‘It is impossible to think that any other single exhibition can ever have had so much effect as did that on the rising generation.’
Vanessa Bell
There can have been few more unfortunate times for a British painter to have been born than in the 1870s. At home, he would have passed his youth in an atmosphere of genteel tranquillity and then, at the onset of middle age, been overtaken by changes unprecedented for their speed and significance. It was difficult for such a painter not to be at some period out of step with his age. For even in 1910 it was still possible to believe one was living in Victorian times. Nothing very much had changed. Victorianism had hardened into a tiny Ice Age, impervious to the intellectual fires that were lighting up the Continent.
Fear was the artificial stimulant that had kept nineteenth-century values alive beyond their natural life span: fear of national decline and the rise of the degenerate lower classes; fear of sex and the desire for birth control; fear that the very implements of fear, poverty and religious superstition, were losing their power; fear of foreigners.
Then, ‘in or about December 1910 human character changed.’ The date was not arbitrary. Announcing1 this change fourteen years later, Virginia Woolf chose it so as to make Roger Fry’s exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (which actually opened on 8 November 1910) a symbol of the way in which European ideas invaded English conservatism. For the first time people in Britain saw the pictures of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne, and in or about December 1910 the character of British art changed. The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition which, two years later, admitted British artists, signalled the last opportunity for them to choose the path they would follow and the view posterity would take of them.
The ‘awful excitement’ which erupted after ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ was a journalistic freak diagnosed by Roger Fry as an outbreak of British philistinism, more extreme than anything since Whistler’s day. The Times critic declared a state of anarchy;2 Robert Ross warned readers of the Morning Post3 that the exhibiting artists were lunatics, and Charles Ricketts wrote to congratulate him on his percipience. Doctors were called in to pronounce on the pictures; Philip Burne-Jones saw in the show ‘a huge practical joke organised in Paris at the expense of our countrymen’, though Wilfrid Blunt could detect ‘no trace of humour in it’, only ‘a handful of mud’: and he summed up the exhibits as ‘works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show’. It was left to a Royal Academician, the ‘desecrator’ of St Paul’s, Sir William Richmond, to strike a note of pathos: ‘I hope that in the last years of a long life’, he wrote, ‘it will be the last time I shall feel ashamed of being a painter.’4
‘Why do people get so excited about art?’ asked Lytton Strachey. ‘…I must say I should be pleased with myself, if I were Matisse or Picasso – to be able, a humble Frenchman, to perform by means of a canvas and a little paint, the extraordinary feat of making some dozen country gentlemen in England, every day for two months, grow purple in the face!’5
The answer was that, in Frances Spalding’s words, ‘art is a carrier of ideology.’6 Roger Fry succeeded as no one else had done in smoking out British philistinism from its lair. It was especially irritating to find this modern movement heralded by an acknowledged authority on the Old Masters. Fry used his exhibition of foreign artists, with their rearrangements of visual facts, their unconventional structures, their slapdash lack of finish, their provoking incorrectnesses and appalling liberties, to disturb ordinary comfortable ways of seeing things. Their strange relations of form suggested all sorts of exciting new possibilities. ‘Perhaps no one but a painter can understand it and perhaps no one but a painter of a certain age,’ wrote Vanessa Bell. ‘But it was as if one might say things one had always felt instead of trying to say things that other people told one to feel.’7
Reading the newspapers, led by ponderous jokes in The Times, Hugh Blaker predicted the reversal of attitudes to come. ‘Cultured London is composed of clowns who will, by the way, be thoroughly ashamed in twenty years time and pay large sums to possess these things. How insular we are still.’8
This extravaganza of journalism presenting the first draft of art history was to give critics a quick device with which to begin the story of twentieth-century art in Britain. But the two Post-Impressionist shows actually confused the art scene in London dramatically. That Sir William Richmond should find these exhibitions ‘unmanly’ was to be expected. What was unexpected was the reaction of Henry Tonks, who came to recognize in Roger Fry the counterpart of Hitler and Mussolini. Fry, to the irritation of Will Rothenstein and the amusement of Walter Sickert, became the leader of a band of young rebellious painters – before splintering from Wyndham Lewis and his regiment of Vorticists. The repercussions from these shows did not divide the sheep from the goats. As Eric Gill observed to Will Rothenstein: ‘The sheep and the goats are inextricably mixed up.’
