampson, united by a longing for poetic escapades, Borrow became an inspiration, replacing bourgeois with bohemian life, promising nothing, beckoning his followers away from the ethics of nineteenth-century empire-building and the commercial practices of twentieth-century industrialism.
As a learned guide to the ways of the road, ‘Beloved Sampson’ became a new kind of hero for Augustus. Their friendship was to be interrupted by glaring quarrels and rivalries, but it lasted a lifetime. They exchanged passwords and countersigns and indelicate verses in Romany. ‘You must hate my jargon compounded of all the dialects in Europe,’22 Augustus acknowledged. It was not really a letter-writing relationship. ‘Many a time have I started writing to you and in many places,’ Augustus assured him the following year, ‘ – but my pockets are always full of unfinished letters.’23 Sampson seldom got so far as beginning letters. ‘You will never write to me I suppose,’ Augustus lamented; ‘all I can do is to write to you and assure you of the sweet pleasure it would always be for me to hear from you, a pleasure which might well come at a time when blank glooms shut out the beauty of the world – one cannot always keep the horizon clear. It is as well to have a pal a long way off when those at hand and in sight are… rather spectral and unconvincing shapes!’24
And yet, because there would be long wandering intervals between their meetings, and distance was always precious to them and separation a necessity, the letters they did eventually send each other over thirty years possessed a special value. ‘What’s the point of seeing Gypsies if I can’t talk to you about them?’25 Augustus demanded. So, with long meditative silences, they did talk a little, partly in Romany, partly in English, through their correspondence. Sampson’s letters, with their reminiscences of sunlight and tobacco smoke, green leaves and wayside pubs, were a magical pick-me-up for Augustus, like an old perfume invading his mind. ‘I shall count the hours till I hear from you,’ he implored, ‘…don’t keep me in suspense.’ It was important to him that Sampson ‘remember your brother of the Predilection’ and send him news of ‘little Egypt’. From time to time he would fire back ‘a pack of Romani stuff’ from his travels through Europe, and Sampson would examine it through his pince-nez and surround it all with his illuminating annotations.
Augustus venerated Sampson’s eclectic scholarship, ranging from the Lyrical Poems of William Blake which he was preparing when they met, to his subversive Poachers’ Calendar and collection of ‘songs for singing at encampments’. Augustus put him on to W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land (‘a beautiful book’) and Sampson introduced him to Hardy’s poems (‘wonderful things’, Augustus discovered). On good days they felt each was the other’s kindred spirit in art and letters, two names that should be coupled down the long ages. ‘Now partner, you must play straight, no publishing songs without my collaboration – that is the bond,’26 Augustus exhorted Sampson. He provided lyrical or bawdy frontispieces for several of Sampson’s books: his Romany version of Omar Khayyám, his volume of poems Romane Gilia, and gypsy anthology The Wind on the Heath which, Sampson assured Augustus, was a ‘strictly amoral’ book, and therefore ‘an excellent one to give to chyes [children]’.27
But what Augustus chiefly prized was Sampson’s massive masterpiece-to-be, The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, tracing the connections between Romany, Sanskrit, Persian and the languages of Europe. ‘It will be a masterpiece old pal,’ Augustus confidently assured his friend, ‘and will probably make Romani in future an indispensable adjunct of a gentleman’s education – like Greek used to be.’28 Augustus was all impatience to see the book – ‘how is the great book going on? Surely you are near Z by now’ – but impatience was inappropriate. In Sampson’s opinion ‘no time or trouble should be grudged to make the book a perfect specimen of its kind.’29 It was a good corrective to Augustus’s hasty spirit. Early in 1924 Sampson wrote: ‘My vocab. has now reached p. 368, beginning of letter T. I send you a proof of an earlier sheet – R being rather an interesting letter – to show you what it’s like. References to “o Janos” [John] wind through the pages “like a golden thread”.’30
‘How delighted I was to receive the specimen sheets!’ Augustus replied. ‘…It’s always a joy to me to read a word of the old tongue and now soon we shall have the big book at last… It’s a fine thing to have accomplished so complete a thing in one’s life.’ The implication was that Augustus’s life had become scattered with too many unaccomplished, or at least unfinished, things.
Augustus was Sampson’s most eclectic disciple. When, falling one day in later life into despair after a gypsy informed him that he was getting bald at the top of his head, Sampson turned and asked Augustus: ‘What should I do?’ he was sternly instructed, ‘Return to your innocence’ – by which Augustus meant ‘sin openly and scandalize the world.’31 But Sampson could not do this: his flirtations were furtive and he led a secret life. Augustus seemed to him exorbitantly favoured by the gods. It was almost impossible not to sentimentalize over him. Sampson described him as ‘strong, handsome, a genius, beloved by many men and women with a calling which is also his chief pleasure and allows him the most entire freedom, successful beyond his dreams or needs and assured of immortality as long as art lasts’. This was the legendary being Sampson was to celebrate in his poem ‘The Apotheosis of Augustus John’. ‘It is almost more than one mortal deserves,’ Sampson wrote to his son Michael, ‘but somehow it seems all right in his case.’32
Augustus needed to put himself in the service of some master. And if the service was intermittent and Sampson a master in the wrong artistic medium, nevertheless the older man’s influence was strong in those early Liverpool days. By the gypsies themselves, Sampson was already admitted as one of their own. Augustus had been attracted to gypsies since childhood, but always from a distance. Now, as the Rai’s friend, he was welcomed by these ‘outlandish and despised people’ as a fellow vagrant. He could not keep away Sampson would take him to Cabbage Hall, a strip of wasteland beyond Liverpool where there was no hall and no cabbages, only the tents and caravans of the gypsy tribes which congregated there throughout the winter; and their visits were rich in speculation and adventure.
There was something strangely satisfying in this life of singing and dancing and odd journeys. The tents, the wagons, the gaily painted carts and great shining flanks of the horses, the sight of the women with their children, stirred Augustus in a way he could not explain. They were so fine-looking, these weathered people, as they crowded round, their language flying everywhere, their beauty intensified by a proud and enigmatic bearing. ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’ – the possibilities seemed endless. Noah, Kenza, Eros and Bohemia; Sinfai, Athaliah, Counseletta and Tihanna – their extraordinary names, and the mystery and antiquity of their origins conjured up a world, remote yet sympathetic, to which he should have belonged.
When he left them to return to the university and to Ida, he would try to reason out why he felt these tremors of fascination and what the true significance of it might be. They seemed to have much in common with him; they were natural exhibitionists, yet deeply secretive; they were quick-witted, courteous, yet temperamental and with a dark suspicion of strangers; they were essentially honest, almost naïve, yet prevaricating; they loved children, yet without sentimentality. All this he knew, and yet it still left unexplained that painful hammering of his heart whenever he approached their camps. His excitement came from desires damped down in childhood now magically rekindled. In the sun and wind, like the trees and fields around them, these travellers seemed truly alive. There was nothing confined, nothing claustrophobic here: they did what they wanted, went where they wished – over the next hill, far away – and they were answerable to nobody.
He was exhilarated.
*
At 4 St James’s Road life had begun to follow a steady pattern. ‘We have callers pretty often,’ Ida informed Alice Rothenstein, ‘University men and their wives. Our room is always in disorder when they come as Gus is generally painting – but they survive it.’ Generally he was painting Ida, but she also found time to continue with her painting and ‘have an old man model, who goes to lectures on Dante, and takes part in play-readings. He sits like a rock, occasionally wiping his old eyes when they get moist.’
Augustus’s father came to see them, and so did Ida’s mother. The Nettleships had not come round to Ida’s marriage. Very little was said, but Mrs Nettleship’s work-girls felt her disapproval and whispered among themselves that it was ‘a shame’, that Augustus was ‘not half good enough’ for Ida and had taken her to live in a slum. Ida’s sister Ursula was still disappointed that there had been no smart wedding; but her other sister Ethel33 bravely came to stay for a week and observed Augustus working hard. It was an uneventful time, but not unhappy. ‘I am afraid I haven’t started a baby yet,’ Ida apologized to Alice. ‘I want one.’
The first variations in this routine came that summer. Ida ‘looks suspiciously pregnant’, Augustus suddenly remarked to Will Rothenstein. The doctor soon confirmed her pregnancy, but in these early months there was a rumour of complications and, so this doctor warned her, the risk of a miscarriage. For this reason she passed the summer months quietly, first at Wigmore Street, then with Edwin and Winifred John in Tenby.
Liberated from domesticity on doctor’s orders, Augustus felt he had been let out from a narrow place. He could go where he wanted, be what he liked. One morning he set out intending to go for a short walk ‘but instead went to Bruges and stood amazed before the works of Van Eyck and Memling’, he explained to Will Rothenstein. ‘The Belgians are as shoddy as they were formerly magnificent. Maeterlinck needs all his second sight.’
His truancy over, he joined Ida in Tenby ‘feeling rather metagrabolized’, and carried her off for a month’s rest-and-painting to New Quay. ‘Now the child has quickened, I suppose there is very small fear of a miscarriage,’ Ida reassured her mother that September. ‘…I have been very well here – no indigestion and very regular bowels. The baby moves from time to time – and I am growing very big and hard.’ Every morning Augustus would go bathing and, during the afternoons ‘have models in a disused school room’. Ida sat at home, letting out her skirts and creating new clothes for the baby, and these she would take up to the schoolroom at tea time, when the painting had to stop.
In the last week of September they returned to Liverpool – but not to St James’s Road, since Ida could no longer manage the stairs there. For two weeks they put up with John and Margaret Sampson – ‘delightful people’, Ida promised her mother – at 146 Chatham Street, a semi-slum. Then they moved off to rather grander accommodation, 66 Canning Street, a three-storeyed, red-brick house, complete with art nouveau metalwork on the doors and railings, and a black projecting portico with Doric cornices.
So much, this autumn, augured well for Augustus. Ida’s pregnancy inflamed him with excitement – a sense of power, tenderness, and some curious feeling of fulfilment, almost as if it were he who was being born again. They had been fortunate in finding Canning Street, and Augustus himself had at last discovered a good studio34 and was making it habitable.
The university, too, had ‘raised my dole by a smug £200 and a day less in the week than last term’.35 This increase reflected the excellent work he was doing at the Art Sheds. His predecessor, Herbert Jackson, had been an uninspiring teacher. He would slump down by a student’s drawing board, sketch an ear or a foot, examine it, then remark: ‘It’s not much good, I suppose, but it’ll do.’ Augustus’s methods marked a great improvement. ‘Alas, how many brilliant drawings have I done on the boards of my pupils!’ he commented. It was as though he was learning from his own instruction. Above all he stressed the importance of observation. ‘When you draw,’ he told his class, ‘don’t look at the model for one second and five minutes at your drawing, but five minutes at the model and one second at your drawing.’ He was immensely pleased when his pupils did well, and he was responsible for several gifted young artists later leaving the School of Art and throwing in their lot with the Sandon Studios Society.36
Despite the incursion which teaching made into his time, his own work was also going well. Liverpool stimulated him, made him more keenly responsive to the visible world. ‘For my part a fine morning fills me with unspeakable joy,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein, ‘ – a tender sky tethers me to childhood, a joyous countenance is an obstacle on the road to old age.’
His letters during this first year at Liverpool are congested with happiness. ‘It has seemed to me of late I’ve been passing through a transition stage,’ he confided to Rothenstein (4 May 1901),
‘taking my leave lingeringly and spasmodically, and with many runs backward, of old traditions… Something stirs within me which makes me think so long and passionate company with so many loves as I have kept has not left me barren. Hitherto I have been Art’s most devoted concubine, but now at length the seed takes root. I am, O Will, about to become a mother – the question of paternity must be left to the future. I suspect at least 4 old masters.’
Between the winter exhibitions of 1900 and 1902, greatly to Brown’s disappointment, Augustus sent in nothing to the New English. Instead he relied on the Carfax Gallery and in particular on Rothenstein. To him Augustus would dispatch what he called his ‘parcels of fancies’ and ‘pastels of sluts’ – beggar girls, ballet girls and all manner of remarkable-looking models he had collided with in the streets of Liverpool. His purpose was to record as directly as possible the natural beauty he saw around him, without any message or moral, any attitude or intervening glaze of intellectuality. Yet it is ‘a strange, troubled feeling for beauty’ these pictures reveal, with ‘undefined hungers and raptures hinted at’, Laurence Binyon was to write.37
With these pastels Rothenstein was most successful, especially in selling them to other artists – Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, Brown and Tonks. ‘Such power, combined with a marvellous subtlety, such drawing, astonished me more than ever,’ Rothenstein recorded; ‘no one living had his range of sensuous, lofty and grotesque imagination.’ But the contrast he regularly showed between crabbed age and youth struck the Royal Academician landscape artist Sir George Clausen as ‘deplorable’. His pastels were not pornographic – they were not even pretty (in the manner of Russell Flint’s watercolours). ‘His work antagonised people; it was deemed deliberately ugly,’ Rothenstein recorded. ‘Were people altogether blind to beauty?’38 he wondered, looking at these lyrical nudes. Augustus’s gratitude, both to Rothenstein and to his models, swelled to its most rhapsodic vein:
‘Beloved Will,
You know nothing delights my soul more than your laudation! you have made me tickle and thrill, and gulp tears to eye and water to lip. And have my poor girls served me so well! Blessing on you Maggie and Ellen Jones!39 Daughters of Cardigan I thank ye! And you Queen of the Brook whose lewd leer captured me in my dreams, may your lusty honest blood be never denied the embrace it tingles for!
…I pant to do a superb decoration.’
The most important development in Augustus’s art during this Liverpool period was his work as an etcher. He had taken up etching at the suggestion of his friend Benjamin Evans, one of his first plates being a portrait of Evans.40 He grew immensely enthusiastic over this new medium. ‘I have been etching a good deal,’ he told Will Rothenstein. It was Rembrandt’s example41 that Evans had extolled and that now fired off this activity. Like Rembrandt, Augustus’s first experiments included a number of portrait studies of himself in various poses and costumes – fur caps and wide-brimmed hats, bare-headed and in a black gown. But there were also several portraits of Ida, very plump and maternal, in a fur-tipped cape or with a special necklace, or simply as ‘a brown study’: and the macabre or eccentric figures of drapers, chandlers, old haberdashers, young serving-maids, ragamuffin children and all the cosmopolitan population of Liverpool whom he saw on the wasteground of Cabbage Hall, or wandering through the university, or at the working-men’s dining-rooms and doss houses along Scotland Road – gypsies and mulattos, the frock-coated bourgeois, the black women, muffin men, charwomen and old people with fierce hopeless expressions.
Augustus had made so close a study of Rembrandt’s method, and assimilated it to such an extent, that many of his etchings look like imitations. Yet however derivative his technique, these etchings do reveal a great deal about his work. In a perceptive introduction to the Catalogue of Augustus’s etchings, Campbell Dodgson wrote:
‘There are certain features in his work which make it unlike that of his contemporaries. His choice of figure subjects in preference to the landscape or architectural motives which are so much in vogue to-day is one of them. His consistency in restricting the size of his plates to small, or even tiny, dimensions is another. Both are significant traits which link his work to the great tradition of the painter-etchers of four centuries… But a fault common to many of them is a fault that runs through Mr John’s paintings and drawings as well, lack of concentration and acquiescence in an apparent finish, a facile substitute for true perfection. Or if we consider the subjects themselves, rather than the manner in which he treats them, is there not something unsatisfying, superficial, betraying lack of “fundamental brainwork” in most of the compositions containing two or more figures? There is no apparent motive for bringing them together, and Mr John, with all his intense interest in single types, and his power, unequalled among etchers of to-day, of expressing individual character, lacks the imaginative, constructive, or dramatic gift of showing several characters in action.’
The fruit-sellers, street-philosophers, tramps and coster-girls who figure in so many of Augustus’s visual lyrics were in fact poor subjects – elusive, self-conscious, shy of being stared at. He had taught his students the value of observation but this lesson was difficult to put into practice. He could catch them all right, these reluctant sitters, but well before the five minutes were up they were off. He was therefore thrown back on memory and imagination, and to some extent these failed him. Everything made its impact at once, and seemed to last only so long as it remained in front of him. Some of these studies of gypsies or fisher folk lack atmosphere. The oxygen has gone out of their world, and they wilt. This seepage of vitality is particularly noticeable in his etchings because the medium was so slow. To fill the emptiness, he overworked them with a turmoil of feathery cross-hatching.42 He could not decide on the right moment to stop. ‘It is only that I feel ever inclined to add a few scratches on the plate that I husband them in this way,’ he told Will Rothenstein.
Campbell Dodgson’s other criticism Augustus would have refuted. It was not his desire artifically to inject action or drama into these studies; it was not his wish to apply sophisticated ‘brainwork’ to simple people. What action or drama or brainwork is there in a tree, the corner of a field, a standing woman? What intellectual ‘purpose’ may be divined in such everyday shapes and ordinary sights? Augustus did not plot his pictures. His groups are deliberately motiveless. He etches them because they’re there – and because he loves them being there. In a sense, the superficiality of which Campbell Dodgson accuses him is exactly what he sets out to achieve. His theme is the profundity of the superficial. He makes the aesthetic statement that passing sights of no special significance have the power to move us beyond explanation or understanding. So far as the artist is concerned, Augustus believed, the ‘meaning’ of his studies should be left to the unconscious. His intention was to fix the passing moment and make it timeless, and in that timeless moment discover ‘a romantic world composed in the image of his desire’.43 But when the magic of timelessness fails and the passing moment will not pose for him, time hangs heavy, and we feel betrayed by the pointlessness of this empty life.
*
So much this autumn promised well; so much seemed to trail its shadow of disappointment: and as the autumn changed to winter, these shadows began to stretch out.
The turning point came in October. It was in the second week of this month that Augustus sustained a bang on the head, reminiscent of his bathing accident at Tenby. Ida, in a letter to her mother (16 October 1901), explained what happened:
‘Gus has broken his nose and put his finger out of joint by falling from a ladder in the studio. The doctor came – a splendid big red-brown man – and sewed up the cut on his nose in two exquisite stitches. Poor Gus was very white, and bloody in parts. He is now a lovely sight, very much swollen and one red eye. His profile is like a lion. They say the scar will not show, and he will be well in a fortnight. The bone was a little damaged but it won’t make any difference – we think his nose may be straighter after!’
After the first shock had passed, Augustus resolved not to be pinned down by his injury. ‘My dear!’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein, ‘a bang on the head has never and will never down me. Au contraire I feel double the übermensch with a great patch on my nose! I have paraded it before my students with great effect. At the Sketch Club the other night it must have been grand to see me point a dislocated finger of scorn and turn up a broken nose at these purblind gropings in pictorial darkness.’
Such was the devastating effect of this patch and bandage, he claimed, that students hurried over to see it from other art schools, and his class overflowed. But what is evident from his letters is that this fall had brought back memories of his accident at Tenby, and that he was theatrically overreacting to it. He wore his misfortune, humorously enough, like some sartorial accomplishment. But an extra wildness entered into his behaviour, as if he were pushing frantically against a door he feared might close on him.
Up till now he had seemed to share the biological adventure of Ida’s pregnancy, but suddenly it threatened him with confinement. The whole process was too long – a nine-days’ wonder was what he would have liked. He felt hemmed in. ‘I really must come to town and see what my contemporaries are about,’ he wrote that October to Will Rothenstein. But the following month he was writing: ‘I fear I cannot come to London before our baby has squeezed its way through the narrow portals of life.’
London, now that he could not reach it, was marvellously desirable to him; while over Liverpool, so fresh and enthralling only that spring, a cloud had begun to settle. London bought his pictures – sometimes the very pictures which Liverpool rejected. The Liverpool Academy refused him membership. He felt himself among Philistines. ‘I come now shattered from a visit to the Walker Art Gallery,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘It contains the Ox Bovril of the R.A. shambles.’44
Because of Liverpool’s hostility to his work and because of his own spendthrift ways, he was often pressed for money and, on one occasion, obliged to settle a huge milk bill by handing over to the disgruntled milkman a number of masterpieces. ‘I would paint any man a nice big picture for £50, if he paid down 25 first,’ he complained to Rothenstein this winter. ‘That’s to say a good big nude.’ But no one wanted his nudes. They were big, certainly; but they were not good, Liverpool decided.
He began to feel that his teaching was holding up the work he really wanted to do. ‘What output can be expected of one who works at a school for 3 days!’ he expostulated.45 Mackay’s lofty ideas now seemed peculiarly misleading. ‘Mackay talks grandiosely of a great art school with 300 a year for me and studio and my own to follow – But I trust him not,’ he confided to Will Rothenstein (16 April 1902). Against Mackay’s vision of a university palace with towers raised above the clouds and a studio at the top of them for every face of the day stood Augustus’s actual curriculum – a treadmill that grew more irksome to him each week. ‘The three days I prostitute to foul faced commodity weigh on my soul terribly,’ he confessed. ‘My conscience is awakening and I see the evil of my ways.’46 By the early spring of 1902 his university career had reached a point of crisis. ‘I am now expected to examine all the work done by every student (50–60) during the past Session and choose an example of each to send to the National Competition S. Kensington,’ he complained to Rothenstein (9 March 1902). ‘You can imagine the brilliant result of such a rummage. I draw the line at that.’ But if he drew the line too firmly he would be out of a job. He was trapped.
The most respectable, and therefore most despicable, elements of university life had begun to infiltrate their home. The wives of professors made it their duty to call regularly on Ida carrying with them useful pieces of black net, warm flannel nightgowns and wool socks; also disused blankets, nondescript fragments of lace, second-hand pin-cushions, half the veil of a deceased nun (rumoured to have special properties), and a miniature stove for preparing baby’s food. Whenever Augustus returned from his studio, there they were, these clusters of affable vague women, tousled, dusty and bespectacled, parading their offerings and chattering about Ida’s baby – when would it arrive? Would it be a boy? Would it be born before, after, or at the same time as the other University College baby that winter, Mrs Boyce’s? Under this pressure Ida began to have fantastic nightmares about her baby. ‘I dreamt last night that the baby came – an immense girl, the size of a 1 year old child – with thick lips, the under one hanging – little black eyes near together and a big fine nose,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘Altogether very like a savage – and most astonishing to us.’47
Avoiding these Liverpool ladies, Augustus spent more time with his gypsies. That autumn there was a fair on Cabbage Hall. The place was filled up with carts and wagons, booths and cheap-jacks; and everywhere the animal – both horse and human – was magnificently exhibited. How tawdry the tea-party wives who filled his home seemed when contrasted with those pictures of sin and supernatural knowledge, the gypsy fortune-tellers, with their stately bearing and unreadable eyes like black coals burning with concentrated hate – terrible to behold! Augustus would linger there till the fields and hills grew dark, a heavy mist enshrouded the tents, and the fiddlers one by one stopped their playing.
Like a gypsy himself, Augustus was growing ever more elusive. Ida seldom knew where he was. It was not only Cabbage Hall that he preferred to his own home, but other people’s homes – the Rani’s at 28 Alexandra Drive which, according to Albert Rutherston, ‘is good for the moral tone of us all’; and the defunct Gothic school near Rodney Street where lived the ‘Doonie’, the artist Albert Lipczinski’s generous blue-eyed wife to whom, in order to avoid trouble, Augustus wrote his letters in Romany. ‘The hospitality of Liverpool is truly wonderful,’ Albert Rutherston told Max Beerbohm, ‘the women more so.’
Ida took it all calmly, though her dreams grew still more fantastic. She dreamt of a tiny man, ‘the size of the 1st joint of a finger’, immensely charming, who drank milk out of a miniature saucer, like a cat, and who had a little boat in which he sailed off alone. He was very plucky, but eventually got lost and exhausted, frightened by the prickly larch trees, until he came across a tent in which lived Jack Nettleship, who took him up and carried him home, quite naked. ‘Do you think the baby will be a lunatic, having such a mother?’ she asked her father.48 The baby was born, weighing 6 pounds exactly, on 6 January 1902. ‘My wife gave birth to a little boy yesterday,’ Augustus wrote to Albert Rutherston (7 January 1902), ‘and seems none the worse.’ But his casual tone concealed real excitement.
The birth of Ida’s son affected the Nettleships’ attitude to Ida’s marriage. Even Mrs Nettleship was prepared to bury her doubts and put the best face on it as she arrived in Liverpool with a special nurse. While Ida rested in bed, Augustus sat downstairs listening to his mother-in-law strumming cheerful tunes on the piano. They reminded him of his father. After a fortnight Ida was allowed up. ‘It was lovely,’ she wrote to her sister Ursula. ‘But I felt as if I were too light to keep down on the floor.’ Her letters over the next few weeks were full of baby-news in which Augustus took as keen an interest as she did, approving each grunt, each ounce. ‘I cannot realise I have a little boy yet,’ she told Ursula (21 January 1902). ‘I cannot believe I am his mother. I love him very much. He has an intelligent little face – but looks, nearly always, perplexed, or contemplative. I do not think he has smiled yet. He is a wonderful mixture of Nettleship-John.’
What exercised Augustus’s mind more than anything else was the choice of a name. It was another sign of his own lack of identity that, with all his children, this choice should be such a perplexing matter. By the time the child’s birth came to be registered, one name alone had been settled upon – and that was compulsory: Nettleship. As a preliminary name, Augustus had given a good deal of consideration to Lewis. But no sooner had he decided upon this than the baby would physiognomically alter so as to resemble an Anthony or a Peter. Then a new conviction would seize him; he would fix upon his son a good Welsh name – Llewelyn or maybe Owen or even Evan… But which? Perhaps, since the child would after all be only one-quarter Welsh, this too was wrong. Whichever way he looked at it, the problem appeared insoluble – yet it had to be solved. He read books, he strode off for long contemplative walks and on his return he tried out names in the proximity of the baby as it slept. By March, Honoré was in the lead and seemed almost certain to win. But by May, Ida was writing to Alice Rothenstein: ‘Really I cannot tell you the baby’s name, as we can’t decide. Gus has said Pharaoh for the last few days. But it changes every week. I don’t mind what it is.’ To meet the pressure of such inquiries, Augustus was eventually hurried into accepting David by the end of the year. But for much of his childhood David was called Tony, then reverted to David – with the occasional variant of Dafydd, being one-quarter Welsh.
At the beginning of March 1902, Augustus, Ida and ‘Llewelyn de Wet Ravachol John’ (temporarily named after an uncaptured Boer leader and an anarchist bomber) left Canning Street and moved to 138 Chatham Street very near the Sampsons. Here, for five months, they went through the rigours of family life. ‘I wish you would tell me something about your baby,’ Ida asked Alice Rothenstein. ‘Does he often cry? Ours howls. He is howling now. I have done all I can for him, and I know he is not hungry. I suppose the poor soul is simply unhappy.’ Augustus too was not happy. The birth of his son, with all its novelty and curiosity, had turned his attention back into their home, but now the noise began to drive him out again. Ida sometimes felt that she had more to do than she could manage. There was no opportunity for painting. ‘Baby takes so much time – and the rooms we are in are not kept very clean, so I am always dusting and brushing. Also we have a puppy, who adds to the difficulties,’ she told Alice. But, she went on: ‘I think I enjoy working hard really.’
Augustus’s pictures of Ida often show her with children. But she was far from being a conventional mother-figure. In a sense she was more of a mother to Augustus than to his sons. She did not feel about her first-born, she told the Rothensteins, as they did about theirs. ‘I have not had any ecstasies over him,’ she confessed. ‘He is a comic little fellow, but he grumbles such a fearful lot. I think he would very much rather not have been created.’ She never experienced the physical, possessive love of her children that the Rothensteins appeared to enjoy. ‘How wonderful it seems to me how you and others love their children,’ she wrote again to Alice about three years later. ‘Somehow I don’t, like you do. I love only my husband and the children as being a curious – most curious – result of part of that love.’
Augustus was one of those fathers who, while his children were very small with little developed character of their own, felt towards them a primitive and protective love. Whereas Ida could not believe she was their mother, Augustus in certain moods almost seemed to believe it was he who had given birth to them and at the start he was more physically close than she was. ‘Honoré is becoming a surprising bantling with muscles like an amorillo,’ he wrote proudly to Will Rothenstein that spring. His new role as parent fortified his self-confidence. ‘The arrival of Honoré gives me to see I cannot dally and temporize with Fate.’
One consideration prevented him from severing his connection with the University Art School. ‘I am wondering,’ he confided to Rothenstein, ‘which is the best way to get out of this school, whether to be chucked out or resign… the former I think would look best in the end.’ He had made a number of friends in Liverpool, but they were all rebels in the university or individualists outside it. The very qualities that provoked hero-worship also created aversion in people such as Charles Allen, who taught sculpture at the university, and F. M. Simpson who held the Chair of Architecture. ‘I become more rebellious in Liverpool,’ he was to tell Alice Rothenstein – and it was true. He did dreadful things there, such as failing to rise to his feet when the King’s health was drunk – ‘it took some doing’. His name was a trigger for all sorts of scandalous gossip. ‘Mr [Wyndham] Lewis has been spreading very bad reports about everybody in London,’ Orpen wrote a little later this year to Albert Rutherston, ‘…his last was that John had been kicked out of Liverpool and that he was going to leave his wife.’
But Augustus was unrepentant. ‘The school may go to hell,’ he announced – and suddenly he felt much better. Even his work improved. ‘I have started some startling pictures,’ he claimed. ‘Ah! if they would emerge triumphantly from the ordeal of completion.’
To make up for the loss of his salary, he was arranging to paint a series of portraits. ‘I have some jobs on hand now, enfin, mon cher!’ he told Rothenstein in May, ‘les pommes de terre enterrées si longtemps commencent à pousser.’ He had also made some rapid decisions on the art of portrait painting to fit in with these new commissions. ‘Nowadays, I fancy, portraits should be painted in an hour or two,’ he decided (16 April 1902). ‘The brush cannot linger over shabby and ephemeral garments.’ Of the intermittent series of Liverpool portraits he now began, three were to be outstanding – those of Mackay, completed in June this year, and of Kuno Meyer and Chaloner Dowdall done several years later. Some of the other portraits49 give a feeling that he had made a brief effort to become interested in his subject, and failed. Soon, however, they were ‘bubbling with sovereigns and cheques’, Ida wrote to Michel Salaman, ‘caused by the disturbance Gus’s work has created in the rich Liverpool waters’.50
But he was no longer painting Ida. ‘I have not sat to Gus for ages,’ she wrote to Alice. Although matters were far from being so bad as Wyndham Lewis reported, Ida felt acutely the need of sympathetic companionship. ‘I long for Gwen [John],’ she had written the previous summer. Winifred had stayed that autumn, making two flannel nightgowns and some woollen socks for the baby; and ‘Gwen will be up here soon,’ Gus assured Michel Salaman. Now, at long last she arrived by steamer from New Quay. Her life, too, had not been easy. During the summer of 1901 she had still shared an address – 39 Southampton Street – with Ambrose McEvoy; but two months after their tearful holiday at Le Puy, at the end of 1900, McEvoy became engaged to Mary Edwards, a damp-looking woman, nine years older than himself, who lived near the Thames. ‘We were quite surprised,’ Everett noted with relish in his journal, ‘as he’d been running round before with Gwen John.’ It had been Augustus who introduced them to each other. Mary Edwards had declared her love for McEvoy at 21 Fitzroy Street, where Gus and Gwen were sharing rooms. But they did not marry immediately, and an awkward period ensued with Gwen living at 41 Colville Terrace, the McEvoy family home in Bayswater, where, as if in mourning, the shutters were always closed to avoid paying the rates. It was from here that she had come to Chatham Street; and it was from Chatham Street that she wrote to Michel Salaman a letter that indicates the direction in which her life was to move.
‘As to being happy, you know, don’t you, that when a picture is done – whatever it is, it might as well not be as far as the artist is concerned – and in all the time he has taken to do it, it has only given him a few seconds’ pleasure. To me the writing of a letter is a very important event! I try to say what I mean exactly, it is the only chance I have – for in talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words in people’s ears – that I think is one reason I am such a waif… I don’t pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.’
But with a few people, mostly women, Gwen was at ease – and one of them was Ida. She could trust Ida, she told Salaman, ‘with all my thoughts and feelings and secrets’; and Ida felt she could trust Gwen. Gwen had been hurt by McEvoy – ‘sister Gwen upset’, Augustus noted.51 An etching he did of her probably during this visit52 shows her as a contained and upright figure, on her guard, the daughter of Edwin John. Her expression is impassive, giving nothing away. On her head sits a pancake hat; her hair is pinned into a tight bun; her dress firmly tied at the neck; her lips buttoned. There is an impression of solitude. No gentleness.
‘I have been very busy with the baby,’ Gwen wrote to Salaman. She would take him out for ‘air’, and scandalize the neighbourhood by sitting unconcernedly on a doorstep whenever she felt like a rest. But for the sake of their families there was also a formal occasion when they stood shoulder to shoulder, Gus, Gwen and Ida (holding the baby), all looking to their front, present and correct, in the photographer’s studio.
After Gwen left, Ida felt her own isolation with fresh sharpness. In the middle of April she went with ‘her dearest and wickedest’ baby for a few days to London to see her father, who had not been well. ‘I am left deserted,’ Augustus exclaimed to Will Rothenstein (16 April 1902). ‘As a consequence I lay abed last night with a moonlit sky in front of me and chased infinite thoughts. Decidedly it is inspiring to lie alone at times. I fear continued cosiness is risky… I wish I had somebody to think with.’
He had never pretended to be an ‘exponent of the faithful dog business’. Ida knew this when she married him. He trusted her to recognize that the overpowering attraction of other women did not diminish his loyalty to her. He loved Ida and would always love her – it was important she understood this. But he needed to play truant. Then he would return to her, choosing the moment that best suited him. But if his freedom were curtailed, if he were prevented from acting as his nature demanded, then a hot-and-cold madness would break out in him and instinctively he would say and do things for which he felt hardly responsible. It was as if another being had taken control and he was no longer ‘himself. The last thing he wanted to do was to hurt Ida, but too much ‘moral living’ might imperil them both.
At the end of July they left Liverpool53 and returned to live in Fitzroy Street. ‘We are in a great turmoil packing,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman. Liverpool was ‘fresh and airy with a clean blue and white sky’,54 but it was no longer the ‘gorgeous place’ it had been eighteen months earlier. Both of them, for rather different reasons, were happy to be back in London. The ‘cosiness’ of their married life was almost at an end.
‘An artist is at the mercy of his temperament and his preferences are apt to be purely personal, quite disproportionate and utterly unhistorical.’
Augustus John (William Rothenstein Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Gallery 1950)
In the eighteen months since her marriage Ida had changed considerably. ‘Ida with her shock of black hair, as wild as a Maenad in a wood pursued by Pan,’ Arthur Symons had romantically pictured her.55 ‘Intractable, a creature of uncertain moods and passion. One never knew what she was going to say or do… She had – to me – the almost terrible fascination of the Wild Beast. There was something almost Witch-like in her.’ This had been her fascination for Augustus. But with the metamorphosis from Ida Nettleship to Mrs John she had developed into a more substantial figure – both physically, following the birth of David, but also in character. Gone was the feyness, the whimsicality of her early Mowgli letters; and gone too was much of her moralizing. Her moods and passion had been the longing of a vigorous nature for everything from which young Victorian ladies were hermetically protected. Now there was reality enough – she was glutted with it. Her character gained unexpected depths in grappling with new problems; she grew more resilient, more direct, at times more ironical. But, in Augustus’s eyes, she lost something of her wild mystery. She was obliged to give up painting in order to become a mother, and her letters from Liverpool had been full of baby news. ‘Mr Dafydd John is very well & fat & cheeky, & oh how he laughs,’ she wrote to Gus’s sister Winifred. ‘He plays bo-peep. He sits up, but does not crawl at all yet.’ By the time they returned to London, the novelty was gone. Motherhood was a full-time job to which she did not easily resign herself – ‘I certainly was not made for a mother,’ she admitted to Alice Rothenstein (1903). She was made, she felt, for Augustus, and wanted to be his mistress. But the roles of mistress and of mother were often in conflict, and in the nature of things – though not in her nature – the mother began to overshadow the mistress.
‘Look what a grand life she had,’ her sister Ethel later wrote, ‘going full tilt.’56 But really it was life that had gone full tilt into her. The first blow came shortly after her return from Liverpool when her father became ill. Though having great difficulty in breathing, he would gasp out page after page of Browning each day, until gradually he grew too weak. Ida and Augustus were with him during this final illness, though for much of the time he was barely conscious and could recognize no one. Once he called out: ‘Are you there, Ethel?’ and, after a silence, called back: ‘Yes, I thought you might come and see us through this risk.’ His daughters Ethel and Ursula were abroad (‘If there had been time,’ their mother wrote, ‘I would have sent for you’), but Ida was at Wigmore Street all week. ‘Old Nettleship is at his last,’ Augustus told Will Rothenstein. ‘He will die before the morning it is thought. Ida and I go round at midnight to see him. He has been in a high temperature… and his mind has not been clear.’