In this mix-up Augustus John’s position was perhaps the most difficult of all to define. He had long been someone who said things he felt rather than what was expected of him. Indeed he was part of the change that was happening in human character. He was a pupil of Tonks, Fry’s enemy, yet provoked the same feelings of shame and outrage as Fry did in many Royal Academicians, including Sir William Richmond who called him ‘loathesome’. He admired Cézanne, was already influenced by Gauguin, but agreed with Sickert that Matisse was full of ‘the worst art school tricks’. There seemed to be two opposing views of John’s work during the first dozen years of the twentieth century. Surveying French trends from a British point of view in 1913, the art critic James Bone saw the new movement in English art as being ‘largely influenced by the Pre-Renaissance Italian masters, by archaic Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Assyrian art, and by the art of the Far East.
‘Mr Augustus John, its leader, already occupies a position for which there is no parallel in our history in that his art, which is supported by many of the most fastidious and erudite connoisseurs of the time, has for its content democratic and revolutionary ideals of the most uncompromising kind… [His art] has much in common with the French Post-Impressionists, although Mr John’s development seems to have no connexion with their experiments; but the plastic freedom of Puvis de Chavannes undoubtedly gave importance to both schools. It is noticeable that they have sought in the first place to simplify their technical method as well as their representations. They use tempera, and in their experiments with oil have often reduced their colours to a few tints prepared beforehand… they have stripped art of much that was comfortable and informing, of many graces and charms… and it is natural enough that in the eyes of the older generation the result should have a naked, disquieting look. Mr John’s masterpiece, The Girl on the Cliff, is like nothing else in English painting in the pure keenness of its imaginative invention. The master draughtsman of his time, he has been strong enough to yield up every appearance of skill and of grace, and to limn his idea with the fresh, short-cut directness of a child.
…His poetry is his own… The old men look cunning and tough, the children untamed and fierce, the women deep-breasted, large-bodied, steady-eyed, like mothers of a tribe… John rarely shows a figure at work… He makes you see that his strong men and women in poor clothes, standing with beauty under cold skies, have chosen their part… The distrust of comfort, of cities, of society in its present organisation, even of civilisation, and the desire for a simple life and the recovery of the virtues that lie in a more physical communion with the earth, are all questions of the time [that]… many are putting to the test of experiment.’9
Such was the ideology of John’s art. In 1909, when his pictures appeared along with those of Robert Bevan, J. D. Fergusson, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Kandinsky and Sickert at the second Allied Artists’ Association exhibition, he seemed a focus for all that was most modern in Britain. But Clive and Vanessa Bell who had earlier bought John’s big decoration ‘The Childhood of Pyramus’ were to sell it in 1913. ‘I wish we could get a Cézanne,’ Vanessa wrote to Clive. ‘It would be a great thing to have one in England.’10 Once she had praised John’s influence on Lamb (‘His drawings are much freer than they were and have lost their rather unpleasant hardness’);11 now Lamb’s work appeared to her deadly academic, and John himself somewhat sentimental. Clive Bell was to relegate John, along with Stanley Spencer, into nursery provincialism. Mature European art had ‘jumped the Slade and Pre- Raphaelite puddles’.
‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ divided critics into those who, like Laurence Binyon, felt that ‘none of these paintings could hold a candle to the Smiling Woman of Augustus John,’12 and the art critic of The Times who wrote that, compared to the revolutionary painting in Paris ‘the most extreme works of Mr John are as timid as the opinions of a Fabian Socialist compared with those of a bomb-throwing anarchist.’13
Like the Post-Impressionists, John was simplifying his forms and intensifying his colour. But Post-Impressionism had moved away from a reliance on subject-matter because, Fry explained to Vanessa Bell when he took her round the Grafton Gallery, ‘likeness to nature was irrelevant in art unless it contributed to the idea or emotion expressed.’14 Though John never used storytelling or moral emphasis, he relied on nature – on the non-dramatic theatre of nature – and the ideas and emotions arising from this staged subject-matter. The question was: had he failed to put his talent to the test of painterly experiment, or had he been able to achieve a good deal of what the Post-Impressionists achieved without breaking tradition? In short, was he a ‘Post-Impressionist without knowing it’?