He survived that night, and in a moment of consciousness assured Augustus that God was ‘nearer to me than the door’. Next morning his arm went up like a semaphore and could not be kept down until suddenly he died. ‘It was a very wonderful experience,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman. ‘Mrs N. is immensely philosophical.’ For Ida it was a deep loss. ‘The dear old chap was quite unconscious,’ she wrote afterwards to Will Rothenstein (1 September 1902), ‘and did not suffer, except in the struggle for breath, and at the end he was quite peaceful. He was so grand and simple.’ The day before the funeral, at her request, Gus drew the dead man’s head. Then they carried him off to Kensal Green.
Besides Gus, her father had been the only man who meant anything to Ida. Now she would have to rely on Augustus alone. As if sensing this extra responsibility, he grew wilder. He was meant to be hanging his pictures in the Carfax Gallery, but this depressed him and to rid himself of this depression he was drinking more. ‘I thank you sincerely for bearing me home in safety,’ he afterwards wrote to Will. ‘I was utterly incapable. I had been imbibing a quantity of bad rum. I knew it to be poison yet drank it with relish… After having slept 3 hours I awoke perfectly well again.’ His powers of recovery were remarkable, and he tested them to the full. ‘John had the drinks,’ L. A. G. Strong wryly noted in his diary, ‘and his friends had the headache.’57
The pattern that had established itself in Liverpool was now broadly repeated in London. By the autumn Ida was pregnant again. She was visited at Fitzroy Street by all her old jungle friends, Gwen Salmond, Edna Clarke Hall, Bessie Salaman, Ursula Tyrwhitt, and by her family, in particular her mother who brought along, brightly intact, all her old grievances. She didn’t like the poor district they lived in and she didn’t like Augustus. It was as if the two of them were in a tug-of-war over the possession of Ida – but however attached Ida was to her mother, she had given herself to Gus. He tried to get on with Mrs Nettleship, but she was so reproving that he would storm out of the house.
‘Our life flows so evenly and regularly, I love it,’ Ida wrote to the Rani, Mary Dowdall, soon after returning to London. ‘But’, she added, ‘I’m afraid Gus finds it rather a bore.’ They still lived in ‘that varied harmony’, as Augustus described it to Michel Salaman, ‘which is the essence of great music’. But he was growing ‘very staid and old fashioned in my ways’, he liked to claim. ‘A french maid cooks my meals. Beer, tobacco & slippers figure largely in my existence. A parrot tempers my solitude and occasionally screeches. Sometimes [Wyndham] Lewis & Albert [Rutherston] or Will or McEvoy call, and arrest my incipient vegetation.’58
He had begun to find something of a home from home in the Café Royal which, by the beginning of the century, had become the rendezvous of many artists and writers living in London. With its exuberant neo-classical ornament, its abundance of gilt, its ubiquitous flashing mirrors and surfaces of crimson velvet, it formed a cosily grandiose setting for their gatherings. It was unique in Britain, a café–restaurant on the French pattern where people could wander from table to table. ‘If you want to see English people at their most English, go to the Café Royal,’ Beerbohm Tree advised Hesketh Pearson, ‘where they are trying their hardest to be French.’ The atmosphere owed something to the nineties – crème de menthe frappé drunk through straws; the clatter of dominoes; and drawings on menus. Through its ‘smoky acres of painted goddesses and cupids and tarnished gilding, its golden caryatids and garlands, and its filtered submarine illumination, composed of tobacco smoke, of the flames from chafing dishes and the fumes from food, of the London fog outside and the dim electric light within’, Augustus appeared a monumental figure ‘like some kind of Rasputin-Jehovah’, Osbert Sitwell remembered.59
He liked the place for its casualness, for the easy coming-and-going, the undemanding companionship. He liked it because, by simple force of personality, he dominated the place. His observant eyes, his voice so confiding and laconic, ruminating, rumbling; his manners, formal yet large; the beautiful hands which threw a spell about his conversation; and that alarming residue of rage and outrage which could be so innocently stirred up: all these ingredients contributed to a physical presence that could pull you into its orbit. ‘Of all the men I have met,’ wrote Frank Harris, who claimed to have met everyone, ‘Augustus John has the most striking personality.’
Though he tended to be silent at home, at the Café Royal he was a different person and, after a few drinks, wonderfully exuberant. Here, by popular acclaim, he was acknowledged a Bohemian king, with the waiters his courtiers, all his companions guests. In such a genial climate, his uncertainties dissolved, his morale rose and he inflated himself terrifically. He could be arrogant, sometimes childishly offensive to people, and he would grow sullen if others became too talkative. He liked to be at the centre of things, and because this suited him so well and he had charm and was such fun, people were generally happy for him to be a star. And there was another reason. Almost always he was left with the bill, and would pay it uncomplainingly with a huge fistful of notes that was sometimes all the money he possessed. In a sense he paid friends to entertain him, and he valued them as entertainers more than friends. His generosity was agreeably complicated by a vein of sardonic humour. One evening in the Domino Room, George Moore was denigrating him to Steer and Rothenstein – ‘Why, the man can no more draw than I can!’ – when Augustus himself walked in and sat down at their table. He took no notice of Moore, who tried to engage his attention, but in silence, Will Rothenstein recorded, ‘he took out a sketch book, and made as if to draw, doing nothing, however, but scribble. Moore, flattered, imagining John to be sketching him, sat bolt upright not moving a muscle. When John, tired of scribbling, shut up his book, Moore asked to see it, and turning over the pages, said unctuously, “One can see the man can draww.”’ 60
In the three most famous paintings of the Café Royal, those by Adrian Allinson, Charles Ginner and William Orpen, Augustus is prominently depicted. He liked best the company of other artists and of models – though he did not talk much about painting. Writers, preferably of the romantic school; decaying aristocrats, circus people, magicians and vagabonds, Celtic gentlemen with a knowledge of archaeology, some philosophical or mathematical ambitions or perhaps a smattering of Sanskrit or Hindi; Social Creditors, practical jokers, picturesque anarchists of the Kropotkin school, flamenco dancers, Buddhists: these were his crew. He welcomed anyone stranded in a tributary off the mainstream of twentieth-century commercial advancement.
With such companions he felt a natural affinity – for was he not also an exile from the modern world, however loudly, in fits and starts, it might applaud him? Was he not a revolutionary in almost everything except perhaps his painting? ‘Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois,’ Flaubert had advised artists, ‘so that you can be violent and original in your works.’ But Augustus often squandered his vitality in acts of nonconformity. ‘Perfect conformity’, he remarked, ‘is perhaps only possible in prison.’61 His whole life was directed to avoiding, or escaping from, any form of imprisonment; and his revolutionary energies were to be directed as much against the bureaucratic future as the restrictive past. ‘The flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep,’ Henry James wrote. In England (especially after the First World War) Augustus would find little depth of soil. ‘The march of progress will leave the struggling artist behind,’ he warned.
‘He is always an outsider, shunning the crowd, wandering off the beaten track and dodging the official guide and the policeman. Perhaps in a dream he has caught a glimpse of the Golden Age and is in search of it; everywhere he hits on mysterious clues to a lost world; sometimes he hears low music which seems to issue from the hills; the trees confabulate, the waters murmur of a secret which the sky has not forgotten.’62
The Rothensteins had begun the habit of entertaining a small group of artists and writers at their house in Church Row, Hampstead, and it was here that Augustus met W. B. Yeats. ‘With his lank hair falling over his brow, his myopic eyes, his hieratic gestures,’ Augustus later wrote, ‘he looked every inch a poet of the twilight.’63 Policemen and official guides were no obstacles to him, and his poetic vision held steady while for Augustus, looking every inch a romantic painter, it became ‘a passing light… a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless.’64
Among the other visitors to the Rothensteins’ house were Max Beerbohm, with his immaculately tailored human nature, so amusing at a distance, so invisible near to; the naturalist W. H. Hudson, hopelessly and eternally in love with Alice Rothenstein; Robert Cunninghame Graham, the traveller, adventurer and friend of ‘Buffalo Bill’, delivering a string of improper stories clothed in impenetrable layers of Scottish dialect; Walter Sickert, decked out in a roaring check shirt and leggings, looking like some farmer from a comic opera; Jacob Epstein, as innocent and truculent as Augustus himself, smelling like a polecat; and William Nicholson and James Pryde, the dandified Castor and Pollux of poster art.
With Wyndham Lewis, to whom the Rothensteins had also introduced him, Augustus now struck up a long precarious friendship.65 Lewis had come from Rugby to the Slade, a good-looking, gloweringly ambitious young man, who drew with thick black contours resembling the lead in a stained glass window. In Tonks’s opinion, he had the finest sense of line of all his students. Rothenstein took him to Augustus’s top-floor flat (which he himself would later occupy), probably in the summer of 1902. ‘There was a noise of children’, Lewis afterwards recalled, ‘for this patriarch had already started upon his Biblical courses’.
For a time Lewis, made heady by the John atmosphere, became a formidable disciple. ‘I was with John a great deal in those early days in London,’ he wrote in Rude Assignment. ‘…Unlike most painters, John was very intelligent. He read much and was of remarkable maturity.’ They stimulated and exasperated each other in equal measures. Lewis was much impressed by all that Augustus had so rapidly achieved. His success in art and with women appeared phenomenal, and by associating with him, Lewis seems to have felt, some of this success might fall his way. Augustus, on his side, was flattered by Lewis’s veneration. Here was someone mysterious and remarkable, a poet hesitating between literature and painting, whose good opinion served to increase Augustus’s self-esteem. He seemed a valuable ally. For whatever else he felt, Augustus was never bored by Lewis, whose dynamic progress through life was conducted as if to outwit some invisible foe. This involved a series of aggressive retreats – to neutral Scandinavia for example, where he would find a letter from Augustus demanding: ‘Is Sweden safe?’ Such places were not only safe, Lewis would hint in his replies, but the arenas of unimaginable conquests.
‘Have patience with this literature of our misunderstanding,’ Lewis appealed.66 Aware of his friend’s superior education, Augustus strove to match Lewis’s ‘calligraphic obscurity’ by what he called ‘linguistic licence’ – that is, a fantastic prolixity which he considered the intellectual tenor of their relationship required. The result was an exchange of letters, part undiscoverable, part indecipherable, covering over fifty years, that is almost complete in its comic density. Both were flamboyantly secretive men with bombardier tempers, and their friendship, which somehow endured all its volcanic quarrels, kept being arrested by declarations that it was at an end – an event upon which they would with great warmth congratulate themselves. Yet such was the good feeling generated by these separations and congratulations that they quickly came together again, when all the damning-and-blasting of their complicated liaison would start up once more.67
Their correspondence is extremely generous with offensive advice which they attempt to make more palatable by adding the odd ‘mon vieux’ or ‘old fellow’. Augustus frequently intends to return Lewis’s letters by post in order to get him to ‘admit [that] no more offensive statement could be penned’; but almost always he mislays the letter or, in his first fit of uncontrollable fury, flings it irrecoverably into some fire or sea. Besides, Lewis is always offering to provide batches of duplicates by special courier. Augustus is constantly being dumbfounded by Lewis’s requests for money coupled with his forgetfulness in repaying it; and by his insistence that Augustus was influencing mutual friends to his discredit. Augustus’s style grows more and more convoluted in grappling with these charges. Then, suddenly, the clouds clear and in a succinct moment of retaliation he announces that Lewis’s drawings ‘lack charm, my dear fellow’.68
The whole relationship is bedevilled by ingenious dissension. Each credits the other with Machiavellian cunning. Lewis is amazed that Augustus never invites him for a drink; Augustus is perplexed that Lewis is never able to visit him – when he does so, Augustus is always out; while Lewis, on principle, never answers his doorbell. They make elaborate plans to meet on neutral territory, but then something goes wrong – the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong mood. Lewis becomes increasingly irritated that Augustus so seldom writes. Augustus becomes irritated because when he does write his letters go astray, Lewis in the meantime having moved in darkest secrecy to some unknown address such as the Pall Mall Deposit. The letters which do arrive express very adequately this irritation fanned, in Lewis’s case, by eloquent invective, and in Augustus’s by a circumlocution that ingeniously avoids answering any of Lewis’s inquiries. It is a most stimulating exchange.
Life itself – beyond Fitzroy Street – was variously stimulating: but at home it was the old fruitful routine. On 11 March 1903 Ida’s second child was born. Gus had confidently predicted a girl, but ‘instead of Esther, a roaring boy has forced admittance to our household,’ he told Will Rothenstein. ‘…Ida welcomes him heartily. But what will David say?’ It was ‘much nicer’, Ida had told the Rani, ‘to have Gussie than the doctor, and a gamp twice a day than a hovering nurse in a starched cap. Lorenzo Paganini is quite lovely and so quiet.’ The boy, also referred to as ‘nice fat slug’ or ‘pig face’ (‘his face is like a pink pig’s,’ Ida boasted to Margaret Sampson), was eventually saddled with the name Caspar – nicknamed Capper (and occasionally ‘Caper Sauce’) – and a gate was fitted at the top of the stairs outside their flat to prevent the children from falling. Suddenly their home seemed very crowded. ‘I emerged into a melodramatic scene of human frailty,’ Caspar later wrote.69
In a highly oblique passage of Finishing Touches,70 his posthumous and unfinished volume of memoirs, Augustus refers to himself under the pseudonym of ‘George’. George, a new recruit of Will Rothenstein’s and said to be on the threshold of a brilliant career, is ‘only just recovering from the nervous breakdown following his recent marriage’. At the informal parties in Will Rothenstein’s house, finding ‘an atmosphere no doubt very different from the climatic conditions of the home-life to which he was as yet uninured… he began to expand and blossom forth himself, in a style combining scholarship with an attractive diffidence and humour. He felt perhaps that here was a means of escape from the insidious encroachments of domesticity, and accordingly attached himself to Will Rothenstein with the desperate haste of a man caught in the quicksands.’
If he expanded here and at the Café Royal, he often contracted again when he got home. This concertina motion, to which Ida responded with a mixture of excitement and dread, had by 1903 produced a strange fragmentation of himself. He became subject to sudden withdrawals from human contact. It seemed baffling that someone of such intelligence and strong physique could at times be so will-less. The only Will he had, apparently, was Rothenstein, whose remedy was to send him off on marathon walks round Hampstead Heath.
Yet Augustus was not indolent. He could work well if tactfully organized. But to organize him was an operation needing remorseless diplomacy. Will Rothenstein, for all his energy and enthusiasm, could not begin to do this, and even Ida, continually pregnant and fretted by domestic duties, was unable to manage such an extra task. It needed a team to organize Augustus, and a team was precisely what he was about to assemble round him: a team of exasperated patrons and art dealers and dedicated women. He did not know why he needed this entourage, only that he must have it. His first steps to get what he wanted imperilled his marriage and brought him to a state which, in his autobiographical synopsis, he described as ‘madness’.
‘What inconsiderate buggers we males are.’
Augustus John to Mary Dowdall
‘Gus is painting several Masterpieces,’ Ida notified Gwen John. ‘…We are as happy as larks.’ To the winter exhibition of the New English Art Club, late in 1902, he sent two major pictures. The first of these, ‘Merikli’,71 was a portrait of Ida holding a basket of flowers and fruit painted as if by an Old Master: Rembrandt, with a helping hand from Velasquez. Ida’s figure, touched by warm light, emerges enthusiastically from the dark shadows of the background. The colouring is sombre, the tone low; the handling is accomplished but conventional and the pose rather artificial. Yet there are a number of peculiar elements in the painting that give it a veil of mystery. In John Sampson’s The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, merikli is defined as: ‘Connected with the Sanscrit “pearl”, “gem” or “jewel” ie., ornament worn round the neck’. In the picture Ida is wearing a necklace of coral (not precious stone but a once-live substance). Then, from the plaited-straw basket, full of roses and cherries, she proffers a ‘daisy’ – probably a pun on the slang use of ‘daisy’ meaning a first-rate specimen of anything. Ida also wears a wedding ring on the right hand. Such unorthodoxes and double entendres suggest a less conventional set of values than the pastiche seventeenth-century manner first conveys, and also reveals the literary methods by which he was attempting to combine new ideas with old forms.
It was voted Picture of the Year at the exhibition.
His other portrait at the NEAC was of an Italian girl, Signorina Estella Cerutti. In the opinion of John Rothenstein, this picture ‘proclaimed him a master in the art of painting’,72 being ‘clearly stamped with that indefinable largeness of form characteristic of major paintings’. The major painter it brings to mind is Ingres, and its striking dissimilarity to ‘Merikli’ (which also recalls Hals) shows a painter still in search of his own idiom. Estella Cerutti is a splendidly buxom woman, whose creamy-golden silhouette is rendered more piquant by the ballooning curves of her ribbed muslin dress. Whereas Ida’s features were painted broadly and spontaneously and looked somewhat masculine in their strength, all is subordinate in the portrait of Estella Cerutti to sinuous contour and the mapping of the shadows. She is not held in the frame but seems to be moving past a window, a self-assured figure holding a handkerchief in her hands (perhaps a reference to Othello) and casting a languorous backward glance.
It was a glance that Augustus followed. ‘Esther’ Cerutti, as he called her – the very name he was to have given his second child had it been a daughter – lived below them at Fitzroy Street. In the spring and summer of 1903 he made numerous drawings of her and at least one etching.73 Two or three times a week she would come up to their flat, and he would sometimes descend to hers. ‘The Cerutti’s vices necessitate frequent purchases of Turkish cigarettes,’ Augustus explained to Michel Salaman, ‘which act as a sedative.’ They were a sedative for him rather than her. Ida admired, envied, and was irritated by Esther in the most confusing way. What style she had! She was an accomplished pianist, dressed superbly well and suffered from such appealing illnesses. It was almost impossible not to be provoked.
Augustus seemed held in tension between the two of them, motionlessly suspended within their opposing fields of attraction. ‘For days I have been inert and dejected,’ he confessed to the Rani in Liverpool.