The trouble was, as the art critic Frank Rutter explained, ‘nobody but Mr Roger Fry and Mr Clive Bell can tell us who is a post-impressionist and who not.’15 But Roger Fry and Clive Bell did not inevitably agree. ‘I have always been an enthusiastic admirer of Mr John’s work,’ wrote Fry in the Nation on 24 December 1910. ‘In criticising the very first exhibition which he held in London I said that he had undeniable genius, and I have never wavered in that belief, but I do recognise that Mr John, working to some extent in isolation, without all the fortunate elements of comradeship and rivalry that exist in Paris, has not yet pushed his mode of expression to the same logical completeness, has not yet attained the same perfect subordination of all the means of expression to the idea that some of these artists have. He may be more gifted, and he may, one believes and hopes, go much further than they have done; but I fail to see that his work in any way refutes the attainments of artists whom he himself openly admires.’16
Such isolation, which would eventually be perceived as a strength in Gwen John, was to be an increasingly unhappy and incomplete condition in Augustus, gradually removing him, a prominent but lonely figure, to the margins of the modern movement. What Virginia Woolf had called ‘the age of Augustus John’ was reaching its zenith, and over the next few years would rapidly fade away, leaving an unanswered question hanging in the air: was that legendary reputation of his early years a mirage or was the posthumous decline of that reputation ‘a quirk of our own time’?17
*
In these years before the Great War, as the republican revolution in art spread from these two Post-Impressionist exhibitions around Britain, Wilson Steer seemed like an old king about to enter retirement, while Sickert occupied the role of Regent, and Augustus John, in his early and middle thirties, was the heir apparent. Whatever he did was news, and whatever he did added not so much to his achievement as to his promise of future achievements. ‘Promise’ was a word that was invariably applied to his work; he was credited and debited with it; it hung like a label round his neck, and eventually like a stone. Ever since the Slade days, he had been dogged by an enviable and excessive facility. His admirers were encouraged to detect in his drawings and paintings signs of infinite potential. However good a particular work might be – his ‘William Nicholson’, ‘W. B. Yeats’, ‘Jane Harrison’, ‘The Smiling Woman’, his drawings of Ida and Alick, his dream picture of Dorelia standing before a fence – it added only to the weight of his future. ‘He seems always on the brink of tremendous happenings,’ wrote the art critic of the Pall Mall Gazette.18
For the last dozen years these happenings had been constantly in the public mind, associated with everything romantic, brilliant and scandalous. ‘He is the wonder of Chelsea,’ exclaimed George Moore in 1906, ‘the lightning draughtsman, the only man living for whom drawing presents no difficulty whatever.’ Two years later (10 June 1908) the painter Neville Lytton, describing him as ‘an anarchistic artist’, told Will Rothenstein: ‘I think John’s daring and talent is an excellent example for us and shows us in which direction it is expedient for us to throw our bonnets over the windmills.’ Some indication of the kind of fame he had achieved before 1910 is given by an exhibition of Max Beerbohm’s caricatures in May 1909 at the Leicester Galleries. One of these, as described by Max himself, showed Augustus ‘standing in one of his own “primitive” landscapes, with an awfully dull looking art-critic beside him gazing (the art-critic gazing) at two or three very ugly “primitive” John women in angular attitudes. The drawing is called “Insecurity”; and the art-critic is saying to himself “How odd it seems that thirty years hence I may be desperately in love with these ladies!”’19
Max’s ambiguous attitude to Augustus’s work reflected that of many contemporaries. At the Leicester Galleries his caricatures had been interspersed with pictures by Sickert and other artists – and ‘John has a big (oils) portrait of Nicholson,’ Max told Florence Beerbohm, ‘ – a very fine portrait, and quite the clou of the exhibition.’20 Four months previously Augustus and Max had dined with the Nicholsons and Max afterwards described Augustus as ‘looking more than picturesque… [he] sang an old French song, without accompaniment, very remarkable, and seemed like all the twelve disciples of Christ and especially like Judas!’ Admiration for his personality and for his painting were shot through with suspicion. ‘I’ve got a very fishy reputation,’ Augustus conceded. His appearance suggested some betrayal and his paintings caused bewilderment. ‘He [John] has a family group at the Grafton,’ Max wrote to Florence (April 1909), ‘ – a huge painting of a very weird family. I wish I could describe it, but I can’t. I think there is no doubt of his genius.’ Max considered ‘The Smiling Woman’ ‘really great’,21 but many of the paintings, especially of women, struck him as crude and ugly. At the same time he believed, like his art critic, that he would be ‘converted’ to them and that future generations would acknowledge their lasting value. The ‘promise’ which he attributed to Augustus was a symptom of an age that had not adjusted its focus and did not really know what to think.
To what extent this faith in Augustus’s work depended upon his glamorous personality is difficult to calculate. The artist Paul Nash, who did not know him and had ‘a deep respect for John’s draughtsmanship especially when it was applied with a paint brush’, observed that ‘technical power rather than vision predominated’.22 But critics were disconcerted by his love of bravura and theatricality, his impromptu effects so prolific and unpredictable, and the emphasis he placed as a portraitist on candour and informality. He was worshipped by the young, and, until the 1920s, would remain a cult figure among students. The futurist painter C. R. W. Nevinson, to whom Augustus was ‘a genius’, noted that ‘though I am always called a Modern, I have always tried to base myself on John’s example’.23 ‘I like success, occasionally,’ Augustus remarked. But he appeared to have achieved too easy a success – at the age of twenty-two, he was sharing a long notice with Giorgione. By the time he was thirty, critics had begun sprinkling their commendations with caveats. In 1907, in an article entitled ‘Rubens, Delacroix and Mr John’, Laurence Binyon wrote:
‘Mr John has shown such signal gifts, and has such magnetic power over his contemporaries, that he might to-day be the acclaimed leader of a strong new movement in English painting; only he seems to have little idea as to whither he is himself moving… he will never know the fullness of his own capacities till he puts them to a greater test than he has done yet, till he concentrates with single purpose instead of dissipating his mind in easy response to casual inspirations of the moment… ’24
Few questioned that here was a great draughtsman – but his work was felt to be too ‘unconventional’. It was not ‘normal’ to search for distortion as he persistently did. What was this ‘affectation’ that made him deliberately misplace ‘the left eye in the “Girl’s Head”?’ asked the Magazine of Fine Arts; ‘…it is difficult to follow the aim of the artist’.25 The critic of The Times (3 December 1907) expressed, in a genial way, what many senior art critics thought about John’s work: ‘The artist, as is well known, is a favourite among the admirers of very advanced and modern methods; and, if he were a dramatist, his plays would be produced by the Stage Society. That is to say he is very strong, very capable, and very much interested in the realities of life, the ugly as well as the beautiful.’
Another critic, heralding what was to come, announced: ‘One must go to Paris to see anything approaching the nightmares that Mr John is on occasion capable of.’26
By 1910 the Americans were discovering Augustus. His flamboyant portrait of William Nicholson was seen to be one of the strongest paintings at the International Exhibition held by the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh in 1910. When Quinn sent him a batch of notices from Philadelphia for Dorelia’s ‘scrapbook’, Augustus replied (4 January 1910) that ‘she don’t keep one – when she does read my notices, it’s with a smile.’ She had begun, he added, to complain that they were no longer rude enough, and therefore not fun. ‘I’ve never kept any of my press notices yet,’ he told Quinn (23 May 1910), ‘ – doubt if I could find storing room for them, but I have a habit of sending some of them to my father, who likes it; reserving the scornful and abusive ones for my own delectation till I light my pipe or otherwise utilize them… The only ones who count are the inspired critic-clairvoyant and fearless – and the conscientious and equally fearless Philistine – and praise and blame from either are equally welcome and stimulating.’