‘I cannot account for the dejection except as the necessary complement of inanition, for my reasons to hope remain palpable and the same. Dearest Lady! How we married people need to cling and pull together and so make this holy state by union a force – for I begin now and then to suspect its weakening – or perhaps it is that I am a weak member, but then at least I am a link in the nuptial chain. But I think we ought to plan it so that we have the laugh on the others… As to Miss Esther I don’t know whether to be mühen [to exert himself] again or not to be mühen, both courses being fraught with problems distant and immediate. At present I slumber in the studio surrounded by my works.’
To escape these problems he went that summer on a ‘short but brilliant campaign in Wales with the admirable Sampson’. But when he returned, the problems were still waiting for him, so he immediately set off again, this time for Liverpool with his sister Winifred, who was sailing to join Thornton in North America. Once he had put her on board, he combed the town for old friends. ‘The Town proved most inhospitable,’ he complained to the Rani. ‘…I had hoped to see Sampson – but alas! his house proved nothing but a silent tomb of memories with those wonderful blinds drawn gloomily down.’ The Rani herself was away in the country, though her elusiveness, he admitted, was stimulating in a disappointing sort of way. ‘Curiously enough ’tis to a dream I owe my most vivid, most tender recollection of you. (And they call dreams vague… hazy...) It happened in Liverpool the last night I spent there. (Heaven knows how I spent the next!)’ Afterwards he ‘fled down Brownlow Hill to the station and so home again’.
A letter Ida sent Alice Rothenstein about this time gives some of the changes in the John household. From her mother Ida had got a few pieces of furniture, including their bed; on the walls of each room she had put plain white paper, and suspended baskets of roses from the ceiling. To do the cooking she had employed a rabbity young girl named Maggie – tempted by ‘friendly lettuce’ – and a maid called Alice whom David insisted on calling ‘Aunt Alice’.
Ida’s day began at 5.30 a.m. and ended at 7.30 p.m. Between day and night came three delightful hours of idleness: then at 10.30 p.m. the night work began – ‘it is the hardest part,’ she told the Rani. ‘I am breaking the baby of having a bottle at 3 a.m., and it entails a constant hushing off to sleep again – as he keeps waking expecting it. Also he has not yet begun to turn himself over in bed, and requires making comfortable 2 or 3 times before 3 a.m. This is not grumbling but bragging.’ Nevertheless, it was a tremendous relief to her to get rid of the two children for short spells. That summer they went down with Maggie to stay at Tenby with Edwin John, and Ida felt almost guilty at her sense of liberation. ‘It is most delightful without them,’ she admitted to Alice Rothenstein.
As soon as their flat was emptied of children, it filled up again with ‘aunts’ – that is, models for Augustus. Esther, magnificently attired in expensive dresses almost bursting at their fastenings, presented herself and posed, while Ida, who was not Mrs Nettleship’s daughter for nothing, set to work creating clothes for herself so as ‘to have at least one pretty feather to Esther’s hundred lovely costumes. I shall have to come down naked in my fichu [scarf or small shawl], for how can one wear grey linen by her silks and laces?’
But while Ida was anxious at being outshone by Esther, Esther was about to be eclipsed by another girl. In the same letter to Alice Rothenstein, Ida mentions that ‘Gus and the beautiful Dorelia McNeill are here… Gus is painting Dorelia’. He was, she adds, feeding up Dorelia for her portrait. This is the first mention of the legendary Dorelia, who was to find a place at the centre of the lives of Ida and Augustus and play a short intense part in the life of Gwen John.
Who was Dorelia? Over a period of sixty years, Augustus drew and painted her obsessively. Yet what these pictures convey is not her identity but her enchantment and mysteriousness. The most celebrated portrait of them all, ‘The Smiling Woman’,74 shows what Roger Fry called a ‘gypsy Giaconda’75 whose smile was often likened to that of the ‘Mona Lisa’. Another picture, ‘Dorelia Standing Before a Fence’, is more mellow and depicts her as a dream creature who, on our waking, continues to baffle and beguile us.
In this sense, Dorelia was a creation of Augustus’s. He made her enigmatic; he made her his ideal woman. What he desired from women was at once simple and impossible to achieve; it was the unknown, tunelessly preserved intact; a fantasy blended with reality; a symbol of creativity and nature; mistress and mother. Though he felt a romantic reverence for high birth – ‘you darling little aristocratic love’, he used to call the Rani – he disliked sophisticated women on the whole, and avoided women famous for their intellect. Cleverness he could find elsewhere, if he needed it: he could even occasionally find it in men. But before the inscrutable beauty of a few women he could lose and renew himself, feel his imagination come alive in inexplicable ways.
All that Augustus aspired to is suggested by the fantasies he wove around Dorelia. In his pictures we see Dorelia as tall, with a swan’s neck and well-proportioned head, often the mother-figure seen against a vibrant landscape. In truth she lived in town, was rather short, and no more the conventional mother than Ida. In his paintings he dressed her in broad-rimmed straw hats, their sweeping lines like those of the French peasants; and in long skirts that reached the ground, with high waistlines and tight bodices, like the costumes of the peasant women of Connemara: but she was not a peasant, French or Celt. He laid a false trail across the life of a gypsy girl called Dorelia Boswell, so that many concluded that his Dorelia was probably a Boswell and certainly a gypsy: she was neither. He called her ‘Ardor’; he called her ‘Relia’ and he called her Dorelia, and finally he called her ‘Dodo’: but none of these were her actual names.
Dorothy McNeill had been born on 19 December 1881 at 97 Bellenden Road, Camberwell. Her father, William George McNeill, was a mercantile clerk, a position he held until promoted, through age, to the rank of retired mercantile clerk. Son of the stationmaster at Peckham, he had married a local girl, Kate Florence Neal, the daughter of a dairy farmer.76 They were an unremarkable couple given the collective nickname ‘Mr and Mrs Brown’. But all their seven children (of whom Dorothy was the fourth) were extraordinarily handsome – mostly small with dark complexions, prominent mouths curving downwards, voices gentle and low, black hair and large brooding eyes.
Each of the four daughters had been taught some profession. Dorothy learnt to type. Her first job, at the age of sixteen, was for the editor of a magazine called The Idler. Then, for a short time, she worked for a writer. By 1902 she had become a junior secretary copying legal documents in the office of a solicitor, G. Watson Brown, in Basinghall Street. She did not appear discontented, but since her personality was very passive and she was not communicative, it was difficult to know what she felt. Another young typist in the office, Muriel Alexander, remembers that Dora, as everyone there called her, always dressed ‘artistically’ in a style entirely her own, wearing long full-skirted dresses and having her hair parted in the middle and drawn in a knot at the back of her head. Everyone liked her; no one knew much about her. On the surface, it seemed, she had accepted a secretarial career, to be followed in the ordinary way by one as housewife. She was not ambitious in the usual sense; but she felt certain another kind of life awaited her, and that she belonged to the world of art. How this was she could not say; nor did she speak about it. But instinctively she felt it to be her destiny. This was her secret, the source of her patience, her means of emancipation. It was Dorothy who typed each day; but it was Dorelia who dreamed.
And it was Dorelia who, in the evenings after the office closed, went off to the late classes at the Westminster School of Art. Here she got to know a number of artists and began to be invited to their parties, at one of which she met Gwen John. Gwen was then using a ‘most exquisite looking pupil of about 15 years old’ as a model in exchange for drawing lessons. ‘Gwen makes her draw the most hideous and wicked of the Roman emperors in the British Museum,’77 Ida reported. Dorelia had already seen Gwen’s brother at an exhibition of Spanish paintings at the Guildhall near her office, but they had not spoken and he did not see her. Yet she remembered this first glimpse of him as if, without words or contact of any kind, she had chosen him as the vehicle of her destiny.
There are many stories of how they met. A popular one was that Augustus overtook her wearing a black hat in Holborn one day, looked back, and was unable to look away. They must have met early in 1903 while she was living in a basement in Fitzroy Street. By the summer he was already writing her passionate letters:
‘The smell of you is in my nostrils and it will never go and I am sick for love of you. What are the great beneficent influences I owe a million thanks to who have brought you in my way, Ardor my little girl, my love, my spouse whose smile opens infinite vistas to me, enlarges, intensifies existence like a strain of music. I want to look long and solemnly at you. I want to hear you laugh and sigh. My breath is upon your cheek – do you feel it? I kiss you on the lips – do you kiss me back? Yes I possess you as you possess me and I will hear you laugh again and worship your eyes again and touch you again and again and again and again… your love Gustavus...’
She was hypnotically beautiful – almost embarrassingly so: ‘one could not take one’s eyes off her,’ Will Rothenstein remembered.78 In his portraits of her, Augustus gave her a sultry look, with high rounded cheek-bones, slanting eyes and an air of devastating refinement.79 A painting entitled ‘Ardor’80 shows a full dimpled face, eyes that solicit, pink cheeks and mouth. It is the portrait of a seductress, a comparable subject technically to ‘Merikli’. In his portraiture, Augustus was like a stage director, assigning his subjects a variety of short dramatic roles. Dorelia, it seemed, acquiesced in them all. She sprang from the natural and the mythic world. She became all things to him; she was Everywoman.
It was not by her looks alone that she dazzled him. Beauty is not so scarce. What was uncommon about Dorelia was the serenity that gave her beauty its depth – a quality he so conspicuously lacked. She was not witty or articulate; and certainly not sentimental. It was her presence that was so powerful, her vitality and above all her magical peace-giving qualities. People who were miserable could come to her, relax, absorb something of her extraordinary calm. All manner of disasters, tragedies, crises appeared to shrivel up within the range of her personality. She guarded her secrets well, like a cat.
Augustus did not conceal from Ida his sudden flaring infatuation for Dorelia: concealment did not come easily to him – it was something he would learn, rather inadequately, later on. Besides, he might as well have tried to hide a forest fire. He presented Ida with the facts; he introduced her to Dorelia; and he left her to decide what should be done. Of the three of them, Ida was the most likely to take a positive decision about the future. Augustus and Dorelia acted on impulse in a way that might appear decisive, but which was often a simple reflex.
The upheaval of Ida’s feelings was painful. Upon the decision she had to make depended the future of their marriage. She knew Augustus better than anyone – ‘our child-genius’ as she was soon to call him – and she had to accept that she could not hope to confine his incendiary passions within the grate of married life. He maddened her, but she loved him. And she liked Dorelia. When the two women were together – it was strange – Ida’s difficulties seemed less acute and she was almost happy. Reason therefore told her that, if Augustus’s feelings persisted, some form of ménage-à-trois was the only practical solution. Reason told her this; but sometimes a violent jealousy would surge through her, drowning reason. She felt ugly. She felt useless. Marriage, which had imprisoned her, left Augustus free, since her love for him excluded other romantic and sexual feelings, while his for her did not. The quasi-religious advice she had poured forth in earlier days on her aunts and sisters she now turned upon herself. Her moral duty was to accept these awkward complications as a part of her love. Whatever happened she must fight against jealousy, since that was the voice of the devil. So, for the time being, she appeared philosophical: ‘Men must play,’ she wrote, improving the quotation from Charles Kingsley, ‘and women must weep.’
With Ida apparently raising no objections, Dorelia began moving into their married life. At first the part she played, though a vital one, was intermittent. She never lived in their flat, though she visited Augustus most weeks to be drawn and painted by him. He loved to dress her up, buying her bright petticoats down to her knees, gay ribbons to tie in her hair, and he relied on Ida to help him choose the costumes. ‘Don’t forget to come on Sunday,’ he reminded Dorelia. ‘I want to get a new dress made for you, white stockings and little black boots and lots of silly little things for your hair… Sleep well Relia and don’t forget me when you go to sleep.’ But sometimes, without warning, she did forget him. ‘In the devil’s name! Why did you not come? Are you ill?… or did you dance too much the night before, so you were [too] tired to come up here… A true young wife and a lady you are… Are your new clothes made [yet]? I should like to see you on the high road all dressed in fire-red. Are you coming next Sunday?’ But already by Monday he found he could not wait till next Sunday.
‘I went last night down to Westminster to find you but you were not there. When are you going there again? as I would like to see your pretty eyes again. If you’ll believe me my girl, I liked more than I can say sitting with you on the grass on the ferns. As you say, you are a young wild tree, my Relia. I love to kiss you just as I love to feel the warmth of the sun, just as I like to smell the good earth. One gets used to the afterwards, my girl, and then they need not be so very damned. My wife and I have been ransacking shops to find a certain stuff for your picture… I am getting excited over the picture. I will do it better now after I have kissed you several times.’
He longed to paint her in the nude, but she was unwilling. ‘Why not sit for me in your soft skin, and no other clothes – are you ashamed? Nonsense! It is not as if you were very fat.’ But still she would not.
At each point his excitement was matched by her imperturbability; his passion by her elusiveness; his doubts and speculations by her compliance. She had cast a spell on him, and he began to weave one for her. ‘How would you like yourself as a Romany lady?’ he asked. To Dorelia, who was rather dismissive of her anonymous parents, here was an intriguing question. Under Augustus’s tuition she began learning the language. All these early letters he sent her were written in Romany,*3 mixed with odd English words, and with word-lists attached. Whatever Augustus learnt from Sampson he passed on to Dorelia – and Ida picked up some of the words too, though she never dared write to Sampson in Romany as Dorelia was soon doing. Romany became their secret code, as the Jungle Book language had once been for Ida’s friends. But Ida was not at the centre of this Romany conspiracy as she had been in the recreated world of Kipling. That centre was for Augustus and Dorelia alone. He was delighted how swiftly she learnt, how eager she was to enter this make-believe. ‘Sit and write down another letter for me,’ he urged her. ‘Put in it all the Romany words you know, then a little tale about yourself, and send it to me.’ She wrote and told him about an old woman who drank whisky and had fallen in love with her – and he was enchanted.
So his love grew. He could think of almost nothing else, could scarcely endure being parted from her. ‘Dear sweetheart Dorelia,’ he wrote to her early that summer on a short visit to Littlehampton.
‘Now I am going to bed, now I am under the blankets, and I wish that you were here too, you sweet girl-wife. I want to kiss you again on the lips, and eyes, and neck and nose and all over your bare fiery body. When our faces touch, my blood burns with a wild fire of love, so much I love you my wild girl. I don’t speak falsely. If you laugh you cannot love. Now I see your white teeth. Why are you not here with me? I hear the sea that sings and cries in the old way, my own great sad mother. Send me word very soon – Tell me that you love me a bit. Yours Gustavus Janik.’
It was not long before rumours of Augustus’s romance began to be whispered among his friends, and among Ida’s. ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is very difficult to deceive anyone,’ Ida wrote to Alice Rothenstein, ‘and that people know one’s own business almost as well as one knows it oneself. I suppose you know that, as you know most things (I am not sarcastic). In a certain way you are a very wise person.’ This was Ida’s difficulty: she had no one in whom she could confide. Alice was a loyal friend, but perhaps not a very understanding one. Her own life was so different and so safe. There was about her a suspicion of vicarious living, of looking with disapproving relish at other people’s goings-on. Nobody could doubt that Alice had Ida’s interests sincerely at heart, but Ida tried to avoid revealing her problems. Besides, Alice seethed with high-principled gossip. She invariably counselled prudence, now that she had married Will. ‘I ask you why should a healthy young woman be particularly “prudent”,’ complained the Rani to Ida, ‘ – or was Alice herself ever – such rot!’ On the whole Ida preferred Will’s counsel and companionship. He too could lecture her, but when he addressed himself to young women his romanticism quite dissolved his moralizing. They were a strange couple, Alice and Will – she still so beautiful, a faintly overblown conventional pink rose ‘large and fair and cushiony and sleepy’, as Ida had written; he ‘a hideous little Jew with a wonderful mind – as quick as a sewing-machine, and with the quality of Bovril’.
Partly because of Alice, Ida was shy of disclosing her secrets to Will. And to Augustus himself it was always difficult to speak of anything intimate for long. It was like sending one’s words down a dark well. When he did talk, it was usually to deliver some laconic sentence that put an end to discussion. She was aware of becoming less attractive in his eyes when she tried to speak to him seriously. He seemed to believe that any talk about their problems could only exacerbate them. This was one of the reasons he drank – to be blind to his problems: to be rid of himself.
Although she would have preferred a man to talk to, Ida confided most to the Rani. To her she felt she might occasionally ‘grumple’ without disloyalty. The Rani could be trusted, and her humour made everything easier – ‘my heart’s blood to you’, she ended one of her letters, ‘and my liver to Augustus’. The world seemed a brighter place after one of her letters. ‘Yours is the proper way to have babies,’ she told Ida, ‘one after the other without fuss and let them roll around together and squabble and eat and be kissed and otherwise not bother.’ She would write of the entertaining disasters that had befallen her, such as poisoning her family with mushrooms; she sent Ida appalling photographs of herself ‘looking like the Virgin Mary with indigestion’; she told her how common her own children were becoming and how she disliked the Liverpool middle classes, ‘all bandy-legged and floppy nosed and streaky haired’, with their ‘jocky caps and sham pearls and bangles and dogs and three-quarter coats’ – they made her ache with anger, causing ‘the glands behind my ears to swell’. Finally she would apologize for failing, despite everything, to be discontented. ‘I am sorry I am so happy and you so much the reverse – I think I really am too stupid to be anything else. You must pay the penalty for having the intelligence, I suppose – the lady Dorelia is a strange creature.’
Dorelia’s strangeness – ‘her face is a mystery’, Ida remarked, ‘like everyone else’s’ – and the uneasy partnership to which she had been admitted were increasingly the subject of speculation. ‘I saw John last week and he doesn’t seem to have been pulling himself together as he should have done,’ lamented Will Rothenstein to his brother Albert (3 June 1903), ‘ – he seems as restless as ever, and looks no better than he should do. Ida has gone off to Tenby for a month with her babes, so he is alive just now.’
A few weeks after Ida returned, Albert Rutherston went to dine with them at Fitzroy Street one evening. ‘They are well,’ he told Michel Salaman (9 August 1903), ‘and John showed me some exceedingly good starts of paintings – they have bred at least a dozen canaries from the original twain which fly about the room – perch on the rafters and sit on one’s head while one dines – it really was amusing… Miss MacNeill came after dinner – she… seems to be a great friend of all the Johns – I think John must have a secret agreement with that lady and Mrs J – but not a word to anyone of this – it is only my notion and a mad one at that.’
Others who saw this crowded household, with its multiplying flocks of canaries, women and children, were sadder and more critical. ‘Really matrimony is not a happy subject to talk about at present,’ Tonks wrote to Will Rothenstein (15 September 1903). ‘The John establishment makes me feel very melancholy, and I do not see that the future shines much.’