By 1910 Augustus John dominated the New English Art Club to an extent where his failure to send in work to their exhibitions itself became headline news. Though still assailed by critics for his wilful distortion – an opinion that seems extraordinary today – he was generally considered the most avant-garde artist in the country.
‘There are two artistic camps in England just now,’ W. B. Yeats advised Quinn in 1909, ‘the Ricketts and Shannon camp which carries on the tradition of Watts and the romantic painters, and the camp of Augustus John which is always shouting its defiance at the other. I sometimes feel I am divided between them as Coleridge was between Christianity and the philosophers when he said “My intellect is with Spinoza but my whole heart with Paul and the Apostles”.’
Quinn’s intellect too, supported by his purse, was with Augustus. At the famous Armory Show in 1913, the equivalent in the United States of the two Post-Impressionist shows in Britain, there were fourteen drawings, three works in tempera, and twenty oil paintings (including fifteen Provençal studies) by John. The American critic James Huneker declared that the three biggest talents among living European artists were Matisse, Epstein and Augustus John.
‘It was not until 1911–12 that the gap widened considerably between the conservative New English and the committed progressives,’ wrote the art historian Richard Shone.27 Many critics who up to the autumn of 1910 had supported progressive art now found themselves agreeing with Wilfrid Blunt that the Post-Impressionist daubs at the Grafton Gallery were like ‘indecencies scrawled upon the walls of a privy’. In retrospect it may appear that, in the last weeks of that year, the enlightened élite of Britain were reduced to half a dozen Bloomsbury intellectuals drawn up about the frail defiant figure of Roger Fry, while Augustus John fell away as a Little Englander. But it was not exactly so. Augustus’s fifty Provençal studies at the Chenil Gallery seemed to many people more eccentric than those of ‘the Frenchmen at the Grafton’. Reviewing his show, which he summed up as being ‘a mystery’, The Times critic asked (5 December 1910): ‘What does it all mean? Is there really a widespread demand for these queer, clever, forcible, but ugly and uncanny notes of form and dashes of colour?… For our part we see neither nature nor art in many of these strangely-formed heads, these long and too rapidly tapering necks, and these blobs of heavy paint that sometimes do duty for eyes.’
These controversial pictures included primitive portrait-busts of his children which recall Tuscan work of the late fifteenth century; small rapid sketches in oil which suddenly made the British palette brilliant with blues and greens and crushed strawberry pinks before Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman began similar experiments with the Camden Town Group; glowing figures in landscapes that tell no story but simply show them bathing in or walking by the Étang de Berre, sitting in the sun or on the shaded steps of the Villa Ste-Anne. They were drawn on the wood in pencil and sometimes redefined over a thin skin of pigment, which produced a jewelled and painterly effect in the relation of the figures to their background of trees and sky, sand and water.
In notice after notice, critics linked these exquisite panels to the concurrent show of Post-Impressionists at the Grafton, and their tone is almost as hostile. ‘At his worst he can outdo Gauguin,’ wrote a critic in the Queen (10 December 1910), ‘…uncouth and grotesque… It is unfortunate that Mr John should go on filling public exhibitions with these inchoate studies, instead of manfully bracing to produce some complete piece of work.’ Two years later, when the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition coincided with the showing of Augustus’s vast schematic decoration, ‘Mumpers’ at the NEAC, it was the latter which was seen by many critics to be the significant masterpiece in British painting. The Sunday Times and the Daily Chronicle both compared it to ‘The Dance’ by Matisse; the Spectator described it as a ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’ ‘more startling than Manet’; the Manchester Guardian stated it had won ‘a new freedom for the artist’; the Daily Mail called it ‘one of the greatest decorative works of our age’; the Observer declared it to be ‘the first mature masterpiece of Post-Impressionism’; and The Times, in a leader, announced that it marked ‘a turning-point in English painting’.28
Public opinion in these two years was turning towards Post-Impressionism, but not in its placing of Augustus’s work as more ‘advanced’ and, in some cases, more incomprehensible than that of the Post-Impressionists. For many he was the last word in modernity. ‘After Picasso,’ wrote one critic, ‘Mr John.’29
It was to be the war, galvanizing avant-garde art among British artists, that finally detached John’s work from the modernist movement. The younger artists had formed up behind him, but he had had nowhere to lead them and they clocked in instead at Fry’s Omega Workshops. Contemporary art critics, such as D. S. MacColl, had celebrated his bravura feats of draughtsmanship for the liberating effects they brought from Whistlerian ‘daintiness’ and their power to recapture the tradition of Rubens. Then art critics towards the end of the twentieth century, such as Simon Watney in his English Post-Impressionism (1980), reacted against this assessment and identified John as the victim of ‘a highly exclusive connoisseur-orientated approach to art education’,30 which between 1910 and 1912 showed younger artists into what doldrums such acclaimed graphic dexterity led. But these critical assessments were confined to John’s drawing and by default undervalued his early panels in oil as simply ‘brilliant historicism’. Critics were in part influenced by two facts and a misinterpretation of those facts. The first of these was Augustus’s description of ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ as ‘a bloody show’; the second was his refusal in 1912 to send in any pictures to the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which included work by Epstein, Gilman, Gore and Nevinson.