But Augustus loved Fitzroy Street. Before Whistler died that summer, he would occasionally meet him there and they would have lunch together. He had always been amused by Whistler’s panache, but no longer had quite the same reverence for him. Whistler had been a man of cities; his curiosity ‘stopped short at dockland to the east and Battersea to the west’.81 He belonged to the urban cult of Decadence, against which Augustus had now started to rebel.
The flat at Fitzroy Street was obviously too small for them all. Augustus felt unable to breathe in that bricked-up atmosphere. He dreamt of wide spaces, ‘the broad, open road, with the yellowhammer in the hedge and the blackthorn showing flower’.82 As the summer wore on, this feeling grew insupportable. ‘I have fled the town and my studio; dreary shed void of sunlight and the song of birds and the aspirant life of plants,’ he told Will Rothenstein from Westcot, in Berkshire, where he had gone to see Charles McEvoy.83
‘Nor shall I soon consent to exchange the horizons that one can never reach for four mournful walls and a suffocating roof – where one’s thoughts grow pale and poisonous as fungi in dark cellars, and the Breath of the Almighty is banished, and shut off the vision of a myriad world in flight. Little Egypt for me – the land without bounds or Parliaments or Priests, the Primitive world of a people without a History, the country of the Pre-Adamites!’
The difference between town and country was like that between sleep and waking life. ‘Don’t get up so much,’ he advised Dorelia from Fitzroy Street, ‘it’s better to sleep. What beautiful weather we are having – it makes me dream of woods and wind and running water. I would like to live in any wooded place where the singing birds are heard, where you could smoke and sleep and stop without being stared at.’
The best plan, he suddenly decided, was to find some house in the country not far from London that would accommodate as many as might reasonably find themselves there – women, children, animals, friends, family, servants and, more intermittently, Augustus himself. Ida, who had recently completed her decorations to Fitzroy Street, agreed. ‘We have been house hunting,’ she wrote to Michel Salaman.
But Dorelia had other plans.
‘Everything is happy and inevitable here – one cannot quarrel with an invisible hand nor need one call it the Devil’s...’
Augustus John to John Sampson (n.d. [1904])
‘I hope for a different life later on – I think it can only be postponed.’
Ida John to Gwen John (21 September 1904)
‘Leave everybody and let them leave you. Then only will you be without fear.’
Gwen John, Diary
The Carfax Gallery, in the spring of 1903, had held a joint show of Gwen and Gus’s pictures. ‘I am devilish tired of putting up my exhibits,’ Augustus complained to Dorelia. ‘I would like to burn the bloody lot.’ Of the forty-eight pictures – paintings, pastels, drawings and etchings – forty-five were by Augustus, and Gwen withdrew one of hers. Nevertheless, he told Rothenstein, ‘Gwen has the honours or should have – for alas our smug critics don’t appear to have noticed the presence in the Gallery of two rare blossoms from the most delicate of trees. The little pictures to me are almost painfully charged with feeling; even as their neighbours are empty of it. And to think that Gwen so rarely brings herself to paint! We others are always in danger of becoming professional and to detect oneself red-handed in the very act of professional industry is a humiliating experience!’
Gwen had closed down her feelings for Ambrose McEvoy. But she needed to love someone. Until recently she had continued living in the McEvoy family home in Colville Terrace, while Ambrose and Mary moved down to Shrivenham in Oxfordshire, an address used by Gwen’s former friend Grace Westray. It was possibly at this time that Gwen went back to the cellar in Howland Street – ‘a kind of dungeon’, as Augustus described it, ‘…into which no ray of sunlight could ever penetrate’. Indifferent to physical discomfort, she seemed filled with a strange elation. ‘I have never seen her [Gwen] so well or so gay,’ Albert Rutherston told Michel Salaman (9 August 1903). ‘She was fat in the face and merry to a degree.’
The source of Gwen’s happiness was Dorelia. On an impulse, she proposed that the two of them should leave London and walk to Rome – and Dorelia calmly agreed. There was nothing, there was no one, to hold Gwen in England. She was to celebrate the opening of a new chapter in her life with a pilgrimage that cut her off geographically, physically and emotionally from her past. But for Dorelia the decision is less understandable since it meant abandoning Augustus, perhaps for months, at a critical stage of their relationship. With a man so volatile, what guarantee was there he would feel the same when she arrived back? Yet Dorelia’s mind did not work along these lines. If Fate intended her to live with Augustus, then that was how it would be – and nothing could alter this. Although she seldom revealed her thoughts, there can be little doubt that she was feeling the strain of being a visitor to Gus and Ida’s married life. Once they had settled into a house in the country perhaps everything would be different. All Dorelia knew was that her life, whatever form it took, would be involved with art, and that there was nothing inconsistent with this in going off for an adventure with Gwen.
The two girls were as excited as if it were an elopement. But Augustus found himself occupying a parental role, advising caution, good sense, second thoughts. Their plan was impossible, he promised: it was also mad. Should they not at least pack a pistol? But Gwen would not listen to his arguments – ‘she never did’.84 Finally, he relented, giving them a little money and some cake. They set off that August, ‘carrying a minimum of belongings and a great deal of painting equipment’,85 and boarded a steamer in the Thames.
‘Give my love to that dear girl Dorelia,’ Ida wrote to Gwen. ‘…Aurevoir mes deux amies… Aurevoir encore.’ Ida hardly knew what to think, so confused were her feelings. She had been glad Dorelia was going abroad and yet she felt envious of her, and also curious about this escapade with Gwen. ‘Is Dorelia much admired?’ she questioned Gwen. ‘I can’t believe you tell me everything, it is all so golden. I suppose you will come with bags of money, & bank notes sewn about you.’86 But actually she was rather surprised to hear they had landed intact at Bordeaux and started walking up the Garonne. ‘What a success!’ she congratulated them. ‘I am so glad & I… long to be with you (now I know its nice). To sleep out in the middle of a river & have a great roaring wave at 3 in the morning – Really it must be gorgeous.’ In comparison her own life seemed tame. Now that Thornton and Winifred were across the Atlantic, Gwen and Dorelia across the Channel, and even Wyndham Lewis in Spain with his fellow artist Spencer Gore, Fitzroy Street filled up rapidly with Nettleships. ‘My tribe came round as usual tonight and assisted at the bathing etc.,’ Ida wrote to Gwen. ‘Gus lay on the bed – Ursula knelt by me – Ethel reclined by Gus – Mother loomed large on the other side of the bath.’ The good news was that Ida wasn’t pregnant again (‘So I feel very light hearted’); the bad news that Gus hadn’t found a house for them in the country. And then there was some further news. Esther Cerutti had stepped back into their lives, ‘as full of that curious thing called style as ever. I believe that is why I tolerate her nonsense.’87
From time to time over the next weeks, Gus and Ida would get morsels of news about the ‘crazy walkers’ as they made their way from village to village towards Toulouse. Sometimes they received odd letters themselves; sometimes they heard from Ursula Tyrwhitt who was also in correspondence with Gwen. The two girls obviously found the going hard. Once they travelled in a motor car – ‘till it broke down’; and more than once they were offered lifts in carts – ‘every lift seems saving of time and therefore money too so we always take them’, Gwen explained to Ursula. At each village they would try to earn some money by going to the inn and either singing or drawing portraits of those men who would pose. But their motives were sometimes misconstrued. At night they slept in the fields, under haystacks, on the icy stone flags beside the Garonne or, when they were lucky, in stables, lying on each other to feel a little warmer, covering themselves with their portfolios and waking up encircled by congregations of farmers, gendarmes and stray animals. Between the villages, bowed beneath bundles of possessions that seemed larger than themselves, they would practise their singing. They lived mostly on grapes and bread, a little beer, some lemonade. There were many adventures; losing their tempers with the women, outwitting the men, shaking with fright at phantom shapes in the night, tearful with laughter when these turned out to be harmless pieces of farm machinery.
Near Meilhan they met a sculptor who told Gwen her lines were too short (‘it is good to have things pointed out’); at La Réole they met a young artist who ‘came to look at us in the stable’ and ‘gave us his address in Paris so we can be models if we like in Paris’,88 Gwen reported to Ursula.
By the end of November they reached Toulouse where they hired a room ‘from a tiny little old woman dressed in black… she is very very wicked’. Here they stayed and worked. ‘We shall never get to Rome I’m afraid,’ Gwen wrote to Ursula, ‘it seems further away than it did in England… the country round is wonderful especially now – the trees are all colours – I paint my picture on the top of a hill – Toulouse lies below and all round we can see the country for many miles and in the distance the Pyrenees. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is when the sun goes down, the last two evenings we have had a red sun – lurid I think is the word, the scene is sublime then, it looks like Hell or Heaven.’89
Augustus noted their progress with a mixture of amusement and irritation. ‘I congratulate you both on having thus far preserved body and soul intact,’ he wrote to them when they were about halfway to Toulouse. ‘But with all my growing sedulity I find it difficult to believe you are really growing fat on a diet of wine and onions and under a burden of ½ a hundredweight odd.’ He also congratulated them on having escaped the importunities of an old man in a barn ‘with true womanly ingenuity’, and he enclosed five pounds for Dorelia – ‘a modest instalment of my debt to you’.90 But already small misunderstandings had begun to creep into their exchanges. In any event, Dorelia decided she did not want random gifts of money accompanied by jokes she did not care for – and wrote to tell him so.
Gus was mainly concerned, at this stage, with Gwen’s pictures. He himself was contributing half a dozen works to the Winter Show of the NEAC, including portraits of Mackay, Rothenstein and Sampson: he was eager for Gwen to submit at least one of her own so that she should not be forgotten. ‘The day for the NEAC is Nov. 9.,’ he reminded both girls. ‘I hope Gwen will do a good picture of you, and that it will contain all the Genius of Guienne and Languedoc. I hope it will be as wild as your travels and as unprecedented.’ But Gwen refused to be rushed. ‘The New English sending day is next Monday,’ Augustus wrote again more urgently, ‘and Gwen’s picture doesn’t seem to arrive.’ When it did arrive – a glowing portrait of Dorelia entitled ‘L’Étudiante’ – it was almost six years late, and was shown at the NEAC Winter Exhibition of 1909.
Soon after Gwen and Dorelia left, Augustus and Ida had taken a two-year lease on what seemed a perfect house, with a large orchard and stables, at Matching Green in Essex. ‘It is lovely here,’ Ida wrote to the Rani, ‘…to go out into the quiet evenings and see the moon floating up above and feel the cold air.’ They moved in with a lawnmower, their canaries, Gwen’s cats and a dog called Bobster during late November. Elm House stood next to a the Chequers Inn, had a studio but no telephone or electric light, and overlooked the village green. ‘Several gypsies have been already,’ Ida informed Margaret Sampson. ‘Our house is one of the two ugly ones. Inside it is made bearable by our irreproachable taste.’ Four-and-a-half miles from Harlow, their nearest town, and twenty from London, Matching Green stood in a tract of land, Augustus told Will Rothenstein, ‘abundant in such things as trees, ponds, streams, hillocks, barns etc.… Pines amaze me growing stiff and lofty like Phallic symbols. I get dangerous classic tendencies out here I fear. London is perhaps on the whole a safer place for me.’
Since leaving his Liverpool job, Augustus’s income had been erratic, while his responsibilities steadily mounted. It was this state of affairs – ‘living as I do in such insecurity’, he described it91 – that now persuaded him to collaborate in a scheme of Orpen’s. ‘I have committed myself to one day a week teaching at a school Orpen initiates with Knewstub as secretary,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘We hope to make pocket money out of it at least. It is a very respectable undertaking with none of the perfection you had insisted on. It is Knewstub who makes things feasible with his capacity for organising and letter writing.’
Jack Knewstub was the brother-in-law of both Orpen and Will Rothenstein. Nicknamed ‘Curly’ Knewstub, he had fair wavy hair, boyish good looks and a rather tough North Country manner. For a time he had acted as secretary to a Welsh Member of Parliament and it was here that he learnt his skills as letter-writer. In his organizing capacity he was certainly superior to Augustus, but he was no businessman. His father had been both pupil and assistant to Rossetti – old Knewstub, it was said, could draw but not colour, and Rossetti, a superb colourist, could not draw: it was an ideal partnership. But Curly Knewstub, brought up in this Pre-Raphaelite world, could neither draw nor colour. He was an artist manqué, a dreamer with ambitious cultural fantasies to which this new school now acted as a focus. In the firmament of his imagination, Augustus shone like the moon. Over the years, he schooled his own six children to draw in the John manner, until they came to loathe John’s very name.
If Knewstub worshipped Augustus, Augustus tolerated Knewstub. Admittedly he was ‘a tactless idiot’, ‘exasperating’ and ‘difficult to avoid’; and also so ‘damned incompetent’ that it was as well to have nothing to do with him in financial matters. Yet no one was perfect and Knewstub proved an agreeable drinking companion, useful in countless little ways – the paper and sealing-wax of life.
The Chelsea Art School, as it was called, opened in the autumn of 1903 at numbers 4 and 5 Rossetti Studios in Flood Street. It was, Augustus wrote to Gwen, ‘a bold enterprise by which we expect to replenish our coffers’. On the prospectus*4 Augustus and Orpen were named as its principals. Knewstub, who began by using 18 Fitzroy Street as his office, acted as secretary and general manager. The sexes were segregated, Gwen Salmond conscripted as ‘lady superintendent’ and various other ‘Sladers’, including Michel Salaman and Will Rothenstein, drafted to give lectures.
In some ways this generation of British artists was to remain a band of eternal students. Perhaps it was because their training at the Slade, where they were so happy, had been incomplete. Gwen Salmond, for example, after leaving the Chelsea Art School, was to study with the Spanish-born, French-trained artist Leandro Ramon Garrido and then, after the war, enrol in a school run by the French cubist painter André Lhote, whose classes Gwen John also attended ‘ill or well’ as late as 1936.
Another Slade student, Edna Clarke Hall, who was to join the Central School of Art and Design in the 1920s, decided to enrol in the Orpen and John Chelsea Art School. ‘The great are following,’ Orpen shouted across to Augustus as she entered the Flood Street studios, ‘we shall succeed.’ Having drifted into her respectable marriage five years earlier Edna had been ‘put on a pedestal and forgotten’ by her husband. But she was not forgotten by Augustus. He would turn up unexpectedly at her home from time to time, sit in the garden drawing her, filling up sheet after sheet compulsively with ‘little wonders’. She watched with fascination, having no idea what was coming next. ‘He talked as he drew,’ she remembered, ‘swiftly and casually but with such a learned hand.’92 He always came on weekday afternoons and she would make sure he had gone and all evidence of his work – and hers – been hidden away by the time her husband got back from his law office. For William Clarke Hall continued to disapprove of her art-student friends, especially Augustus John, and to discourage her from painting and drawing. ‘What is all this rubbish lying around?’ he had demanded, looking at her pens and paints. So she put them away, but went on longing ‘for the old Slade days when we were all drawing together’.
It was Gwen Salmond who arranged the life-drawing classes for Edna at the Chelsea Art School – just as she had arranged for Gwen John to attend the Académie Carmen in Paris – so enabling her to escape for a time the ‘great solitude’ of her marriage. Edna enjoyed returning to school. But nothing could conceal the fact that ‘those happy days’ at the Slade were ‘gone for ever’. So much had been happening to her friends in her absence. Gwen Salmond had become an art teacher, taking classes for the London County Council and the Clapham School of Art; Gwen John had disappeared with the mysterious Dorelia, ‘the queen of all waterlilies’ as Ida called her; and Ida herself had started a large family because, as she explained, ‘there is nothing else to do now that painting is not practicable, and I must create something.’93 Such news of Ida’s domestic routine of washing and sewing and baby-minding as Edna picked up ‘strengthened a longing I have often felt to take you right away from those boys of yours’.94 But where could she take her? Edna herself had no babies. She was merely a child-wife and Edwardian hostess.
‘The school idea receives great encouragement from all sides,’95 Augustus had reported to Michel Salaman. No one was more excited than Edna. She liked the way Augustus taught by demonstration, re-drawing the students’ work with extraordinary skill. He made obvious efforts to be tolerant and enthusiastic but, like Tonks at the Slade, he could also be sarcastic. Having reduced a pupil to tears, he would then become riddled with guilt and, as an act of contrition, find himself inviting the tearful student out for ‘a drink or a day trip up the river on a steamer’,96 during which he would recite Romany verses in his rumbling bass voice – an impressive sound drifting incomprehensibly along the water.
Everything began promisingly at the Chelsea Art School. ‘They have 35 students – but need to double the money to make it pay,’ Ida wrote to Winifred John in January 1904. ‘They have fine studios in Chelsea. Gwen Salmond is the chief girl and looks after the women’s affairs. Isn’t it mad?’
One person who thought the arrangement dangerously mad was Alice Rothenstein. Did Ida, she wondered, know nothing about men? It was inviting trouble, this burying herself in the country and permitting Augustus to roam the streets of London alone. Her head swam at the pure folly of it. So strongly did she feel, that she would have intervened had she not been weightily pregnant at the time. As it was, the very least she could do from her bed of confinement was to pepper Ida with warnings. Of course, it was none of her business, but then what were friends for? Alice had been on the stage before she married Will. Ida had had a sheltered upbringing and was an innocent creature – she must be protected by post. Ida endured these reprimands stoically, then retaliated (12 December 1903):
‘You are quite quite wrong, but I will not scold you now as you are just going to have a baby. In the first place I prefer being here. And healthy or no, Gus enjoys being in London alone.
Think it pride if you will, but the truth is I would not come back if I had the chance. You do not understand, and you need not add my imaginary troubles to your worries. If I had not known it was alright I should not have come here. I always know. So there. Cease your regrets and all the rest of it. Yrs. Ida.’
Alice was shocked. This was the last thing she had expected. The temptation to appear more offended than she actually felt was almost irresistible. Ida, however, was having no nonsense. She refused to be seen as forlorn, abandoned or irresponsible, as Alice’s theatrical imagination demanded. ‘Dear Alice, I was not in the least vexed,’ she replied, ‘and you know I was not. And please always say exactly what you feel. Only I can’t help doing the same and disagreeing. And I know it is such a good thing we came here, and you say it is a bad thing.’
Thereafter, whenever Alice’s volleys of questions grew too intense, Ida would put up a smokescreen. Had Alice observed how lovely the trees were looking just now? Would she like news of the two piebald pigs she owned (‘they grunt very nicely’) and about the terrific number of black-and-white cats Gwen John had left with them? Sometimes Ida would post her ‘several pages of nothing’: at other times she would reveal that, with many disheartening interruptions, she was learning the piano or making a hat. She sent flowers and embroidery and lists of ‘scattered visitors – all very pale’ to Elm House: her mother and sisters, Margaret Sampson, the Rani – ‘we have giggled and been stupid and feminine all the time’. She invited Alice to visit her also and see the elm trees, the green, the open skies: ‘The geese still cackle and waddle on the green, and the bony horses graze. All the buds are coming out, and the birds beginning to sing long songs.’
But by far the best method of deflecting Alice’s formidable pity was to introduce the ever-interesting subject of children. Alice, who was extremely proud of her children, simply could not resist it. Ida is careful to establish that her two sons are in no way comparable to the magnificent Rothenstein boys. David, who ‘is spoiled – or any rate he is difficile’, shouts whenever the sun comes out, loves nursery rhymes with any mention of dying in them, says ‘NO’ a great many times each day and has taken to drawing, making their lives terrible with his ceaseless howls for pictures of hyenas, cows and ‘taegers’. Caspar is enormous, struggles with a free style on his tummy across the floor exclaiming ‘Mama’ as if it were some kind of joke, remains perfectly toothless at ten months old, but has developed two fat and rosy cheeks from perpetually blowing a trumpet – ‘his first and only accomplishment’. He is strong as a bull and has achieved a ‘long dent in his forehead from a knock… [which] really must have dented his skull as it still shows after several weeks’.
But sometimes her stream of domestic trivia runs dry, and we catch sight of other aspects of Ida’s life. ‘Dear Alice, I have nothing to say – do forgive me. I am very tired.’ The children dominated her night and day, sucking away all energy. Never, it seemed, could she escape from their noise, their eternal need for food and attention. ‘I am getting a little restive sometimes,’ she admitted (15 February 1904), ‘but what I chiefly long for is 2 or 3 quiet nights. Not that they are restless in the night – but as you know they require attention several times.’ She was a conscientious mother, determined to make the best of it. Motherhood was a medicine she had to swallow, and to judge from its bitter taste it must be improving her character. ‘All my energies go to controlling my own children’s passions,’ she explained to Alice. ‘I do get angry and irritable sometimes, but I am getting slowly better, and it is a discipline worth having. I have been so used to looking upon life as a means to get pleasure, but I am coming round to another view of it. And it is a limitless one.’
Intermittently this glow of moral optimism would fade and she envied Gwen John her painting, Dorelia her freedom. Both Ida and Gus would have preferred to be in France with Gwen and Dorelia, whatever the emotional complications. ‘It’s all very well talking about Toulouse,’ Gus reprimanded Gwen that autumn. ‘Naturally I prefer Toulouse to Didcot myself. But there’s the question d’enfants.’97 How he survived the Nettleship family Christmas was a wonder. ‘We are very silly and Gussy has many disdainful smiles,’ Ida wrote to Gwen. ‘…[He] is drawing animals & people for Davie to recognise.’98
There were plenty of animals and people for David and Caspar to recognize at Matching Green: their lunatic of a dog, now called Jack and ‘too silly for words’; and Gwen’s family of ten cats (some of the kittens Augustus drowned in a kettle); and six breeding canaries. ‘Domesticities amongst the birds are going on all around me,’ Ida wrote to Margaret Sampson. Then there was Maggie, the cook; and Lucy Green who came in ‘shining with soap’ to help with the housework; and various visitors including Esther Cerutti, who arrived from London in all her finery and played the piano.
Almost the only person whom the children did not see so much was the ‘father of the family’ who was ‘generally in London’,99 Ida explained to Winifred. Augustus loved Matching Green – ‘I see things so beautiful sometimes,’ he confessed to Sampson, ‘I wonder my poor eyes don’t drop out.’100 But you could have too much of a good thing. Besides, he had to work at the new art school and make some money for them all. In some ways he was like an extra child for Ida, or an adolescent, who could seldom tell her when he was coming back for supper because he did not know himself.
Ida would have liked to be as free and easy herself. ‘I get very little time for contemplation now-a-days – and if I do get half-an-hour I am certain to tear my dress and have to mend it, or spill a box of pins, or something.’ She had given up painting altogether. ‘For the first time in my life Matching Green bores me – to extinction almost,’ she told the Rani who came down from Liverpool to stay with her. ‘I wish it did quite. It would be quite a pleasant way of dying – to be bored away into nothing.’ She longed for a more adventurous life, and more adult companionship. ‘I am “comblé de travail’”, she wrote to Dorelia. ‘I am usually so tired that if I sit down I doze… My thoughts are often with you.’101 When she compared their lives in her imagination, ‘I long to come over,’ she told Gwen and Dorelia in the spring of 1904. ‘…Your life is romantic, mine a pigstye with the stye overhead.’102 She was getting too little of Gus’s company and far too much of his children’s. ‘I am beginning to wonder if my head will stand much more of the babies’ society.’
From the nursery she began escaping into the kitchen. Though Alice, their maid at Fitzroy Street, had left, their young cook Maggie, now very ‘fat and attractive’ and nicknamed ‘Minger’, had come with them to Elm House. As the weeks went by, Ida did more cooking and Maggie more looking after the boys. ‘I have begun to learn to cook,’ she announced triumphantly (15 February 1904), ‘and can make several puddings and most delicious pastry.’ Cooking was so much quieter than children, so much – despite what everyone said – more creative. ‘I have been cooking and cooking and cooking – and have been so successful. I want to try and make Maggie nurse, and be cook and odd woman [myself]… And cooking is so charming… However, it is not settled yet.’ By the spring it was settled: ‘Maggie is Nurse entirely now – and I am Cook General. It is so much less wearing.’
She also took up gardening, became a ‘scientific laundress’, grew ‘mad on polishing furniture’, involved herself in the manufacture of loud check coats. Guilt often stabbed at her: she was a poor mother, a reluctant ‘housewife’, despite being better off than many others. Besides Maggie, she was soon regularly employing Lucy Green, ‘a very large and conscientious child of 14’ to act as housemaid. Yet still she seemed to suffer from overwork. ‘Matching Green is quite drunk to-day,’ she wrote to Alice at Easter. ‘…Soon the woman who lives on our other side will be helping herself home by our garden railings. It is remarkable the way they all make for the pub. Overwork. I know the necessity. I go to domestic novels – quite as unwholesome in another way. For my part I could not be really at leisure and able to follow my own desires with less than 4 servants. So what can these poor people do without one? And yet how gorgeous life is.’
Then again this glow would darken and apathy would sweep over her. ‘I should like to have gone to Michel [Salaman]’s marriage feast but they will do well enough without me, and nothing matters.’
But one person still mattered to her: Gus. All winter he had been subject to dark moods, and when spring came these moods grew blacker and more frequent. Her inability to pull him out of these depressions was a source of self-reproach. She lost confidence – perhaps she was the wrong person; perhaps only Dorelia could help him – help both of them. Ida’s exhaustion was added to Gus’s listlessness, and together they seemed like two ships becalmed, waiting. ‘Dorelia and Gwen, when are you coming back?’ Ida asked; and Gus added his appeal to the same letter: ‘I wish you two would come back & be painted – with your faces towards Spain if you like.’103
*
The Chelsea Art School absorbed much of Augustus’s energy during its first two terms. For his own work he used a studio above the school, and would often spend a full week, or even a fortnight, in town. ‘London is very beautiful,’ he wrote to Dorelia, ‘it becomes more like home every day.’
Orpen’s chief contribution to the school was a series of lectures on anatomy. All pupils had to draw from the model, then ‘skin him’ and draw the muscles employed in his posture.
As at Liverpool, Augustus stressed the value of observation. He discouraged the use of red chalk because it tended to make a bad drawing look pretty. Every line should carry meaning, nothing be left vague. Students were taught to keep their drawings broad and simple, avoiding too much detail, to use a hard piece of charcoal, to draw with the point and to perfect ‘the delicate line’.
Perhaps because it diverted his mind from personal worries, Augustus enjoyed his teaching. The division of his life between town and country seemed to suit him: he never quite had time to grow tired of either. In London he was meeting many people – Gordon Craig, Arthur Symons, Charles Ricketts, Lady Gregory.104 In March he dined at the house of art collector and critic Hugh Lane, and Lady Gregory noted: ‘We went upstairs after dinner to look at the Titian – Philip II, and I speaking to John for the first time said “How can the wonderful brilliancy of that colour keep its freshness so long?” And John said “Ah-h-h”.’
From remarkable exchanges such as this, he would return with relief to the freshness of Essex. ‘It has been wondrous fine in the country these last few days – a white frost over everything, our humble garden transformed; every leaf and twig rimed with crystal; in the moonlight things sparkled subtly and any old outhouse became the repository of unguessable secrets,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘To-day all changed into the dreariness of mud – the green a morass – the sky all gone, and grey expressionless vapour instead… I am bent on etching now and mark me Will I will have a new set out before it is time to think of potato planting. This bald little house is becoming trim and homely and you will not find it inhospitable when you seek its shelter.’
Armchairs and green-baize tables, a light-oak bureau and a cottage piano had made their appearance there. Augustus’s pipes and slippers littered the rooms; breeding cages for the canaries were raised upon the walls, each suspended by a single nail – ‘they are charming and make an awful mess’, the Rani wrote when she came to stay. The little brown bookshelves in the chimney corners were filled with many of the books he was reading in tandem with Wyndham Lewis: books by Baudelaire, Verlaine and Huysmans; also Stendhal, Turgenev and Borrow, Darwin, Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant, as well as elaborate works on Italian painters, cookbooks, domestic novels and volumes about Wales. The white-papered walls of the drawing-room were covered with rows of Goya and Rembrandt etchings ‘and part of a Raphael cartoon in one corner’. But his own work was subject to fitful delays. ‘Rumbling home in a bus in a state of blank misery I found myself opposite a perfect queen among women, a Beatrice, a Laura, a Blessed Virgin!’ he exclaimed to Will Rothenstein that winter. ‘The sight of her loveliness, the depth of her astonished eyes, her movements of a captured nymph dispelled the turgid clouds from my mind, leaving an exquisite calm which became by the time I got to bed a contradiction of almost religious exaltation. Would I could repay my debt to the enchantress! Would that I too were a wizard!’
But he could summon up no wizardry to control his own emotions. Visual experiences affected him as a switch controls an electric light. Without these, he was nothing. Clouds of ‘blank misery’ rushed in to fill the vacuum. They came and went again, forming and dissolving according to no obvious laws, but massing more densely, taking longer to evaporate. For Dorelia, like a sun beyond the horizon, was out of sight: and he was miserable without her. ‘What can have taken place in Relia’s [Dorelia’s] head’, he asked Gwen, ‘that she never writes to me?’105
He had hoped she would return for a belated house-warming party at Matching Green. ‘Of course Dorelia you are coming here,’ Ida wrote. ‘Gus says you are well worth your keep only as a model – and I can give you plenty to do too. But what would your family say? Gwen would love this place.’ Augustus also loved this apple-and-pear country. ‘The village seems to me curiously beautiful in a humble way,’ he wrote to the two girls, ‘ – the Green is now full of ponds. At night the little lighted tenements are reflected in the water in a very grave and secret way.’106
He longed to finish his portrait of Dorelia. ‘Your fat excites me enormously and I am dying to inspect it,’ he wrote to her.
‘I am itching to resume that glorious counterfeit of you which has already cost me too many sighs. I have a feeling that the solitude of Matching Green will do much towards its perfection. The thought of this picture came upon me with an inward fluttering and I am fond to believe that the problem will now find its final solution in your newly acquired tissue. When are you two going to turn your backs on Pyrenean vistas? How is it you are not going to assist at the warming and consecration of Elm House? I imagine new papers in the ladies smoking room with ribbons and roses on it and new chintz on the chairs and sofa again with roses and ribbons. Ida has commissioned me to paint a silk panel for the piano, and the front door is already a pure and candid white behind which no hypocrisy can harbour.’
He asked to be told of their exploits, but all he received was a package of out-of-date Christmas presents – bonbons and toys for the children, and some cakes for him and Ida. ‘Gwen is still in Toulouse I believe,’ Ida told Alice (January 1904), ‘painting hard – and anxious as soon as her 5 pictures are finished, to go to Paris.’ ‘They have a dog who is naughty always, Gwen says,’ she wrote to Winifred the same month. And that, it seems, was all they knew.
Even before the end of the year Augustus had been growing impatient at their prolonged absence. ‘The spring days stir my bowels subtly,’ he had confided to Sampson. ‘…My palate begins to water to lusty appetites.’107 The weeks went by; he heard almost nothing, and what news did trickle through tantalized him. ‘It was a bloody long time before I heard from you,’ he burst out in a letter to Dorelia from the Chelsea Art School.
‘Gwendolina says that you get prettier and prettier… When are you coming back again? You are tired of running about those foreign places I know… I have stayed up here now for many days, laudably attempting to get things done, but these models, drat them, don’t give a man a chance with all this employment. However I am gettting into a weedy condition. My studio is grimey, my bed is unmade, my hair uncombed, my nails unpared, my teeth uncleaned, my boots unblacked, my socks unfresh, my collar unchanged, my hose undarned, my tie unsafety pinned (I wish you’d send me some safety pins, it’s not too much to ask) – lastly, my purse unlined.’
It was true that Gwen and Dorelia were by now growing tired of Toulouse. Their room was bare; they bathed, when it was not too frigid, in the river; and subsisted mainly on a diet of old bread, new cheese and middle-aged figs – though there were also evenings over a bottle of wine and a bowl of soup. Gwen, Dorelia observed, was becoming very strict and demanding. She disapproved of the theatre and spoke with disgust of the ‘vulgar red lips’ of a girl they used as a model. Yet she was not unattractive to men, and never careless of her appearance – ‘in fact’, Dorelia noted, ‘rather vain’.108 To maintain themselves the two girls made portrait sketches in the cafés for three francs each. The rest of the time Gwen worked at her five paintings, at least four of which were portraits of Dorelia.109 ‘I look forward to a little time in which I can try to express in some way my thoughts,’ she wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘I am hurrying so because we are so tired of Toulouse – we do not want to stay a day longer than necessary – I do nothing but paint – but you know how slowly that gets on – a week is nothing.’
‘Is Dorelia much admired… She must look gorgeous,’110 Ida had written to Gwen. Gwen’s portraits of Dorelia were gorgeous and show someone admired and loved. She was working with layers of paint over a fast-drying base of burnt umber, the technique she had apparently picked up from Ambrose McEvoy. These pictures are less oblique than anything she was to paint over the next thirty-five years in France. Together with her two self-portraits (the first an extraordinarily confident bravura work akin to the portraiture of Augustus, who owned it all his life; the second, which Augustus had described as a ‘masterpiece’ and which resembles an English governess, owned by Frederick Brown of the Slade), they represent the crown of Gwen John’s ‘English’ period.
By the end of February 1904, Gwen’s pictures being for the time being finished, the two girls bundled their possessions on to their backs again, and made their way north in the direction of London. ‘What a surprise to hear from you in Paris,’ Augustus wrote at the end of March. ‘I suppose you willed yourself there… I trust you are careful to pose only to good young artists. They must find you two quite épatant [dumbfounding].’111
He was overjoyed that they were on their way back. It could not be long now before they arrived in England. ‘I have ordered a mighty canvas against your coming,’ he wrote to Dorelia, ‘…so better go in for Ju-Jitsu at once, dear, for you will have to fill it spreadeagle wise.’ But when Gwen and Dorelia reached Paris, they stopped. The Rani, who was staying at Elm House in the last week of March, describes what the atmosphere was like in a letter to her husband (24 March 1904):
‘Mr Augustus’s habits are really remarkable. He came on Tuesday with a bad cold and all Wednesday morning he stayed in bed and played the concertina and we had to take turns to provide him with gossip. All afternoon he read Balzac – never moved from his chair – went out for a walk just before supper in piercing cold – read all evening including meals – said “I want to make some more sketches of you” and dropped the subject. All Thursday (yesterday) he stayed in bed and asked for no one – played the most melancholy tunes on his concertina and got up at tea time – very silent, read his book but as good as gold and ready to nail up bird cages or anything – after tea went out – at tea he said “Good God is it Thursday? – I thought of doing that sketch to-day.” At 6.15 he appeared with a block and some red chalk and began to draw me as I sat by the fire. I said “I hope you are not doing it unless you feel inclined” to which a growl and “I do feel inclined – that is I shan’t know if I do until I’ve done.” He drew furiously by firelight and the last glimmer from the window and fetched a lamp and drew by that until supper – 7 o’clock three sketches – I didn’t ask to see them knowing better – at supper we both took our life in our hands… and asked to see the sketches he had done. He produced them… each more charming than the other… He worked with the tension and rapidity of ten Shannons [Charles Shannon, lithographer and painter] rolled into one – scraped and tore away at it in the most marvellous way and did I should think fully six more of which I only saw one – too exquisitely squirrelly and funny for description but beautiful. They were mostly put in the coal scuttle as he did them but preserved all right. It must have been about 12 when he suddenly stopped, said “thank you for sitting” and went off to bed.’
The next day, 25 March, the Chelsea Art School officially ended its term, and Augustus began to spend more days at Matching Green. ‘The school is going on rather dully,’ he wrote to Gwen. ‘I’m trying to think of some startling innovation to buck people up, like having a family of boys & girls posing in groups now. But we need another studio for portraits.’112 Time hung heavy. For a while he stayed mild and good, only half-aware, it seemed, of the terrible clamour of children, cats, canaries, chickens and other cattle that reverberated through Elm House.
‘Mrs John is beating the baby to sleep which always amuses me and appears to succeed very well – she is so earnest over it that the baby seems to gather that she means business,’ the Rani wrote to her husband a few days later (27 March 1904).
‘…The baby is simply roaring its head off and no one paying any attention – it is in another room… You would hate to be here. Mr Augustus looks sometimes at the baby and says “Well darling love – dirty little beast” at the same time. He is the sweetest natured person in the world. It is all indescribable and full of shades and contrasts and the whole is just like his pictures. He looks so beautiful and never takes a bath so far as I can make out. At least I know he is not three minutes dressing but always looks clean. He has cut his hair by the way a good deal – Ida likes it. I haven’t made up my mind yet – I think she must have sat on the baby – it has suddenly stopped crying.’
The sweetness slipped out of his nature on learning what Gwen and Dorelia were up to in Paris. They had settled into a single room at 19 boulevard Edgar-Quinet. ‘I am getting on with my painting, that makes me happy,’ Gwen wrote to Alice Rothenstein. She had been followed from Toulouse by a married woman who, falling under her spell, had abandoned her husband to be with Gwen. But in Paris Gwen, happy now with her painting and with Dorelia, would have nothing to do with the woman. ‘She [Gwen] was extremely queer and hard,’ Dorelia remembered,113 ‘always attracted to the wrong people, for their beauty alone.’ In many ways she was as overpowering as Gus.
In their spare time the two girls made clothes. ‘The room is full of pieces of dresses – we are making new dresses,’ Gwen told Alice. ‘Dorelia’s is pink with a skirt of three flounces. She will look lovely in it. Our two painters will want her as a model I am sure when we go home.’ They had taken with them the address of the young artist they had met at La Réole who had offered them jobs as models in Paris. The news that agitated Augustus was that Dorelia was posing in the nude – something she had never consented to do for him. What were the two of them up to? ‘You tell me not to be alarmed,’ Ida had written to Dorelia. ‘ – I am not – only mystified.’ For weeks Gwen had been tantalizing Augustus with bulletins of Dorelia’s marvellous efflorescence. ‘Dora mustn’t grow any prettier or she will burst,’ Ida replied that spring. ‘…oh my dears – come back before it’s too late...’114
Suddenly Augustus could stand it no more. ‘Why the devil don’t I hear from you, you bad fat girl?’ he reprimanded Dorelia.
‘You sit in the nude for those devilish foreign people, but you do not want to sit for me when I asked you, wicked little bloody harlot [‘lũbni’] that you are. You exhibit your naked fat body for money, not for love. So much for you! How much do you show them for a franc? I am sorry that I never offered to give you a shilling or two for a look at your minj [middle part]. That was all you were waiting for. The devil knows I might have bought the minj and love together. I am sorry that I was so foolish to love you. Well if you are not a whore, truly tell me why not. Gustavus.’
Dorelia’s reply, when it arrived, was little more than a scribble. In the heat of the moment, Augustus had forgotten to enclose his usual word-list, so much of his Romany invective had gone astray. Certain phrases in his letter puzzled Dorelia. What, for example, did lũbni mean? But Augustus already felt rather ashamed of his outburst and refused to answer. All this letter-writing was getting him nowhere. He needed to see Dorelia. It was eight months since he had seen her. What was he to do? It was Ida who decided. ‘Paris is quite near,’ she reminded him. She would have liked to go herself, but it was better that he go – he could see the show of Primitives there at the same time. The idea was very appealing. ‘Do you see any Géricaults?’ he asked Gwen. ‘He was a very wonderful man and liked to use plenty of paint. Courbet also is a man that flies to my head when I think of France. I suppose there are no wonderful young painters in Paris… I want to see you and the Primitiffs… you and that pretty slut Dorelia, she who is too lazy to answer my frequent gracious and affectionate letters.’115
As soon as Ida had spoken, Augustus reacted. He was like a dynamo – one that needed someone else to turn the switch before it burst into life. A week before he came to Paris, Gwen had written to Alice Rothenstein: ‘We are getting homesick I think, we are always talking of beautiful places we know of beyond the suburbs of London and Fitzroy St and Howland St seem to me more than ever charming and interesting.’ They would soon, she added, be coming home.
This was their intention shortly before Augustus turned up in Paris in the second week of May. But afterwards they did something different. That another man might take his place in Dorelia’s life had not seriously occurred to Augustus. But this was what was happening in Paris while he lay lugubriously playing the concertina at Matching Green. His rival seems to have been a young artist – half artist and half farmer – possibly the man she and Gwen had met at La Réole. His name was Leonard, and from Dorelia’s point of view he had some advantages over Augustus: he was not married; and life with him, while not contradicting her sense of destiny, might involve a farming background, which appealed to her.
Augustus arrived in Paris and a few days later Dorelia left boulevard Edgar-Quinet – not with Augustus back to England, but to Belgium with Leonard. She fled with him secretly, telling no one, leaving no address. She had gone, they discovered, to Bruges, was living with Leonard and for the time being could only be reached through a poste restante. She would stay with him three months – or a lifetime: it depended how things worked out. It was, she afterwards remarked, ‘one of my two discreditable episodes’.116
Exasperated, agitated, almost beside himself, Gus hung on in Paris, seeing Gwen, doing nothing. He was reduced once more to writing letters – not in prose this time, but page after page of poems, ballads and sonnets, odd rhymes running in his head which he stored up and subsequently sent Dorelia.
But for the woman I hold in my heart,
Whose body is a flame, whose soul a flower,
Whose smile beguiled me in the wood, the smart
Of kisses of her red lips every hour
Branding me lover anew, is she to be,
Being my Mistress, my Fatality?
In the stream of his passion there are already odd pebbles of pedantry. At one point, he interrupts an anguished appeal to instruct Dorelia that ‘the word “ardent” in the first sonnet I sent you should be changed to “nodding”. Kindly make that correction.’*5
So numerous were these poems that there seems to have been one left over for Ida who, he now learnt, was pregnant again. Possibly on Gwen’s advice, he appears to have written little but verse to Dorelia at her poste restante. But to Ida he explained all that was happening, and so did Gwen. ‘Darling Gwen’, Ida answered, ‘Your letter was such a comfort and made things so much simpler. I get brooding here. I am inclined to agree that D[orelia] will turn up one day & oh how happy we might be.’117
Augustus’s letters revealed how Gwen herself was suffering over Dorelia’s disappearance. ‘Gussie tells me you do not eat,’ Ida wrote. ‘Little girl what is the matter? Poor little thing, it is really hardest on you that she went. It was a shame. Did you over-drive her? I know you are a beauty once you start. But you are worth devoting yourself to, & she should not have given up.’118
Upon Ida’s reaction the whole course of their collective future hung. She found herself longing for Dorelia to come back. The last weeks at Matching Green had been miserable. She felt that she had even lost the ability of sitting to Augustus, and with it her last connection with art. Perhaps it was a temporary incapacity due to her new pregnancy but, she told Gwen, ‘I would rather lose a child than the power of sitting.’ For it was a power, this gift of inspiring painting, and Ida felt critical of Dorelia for abandoning it voluntarily, however difficult Gus and Gwen might be.
Ida herself had no intention of giving up. If Dorelia was added to their household, and Gwen herself returned, they could control these Johns, even in overdrive. Her confidence reaching a state of exaltation, she sent Gus and Gwen two letters that were dramatically to alter the course of events.
It was Gwen who put herself in charge of these events with a letter to Dorelia. ‘Dorelia, something has happened which takes my breath away so beautiful it is,’ she began. ‘Ida wants you to go to Gussy – not only wants it but desires it passionately. She has written to him and to me. She says “She [Dorelia] is ours and she knows it. By God I will haunt her till she comes back.”
‘She also said to Gussy, “I have discovered I love you and what you want I want passionately. She, Dorelia, shall have pleasure with you eh?” She said much more but you understand what she means.
Gus loves you in a much more noble way than you may think – he will not ask you now because he says perhaps you are happy with your artist and because of your worldly welfare – but he only says that last – because he knows you – we know you too and we do ask.
You are necessary for his development and for Ida’s, and he is necessary for yours – I have known that a long time – but I did not know how much. Dorelia you know I love you, you do not know how much. I should think it the greatest crime to take with intention anyone’s happiness away even for a little time – it is to me the only thing that would matter.
…I know of course from one point of view you will have to be brave and unselfish – but I have faith in you. Ida’s example makes me feel that some day I shall be unselfish too.
I would not write this if I knew you have no affection for Gussy. You are his aren’t you?
You might say I write this because I love you all – if you were strangers to me, I would try to write in the same way so much I feel in my heart that it [is] right what I say, and good.
I am sorry for Leonard, but he has had his happiness for a time what more can he expect? We do not expect more. And all the future is yours to do what you like. Do not think these are my thoughts only – they are my instincts and inspired by whatever we have in us divine. I know what I write is for the best, more than I have ever known anything. If you are perplexed, trust me.… Gussy is going home to-night. Come by the first train to me. I shall be at the gare to meet you. When you are here you will know what to do...
Do not put it off a minute simply because I shall then think you have not understood this letter – that it has not conveyed the truth to you. I fear that, because I know how weak words are sometimes – and yet it would be strange if the truth is not apparent here in every line.
You will get this to-morrow morning perhaps – I shall be in the evening at the gare du nord. I would not say goodbye to Leonard. Your Gwen.’119
It was not simply that Gwen wanted Dorelia to return to Gus, but that she believed Dorelia belonged to the John tribe and that by running away she had contradicted her nature. Her letter, and the others she wrote over this period, are remarkable for their fundamentalist attitude to Dorelia’s future. Hers was no ordinary religion, it was the religion of love for art’s sake. Were not art and religious experience much the same thing? Was not Dorelia an idol in the Temple of Art, a rare femme inspiratrice?
But it is Gwen’s tone of didactic certainty that is so remarkable. The other side of this moral conviction was a callousness that shows itself in her attitude to Leonard – ‘what more can he expect?’
Gwen took over and organized everything. Augustus’s absence from the battlefield of negotiations avoided any hint of a sexual tug-of-war, of a man-versus-man contest. Nor was Gwen acting for herself. Was she not surrendering Dorelia to Gus and Ida?
If Dorelia was subject to anyone’s will, it must have been Gwen’s, whose hard queer intimate company she had kept over the last eight months, and who, alone of all the John tribe, knew Leonard. The timing of her first letter, too, was good: no appeal until Ida’s sanction had been obtained. Finally, Gwen called upon the one strain stronger than any other in Dorelia’s character, one that Gwen understood well: her sense of destiny. There was only one weakness in Gwen’s position, and that was inevitable: while she could only send ‘weak words’ on pieces of paper, Leonard was actually with Dorelia. It was to be her words against his presence. But what she could do to offset this disadvantage she did, recommending Dorelia to tell Leonard nothing, to leave him in the same secret way as she had left Paris. For this too was in Dorelia’s character, and to have a weakness recommended as one’s duty can be irresistible.
When Gwen went to the Gare du Nord the following evening to meet her, Dorelia was not there. But she had sent a letter. To go back, she wrote, would be to curtail her freedom. With Leonard she was free of the overwhelming passions of Gus and Gwen, who together so excited and exhausted her. ‘God, I’m tired of being weak, of depending on people, of being dragged this way & that by my feelings, of listening to everybody but myself. I must be free – I will be. I wonder if you will understand… I am afraid you will not understand. Gussie will perhaps, he knows me, how I am.’120
Like the other Gwen, Gwen Salmond, who was soon to liberate Matthew Smith from nervous paralysis and fill him with confidence in his artistic talent, Dorelia believed in her possession of a vicarious ability that was the special gift of some women, perhaps even some men. She had served Gwen John, but her relationship with Augustus entangled her in Ida’s peculiar destiny. Besides, she did not want to be a slave to this gift, and sensed the danger of her love for Gus and Gwen – that it would devour and damage others. ‘You must know that I love you all – I cannot say how much,’ she replied to Gwen. ‘You say I must be unselfish and brave. I must, but not in the way you mean...
‘Whatever I do there must be something false; let me choose the least false, the most natural, let me? If I loved Gussie & you & Ida twenty times more – though I cannot love you more than I do – I would not come back… I see how wonderful it would be – it cannot be.’
All this, Dorelia felt, ‘must sound horrible to you but I must write it’. It was essential that she resist the potent spell of these Johns. Gwen had written her letter in ‘an ecstasy’: it was not reasonable; it was not practicable. Whatever happened, she concluded, Gwen must not seek her out in Bruges: ‘it would be useless.’121
If Gwen had not won as easily as she appears to have expected, she already sensed victory. Dorelia had asked for her permission, and she refused to give it. In her answer she brushed aside all these objections. She understood Dorelia’s position, Dorelia did not understand hers. She returned to the attack, reiterating and elaborating her previous arguments. ‘I must speak plainly for you to know everything before you choose. Leonard cannot help you, he would have to know Gussie for that and Ida and you a long, long time, he never could understand unless he was our brother or a great genius.
Strength and weakness, selfishness and unselfishness are only words – our work in life was to develop ourselves and so fulfil our destiny. And when we do this we are of use in the world, then only can we help our friends and develop them. I know that Gussie and Ida are more parts of you than Leonard is for ever. When you leave him you will perhaps make a great character of him – if he has faith in you that you are acting according to your truest self – and what good could you do him if he had no faith in you – by being always with him? But faith or no faith he would know some day the truth – and that is the highest good that can happen to us. To ‘wholly develop’ a man is nonsense – all events help to do that. I know as certainly as the day follows the night that you would develop him and all your friends as far as one human being can another by being yourself. That is what you have to think of, Dorelia. To do this is hard – that is what I meant by saying you must be brave and strong. I am sorry for people who suffer but that is how we learn all we know nearly – and that is the great happiness – knowledge of the truth!
You know you are Gussy’s as well as I do. Did you do wisely in going away like that without telling him? Do you dare spend a week with him or a day, or a few hours? Forgive me for speaking like this darling Dorelia – I only want to help you to know yourself. I love you so much that if I never saw you again and knew you were happy I should be happy too… It makes it simple to know all we have to do is to be true to the feelings that have been ours longest and most consistently.’122
While Gwen was writing this to Dorelia, Leonard had posted an answer to her first letter which, disobeying Gwen’s instructions, Dorelia had shown him. ‘Leonard has written to you too,’ Dorelia informed Gwen, ‘ – do not think he has influenced me.’ Written in halting English, by now partly indecipherable, it is couched as a rebuke yet struggles to maintain a sense of fairness in grappling with Gwen’s philosophy:
‘Dear Miss John,
Dorelia got your letter to-day and showed it to me. Your letter forces me to explain to you several things you forgot, as well as I can do.
Of course you don’t know me neither do you know my sentiments to Dor; but this is the other side of the facts, at which you did not like to look, anyway it exists and it is as true as your words, if I allow myself to talk a little bit of myself.
You say L. has had his happiness for a time, what more can he expect? Do you really think… that Dorelia’s feelings are small enough to love a man like this? People like me don’t love often and a woman like Dorelia will not pass my way again; you would better understand, if you would know my life.
Your letter is full of love, the love of a woman for another one, now imagine mine if you can. I am no ordinary man as you may think, who loves a girl because she is beautiful or whatever. I tell you and you are Dory’s friend so you must understand it, I am an artist and cannot live without her and I will not live without her – I think this is clear. Very right if you say “it is the greatest crime to take with intention anyone’s happiness”. You might say as you did I had my hapiness. Do you think hapiness is a thing that you take like café after dinner, a thing that you enjoy a few times and something you can get sick of? Not my hapiness by God; I suffered enough before and I don’t let escape something from me that I created myself with all my love and all my strength. Well, all those words are only an answer to yours, but something else that you forgot.
We cannot force the fate to go our ways, fate forces us...
That’s all I have to tell you, compare now my fate with that of John and his family perhaps you will see where it is heavier. My words seem hard to you, but they are the expression of my feelings as well as I can say it. I think it is not necessary to talk about Dorelias feelings and thoughts. I did not tell her what to do, I told her she might do what she thinks right and naturel, but remember your words of the crime and think that there are greater crimes which are against the rules of nature.
If you want wright to me your thoughts about everything and dont get mad against me, you must see that there is no world that [is] absolutely right.’123
Wisely Gwen did not accept this invitation to write to Leonard. She was not interested in a discussion of ‘thoughts about everything’, but in outcomes; not in fairness, but rightness. Leonard’s letter arrived in Paris before Gwen had posted her second letter to Dorelia, so she slipped into the envelope an extra pitiless page deflecting his arguments to her own ends. What he had written disappointed her, she claimed, and made her ‘more certain if certainty can be more certain of everything I have told you’. Leonard’s love was, after all, nothing better than possessiveness. She had supposed it to have been finer – perhaps he’d climb to better things in time, given the adversity. He loved her of course, no one denied that. But his love was selfish, like that of the Pebble of the brook in Blake’s The Clod and the Pebble, while Augustus’s, ‘much more noble’, resembled the little Clod of Clay’s.124 For, whatever his faults, Augustus was an artist; while Leonard was still a part of the bourgeoisie.
‘I have just read Leonard’s letter. In self-justification I must answer a few things to you. I don’t know what he thinks I mean – he does not understand certainly… He says “you are not free anymore you are his, his body and soul”. He says there are greater crimes than breaking another’s happiness that is to do things against the rules of nature.
He limits the laws of nature. You are bound to those whom you are in sympathy by laws much stronger than the most apparent ones. The laws of nature are infinite and some are so delicate they have no names but they are strong. We are more than intellectual and animal beings we are spiritual also. Men don’t know this so well as women, and I am older than Leonard.
He said “I could not live without her and will not live without her – this is clear.” Well a man who talks like that ought to be left to walk and stand and work alone – by every woman. Only when he can will he do good work.’125
Gwen’s shock tactics exploded powerful doubts within Dorelia. And to Gwen’s philosophy were now added Augustus’s poetry, and letters of entreaty from Ida. Ida had already dispatched Augustus back to the front line of combat in Paris so that, when the critical moment came, he could advance upon Bruges with all haste. ‘Aurevoir,’ she wrote to him, ‘and don’t come here again alone. Mrs Dorel Harem must be with you.’
From Dorelia herself little or nothing was heard. She was floundering, quietly, hopelessly and without comment. Then, suddenly, she capitulated. ‘I have given in and am going back with Gus soon,’ she wrote to Gwen. How and when she was going back were still uncertain; hers was a conditional surrender of which no one quite knew the conditions. It was now that Augustus decided to move from France into Belgium, while from further back, the John artillery still kept up its hail of letters. Ida was insistent that Dorelia should return, not simply to England, but to Elm House itself. The three of them must live together in Augustus’s ‘wonderful concubinage’. This would be infinitely preferable to a dreary segregation, with its periodic loneliness, dullness, incompleteness – almost respectability. If Dorelia were elsewhere, Ida could never be sure what Augustus would do. This at least was part of her reason for welcoming Dorelia into the home. But the prospect of it also curiously excited her. She had begun to identify her feelings for Dorelia with Gwen’s, and to suspect that in some extraordinary way she loved her too. ‘Darling Dorel,’ she wrote:
‘Please do not forget that you are coming back – or get spirited away before – as I should certainly hang myself in an apple tree. Whenever I write to you I think you will be annoyed or bored – I seem to have written so often and said the same thing. But for the last time O my honey let me say it – I crave for you to come here. I don’t expect you will and I don’t want you to if – well if you don’t. But I do want you to understand it is all I want. I now feel incomplete and thirsty without you. I don’t know why – and in all probability I shall have to continue so – as of course it will probably be impractical or something and naturally there are your people – and Gus will want you to be in town.
But I want you to know how it is Mrs Harem – only you needn’t come for 10 days as I am curing freckles on my face and shall be hideous until I blossom out afresh.
I heard from Gwen “Dorelia writes she has given in”. Were you then holding out against Gus, you little bitch? You are a mystery, but you are ours. I don’t know if I love you for your own sake or for his. Aurevoir -I wish I could help that Leonard. It is so sad.’
It seems probable that Leonard still did not know what was happening. Dorelia kept everything secret – in a sense even from herself. She put herself in the path of the greatest current of energy, and let events take their course. Augustus by this time had reached Antwerp where he halted, expecting some news. ‘I am getting to know every stone of Antwerp,’ he complained.
‘…The Devil keeps you away from me Ardor McNeill. Sometimes I talk to you while walking along and laugh so heartily all the people stare. All night I have strange dreams… You have only written once and how many letters I have sent you. You make me feel like Jesus Christ sometimes. I sit and sip and call for paper and ink… I think of the portrait I shall paint of you – there is a painting here by Rembrandt of little Saskia – a wondrous work – it is the repository of the inmost secret in the heart of a great artist. It is like the Cathedral here only more intimate more personal more subtle. In it is the principle of man’s love of woman. You call me pirino – beloved, but do you love me enough… Beloved Beloved your hands are laid on my head and everything fades… Ardor thou sylph with a secret for me let me hear you breathe. Gustavus.’126
He kept on writing letters – what else could he do? But ‘have you taken the trouble to go to the Post Office for them?’ he asked. Once, to his dismay, he forgot to go to the post office himself and found his letter still in his pocket two days later – then posted it out of sequence. But his outpourings had no sequence. They all said the same thing. ‘Why did you desert me before – why, I cannot think. Don’t trouble to find an impossible answer. If anyone can understand you I can. Love, I know you – Know me. Know me.’127
Dorelia did not trouble to find an answer. In a sense Augustus’s letters were complete in themselves. During the whole of this episode while Gwen, Ida and Gus were discharging their emotions on to paper, Dorelia confined herself to little more than the odd postcard – a time, a place, a piece of luggage, some weather, part of a dream, sometimes simply nothing at all but the picture on one side, her signature on the other. Augustus dashed from place to place – Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent – endeavouring to catch these elusive cards, endeavouring to discover in them some clue as to what was going on. ‘I hope you haven’t sent word to Antwerp now that I have left,’ he wrote from Ghent. But how would he know without travelling back to Antwerp?
It appears that Dorelia had consented to see him, but only outside Bruges. ‘I can come then on Tuesday morning?’ he asked, perplexed, exasperated. ‘Why come here, this isn’t the way home, at least not the shortest. Beloved tell me where to find you – but if you can come here before come in the name of all the Gods – wait for me here opposite the station.’128 They met, almost by accident it seemed, certainly by good luck, but even now nothing was fixed. Dorelia needed more time: a week. Allowing her to return was a torture to Augustus. ‘What am I to do these last days?’ he demanded. She did not reply. ‘The time is nearly up – Ardor,’ he wrote again. ‘Gand [the French spelling of Ghent] is very near Bruges. I am to rejoin you on Tuesday morning. So be it.’129
They set off on their return journey from Bruges station on 1 August 1904. They were to travel, not via Paris, but direct to London. Before leaving, Augustus wrote to Gwen arranging for Dorelia’s belongings in the boulevard Edgar-Quinet to be sent to the studio in Flood Street. On the platform, waiting for their train, Dorelia also wrote to Gwen. Her postcard reads: ‘How is the cat? Dorelia.’130
Whether Leonard understood, until after she left, that Dorelia had ‘given in’ and chosen Augustus, is unclear. He returned to Paris, imagining perhaps he was following her. But he only saw Gwen, who told him nothing. His name does not appear in their correspondence again: except once at the end of the summer. ‘Leonard came up to me a few days ago,’ Gwen wrote to Dorelia. ‘I should write him a nice letter if I were you. He will get very ill otherwise I think.’131 After this he vanishes, his identity lost, with the unsettling echo of his words to Gwen: ‘I will not live without her.’
Gwen’s letter to Dorelia passes on to details of a skirt Dorelia has promised to make for her and a request for some more ‘earrings like Gussie’s’ which she has lost. Also there is news of four ‘Toulousians with umbrellas’ whom they had met on their uncompleted walk to Rome. They had turned up in Paris and Gwen had been able to take them to Rodin’s studio, ‘a great favour, as he does not see students now.’ As a result, they were growing ‘so enthusiastic that they are almost unintelligible’.
*
‘Why not call on Rodin?’ Augustus had asked Gwen on hearing at the end of March that she and Dorelia had reached Paris. ‘He loves English young ladies.’132
While Dorelia was at Leonard’s Paris studio, Gwen had taken Gus’s advice and gone to see Rodin. ‘I am at Rodin’s nearly every day now,’133 she informed Ursula Tyrwhitt a little later. The extraordinary assurance of her letters to Dorelia in Bruges and her resolute attitude to Leonard may well have sprung from her elation over Rodin. Dorelia had observed that she had written in an ‘ecstasy’ and though she later denied this (‘I haven’t been in one for ages’), it was certainly true.
Auguste Rodin was sixty-three when they became lovers that summer, more than six years older than Gwen’s father. For a decade he would be everything to her that her father had not been and everything that she had failed to find in Ambrose McEvoy. She became his model, his pupil, his mistress, his little girl. The loving care over her work and welfare that Edwin John had never shown, and Augustus only intermittently (‘I must urge you to eat generously… Do do some drawings of nudes. Goodbye and a kiss from Gustavus’),134 was now assumed by Rodin, who found himself urging her to eat, wash, work, brush her hair, tidy her room; who made timetables for her and (‘wasn’t it kind of him?’ Gwen asked Ursula Tyrwhitt) paid for the rent of her new lodgings. She was in such an excited state, she could not keep it wholly secret. Gus watched what was happening with a mixture of admiration, envy and concern. ‘How delightful to have a drawing given you by Rodin – does he give all his sitters drawings?’ he asked on arriving back at Matching Green. ‘…When you have exhausted Rodin’s resources let me know.’135
Augustus felt grateful to Gwen for all she had done to reclaim Dorelia. He understood that Rodin might develop his sister’s talent as she believed Dorelia would develop his – indeed, this was the sort of master-and-student arrangement from which he himself would have liked to benefit. ‘Give my homage to dear master Rodin. I salute him and wish I could serve him as you do,’ he wrote to Gwen that autumn. ‘…You are evidently becoming indispensable to Auguste Rodin. It must indeed be a pleasure to be of service to such a man.’136
It was a startling coincidence, this fact that Rodin’s Christian name should be the same as his own. Gwen would use episodes from their adolescence to stir Rodin’s sympathy and protection. ‘J’étais pensant avant de dormir de mon frère,’ she wrote to him, ‘…et comment j’étais misérable en Angleterre.’137 Sometimes, when she waited for Rodin and he did not come, morbid dreams would rise from her childhood involving Gus’s ‘méchanceté’ (wickedness). ‘I torment myself… because of my brother – and if I had seen my Maitre these last few days I wouldn’t have had these feelings, for they are feelings rather than thoughts,’ she noted in a draft letter for Rodin. ‘…I suffered a long time ago because of him [Augustus], it’s like certain illnesses which recur in time. When they return I believe that my brother is my evil Genius and that he will do me harm – perhaps, without wishing to – if I do not avoid him...’138
Though Augustus sincerely wished Gwen well, she did not want to accept money from him. She wanted to be free, rather than caught up, as her sister Winifred found herself in relation to Thornton. All four of them experienced great difficulties forming loving relationships outside the family. Gwen had lent Winifred some money the previous year when she joined Thornton in North America, and Winifred had recently written to her about a young man called Philip. ‘Thornton must guess Philip is in love with me & I really must tell him soon. I keep putting it off. I hate to tell him. I’d rather tell Papa a thing like that.’139 A little later, when Philip left and Paul arrived, it was the same story (‘he said he wished it was Papa he had to tell instead of Thornton’).140 Eventually Paul disappeared and ‘I don’t want to ever “fall in love again”,’ Winifred informed Gwen. ‘Don’t be soft on the subject of R[odin] be firm – sacrifice all to work. I am going to...’ Thornton, she added, was ‘rather lonely’.141
Gwen’s love for Rodin – like Gus’s for Ida and Dorelia, and Winifred’s marriage later on to one of her violin pupils – was part of the intimacy of her work. She elected him her good genius, learning from him how to concentrate her powers of observation by the repetition of images and how to simplify her work with strong contours. She had ‘un corps admirable’, Rodin told her, and it was appropriate that he should use her as a model for his unfinished monument to Whistler. For Gwen’s painting technique in France, almost the opposite of her English work, relied on her own version of what she had learnt at the Académie Carmen about Whistler’s preparation of paint mixtures.
‘Je vous aime et je vous désire heureuse,’142 Rodin assured Gwen. In London she had been ‘shy as a sheep’; in Paris she grew, in Augustus’s words, ‘amorous and proud’. The Jane Eyre governess of her self-portrait was replaced by a rather brazen female speaking of ‘things I never thought of before’.143 Under Rodin’s spell she spent hours on her appearance, buying new clothes, pinching her breasts to ensure they did not grow smaller, and commanding Rodin to save his energy for their next love-making.
But their lovemaking, which rejuvenated her, aged him. Her passion, like that of Augustus, was a compulsive and demanding force that grew from the aridity of their upbringing. ‘Love is my illness,’ Gwen told Rodin, ‘and there is no cure till you come.’144 She wore him out with her obsession, haunting the café opposite his studio, camping in the bushes outside his fence at night, and writing hundreds of adoring letters in a handwriting that became pathetically schoolgirlish. ‘Vous avez de grandes facultés de sentir et de penser,’ he replied. ‘Courage, petite amie, moi je suis si fatigué et vieux… mais j’aime votre petit coeur si devoué, patience et pas de violence.’145
‘I don’t think we change but we disappear sometimes,’146 Gwen was to tell Michel Salaman. Before meeting Rodin she had confessed to getting rather homesick for London. ‘We shall be going home in the Autumn I think if not before,’ she had written earlier in the year to Alice Rothenstein. Rodin changed her plans. She anchored herself in Paris which became her new home, a home in exile, and so escaped from ‘not only the overpowering influence of Augustus’, wrote Mary Taubman, ‘but also from the curiously vapid atmosphere of the English art world...’147
*
‘Maintenant il faut travailler un peu,’148 Augustus wrote to Gwen after arriving back in England with Dorelia. He had been inspired by the precision and simplicity of L’Exposition des Primitifs Français he had seen at the Palais du Louvre and Bibliothèque Nationale – ‘a magnificent exhibition’, Gwen had called it. ‘I’ve been leading a reckless life in the Louvre, & so am on the brink of ruin,’149 she told Dorelia. Augustus felt similarly – in his fashion. ‘Oh yes I am going to do the Louvre,’ he had written to Gwen, ‘but I must have air air air! Studios are sickening.’150
From some letters he wrote to Charles Rutherston, it seems that in the autumn of 1904 Augustus took a studio on the other side of the King’s Road from the Chelsea Art School – No. 4 Garden Studios in Manresa Road. Dorelia spent some of her time there (‘Dorelia is practising Chopin in the Studio in London’) and some time at Elm House, as Ida had desired. ‘They are putting up a hen run in the garden here,’ Ida wrote to welcome the returning couple. ‘…The hammock is up and there are some canvas chairs and we are becoming quite like a “country house” – and now the rain has come.’
Ida was anxious for Gwen to ‘come & pay us a little visit & go back again’, but instead of Gwen, Edwin John arrived. He had been searching Paris for Gwen, but she had not sent him her new address. He became convinced she was back in England. ‘Father called yesterday & received a great shock on not finding you here,’ Augustus notified Gwen that September. ‘He suspected some dark plot but I assured him there was none, impossible as it appeared. He is a strange unique little man, all silver pink & black. He is unparalleled in simplicity and only needs a good deal more of another sort to be quite perfect.’151 Having inspected the household in Dorelia’s absence, Edwin reported to Winifred that the two boys, David and Caspar, ‘are completely spoilt by over indulgence’, and then returned to Wales.
Ida had welcomed Gus and Dorelia at Matching Green. ‘Gus came back so well from Paris,’ she wrote to Gwen. ‘…It goes without saying he loves Dorelia – but then he always did.’152 All of them appeared happy. Augustus’s happiness shines through the letters he wrote that late summer. ‘The country here is like a new America to discover every evening on a walk at sundown,’ he wrote to Gwen on 29 August. ‘Sometimes I come to the conclusion that nothing could be near so beautiful as our poultry run – it seems so marvellous, so removed from human interestedness, so remote & magical – the fowls, carrying with them ever the stigma of the Orient, move about their concerns under the slanting golden rays of the sun and are golden & soft & dappled under the gilded green of alders. I am painting of course. Dorelia’s face is a mystery – just like others perhaps.’153
But Dorelia’s mysteriousness was sometimes provoking. ‘You keep your movements & impressions enveloped in mystery – why?’ Gwen demanded that August. ‘…What is London like after France? & how do you like being in the bosom of your family?’154 Those were complicated, almost impossible, questions. Ida had desired Dorelia to come back, but now that she was back, clouds of anxiety were already forming. After the strain of the past months, Ida felt exhausted. That autumn she seems to have come near a breakdown. ‘Ida has her moments of défaillance [weakness],’ Augustus admitted to Gwen, ‘but the burden she carries [her pregnancy] accounts for them.’155 Worried by the tone of Ida’s letters, and perhaps curious about Dorelia too, Gwen did come over to Matching Green for three days in September.
But what Ida really wanted was to come out and join Gwen in Paris – as Gwen Salmond had done in July, and Ursula Tyrwhitt was planning to do later in the year. ‘How I wish I were with you,’ she wrote to Gwen. ‘Aurevoir my darling.’156 She seemed to be saying goodbye to freedom; to be cutting herself off from the life Dorelia enjoyed with Gus in London and Gwen in Paris. ‘You have Rodin & work & streets & museums,’ she told Gwen. ‘…The children are back tomorrow & nous voilà pour tout l’hiver. Cela me donne des frissons d’ennui.’157
This need to cut loose for a time ran strongly in Ida. ‘Matching Green seems a grave now, but I live in hope of a resurrection.’158 Eventually she put the question to Gus. Should she go to Paris? He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. He didn’t say that he thought she had gone slightly mad. So she pressed him as to what he would truly prefer, and he said stay, ‘& so I could not come, could I?’ Ida explained to Gwen.
There were reasons for staying. She was seven-and-a-half months pregnant; one of the children was sick; and there was a portrait of her that Augustus promised urgently to finish. He had not tried to forbid her going. It seemed to him ‘the only course to take’, and she reluctantly agreed. But ‘I know I shall regret not coming many times unless I get very strong,’159 Ida confided to Gwen.
What Augustus recognized was that he and Dorelia must be specially attentive to Ida during these final weeks of her pregnancy. To ‘preserve her mental equilibrium’, they took her for ‘frequent diversions’ up to London and ‘it is nicer here now,’ she admitted to Gwen. ‘…We stay in Gus’s new studio… Dorelia & Gus are very kind & when I do not think it is compassion I am happy enough.’ Back at Matching Green she reflected that she would probably manage to get through this period of instability ‘if I always remember he does want me here – it is only when I think he doesn’t it becomes unbearable.’160
And it was true he did want her there. After the baby was born, he assured her, she could buzz off to Paris, though really she doubted if ‘I shall be well able to leave it’. Meanwhile he went on treating her to ‘little journeys to London’ where she could help Dorelia make curtains for his studio, and taking her back to their gypsy garden at Matching Green where the hens continued ‘moving among medicine bottles, and broken pots and pans, crockery, meat cans, old boots and ancient dirt and indescribable debris – the uncatalogued tales of a human abode’.161
So this first crisis evaporated. Augustus looked, and saw that all was good. ‘Never have the beauties of the outer world moved me as of late,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘…I have worked at my women painfully, laboriously, with alternations of achievement and failure, impotence and power – you know the grinding see-saw – under a studio light, cold, informal, meaningless – a studio – what is it? a habitation – no – not even a cowshed – ’tis a box wherein miserable painters hide themselves and shut the door on nature. I have imprisoned myself in my particular dungeon all day to-day for example – on my sitters’ faces naught but the shifting light of reminiscence and that narrowed and distorted...’162
This, until too late, was to be Gwen’s route rather than his own: the shutting away of her impatience, the search for strange form, the ‘narrow talent, sharpened as a pencil’,163 as Sylvia Townsend Warner described it. ‘What I don’t like is to see people and much light,’164 Gwen was to tell Ursula Tyrwhitt. Augustus needed people and light. ‘This evening at sundown I escaped at last to the open, to the free air of space, where things have their proportion and place and are articulate,’ he continued his letter to Will Rothenstein, ‘ – so by the roadside I came upon my women and my barking dog seated on the dark grass in the dusk, and sitting with them I was aware of spirits present – old spirits, ancient, memorable, familiar spirits, consulted in boyhood – insulted in manhood – bright, good, clear, beneficent spirits, ever-loving and loved spirits of Beauty and Truth and Mystery. And so we are going for a picnic tomorrow – and I will make sketches, God-willing. I wish we might never come back to dust-heap-making again. The call of the road is on me. Why do we load ourselves with the chains of commodities when the trees live rent free, and the river pays no toll?’
So with ominous foreboding, he signs his letter: ‘Yours with the Unrest of Ahasuerus in his bones, “John”.’
*1 See Appendix Two, ‘John’s Pictures at the New English Art Club’.
*2 Later on at Liverpool Augustus wore only one earring, having, so the story goes, gallantly presented the other one to a lady who admired their design.
*3 They are written partly in the inflected Romany, like the so-called ‘Welsh Romany’ which is really an older form of English Romany, partly in the broken English Romany, and partly in English. The versions quoted here were done into English by the gypsy scholar Ferdinand G. Hugh who wrote that ‘I have made the translation as near as possible to the actual Romany words’.
*4 See Appendix Three.
*5 She did.