The very time when he had begun to fulfil his much-trumpeted promise was the year that contemporary critics renewed their hostility to him and art historians have removed him from the forefront of British art. But in 1910, working independently in France and taking his inspiration from Italy, he had launched a private revolution of his own.
‘Since the advent of Post-Impressionism Mr John has been almost forgotten… Many of his erstwhile champions have been so eager to uphold the fantastic banner of Matisse and Picasso’s Falstaffian regiment that they have neglected the old leader who led them into unknown paths of danger… “Where is he? What is he doing?” At last he himself has answered in decisive fashion.’
Morning Post (23 November 1912)
‘Is it that the atmosphere of England is oppressive?’ Augustus asked Quinn (25 May 1910). ‘Stendhal said a man lost 50% of his genius on setting foot on that island.’ Almost fifty per cent of Augustus’s post-Slade work had been done in France. He had met Picasso, seen the work of Cézanne in Provence and of Matisse in Paris. He had even read the novels of Dostoevsky before they had been put into English. Yet in two respects the Slade had held him back. He had been trained in a climate so regulated that it admitted only two schools of rival art; the academic art taught by Tonks and Brown based on classical and Renaissance models; and the academizing process carried on by the Royal Academy ‘by which’, Harold Rosenberg has written, ‘all styles are in time tamed and made to perform in the circus of public taste.’31 Augustus had learnt his lessons well and it had taken him time to ‘see’ a non-academic form of art that matched his talent.
Despite the time he had spent there, Augustus remained something of a foreigner in Paris. But in Provence he had come home. There was something of Wales here, he felt, something to which he responded instinctively. The country was rooted in a past to which he belonged and with which he could connect the work of Puvis de Chavannes and the great Italian masters he had been studying. He suddenly saw himself as being part of a tradition in painting, as being able to add to that tradition; and this feeling of belonging steadied him. Everything fell into place; what he had seen, where he worked, who he was.
‘I am certain I have profited greatly by my visit to Italy,’ he told Quinn on reaching Martigues (3 March 1910).
‘My imagination and sense of reality seems to me just twice as strong as it was before – and no exaggeration… I tell you frankly and sincerely, I feel nobody dead or alive is so near the guts of things as I am at present… What is surprising, together with this infallible realism my sense of beauty seems to: has, grown simultaneously. All this remains to be proved of course. I give myself till the end of the year to prove it up to the hilt. And this comes, it seems to me, from being suddenly alone for some months, and seeing – and rubbing against (without committing myself too far) new people and also seeing certain pictures which crystallize the overwhelming and triumphant energy of dead men – like Signorelli for instance.’
There had been plenty of happenings to interrupt this stern programme, and the mood of confidence and resolution that supported it: drunken days with gypsies; irrelevant sorties with his bird-like neighbour and the air-machines; that distressing ambush of hospitality prepared for him by Frank Harris; Dorelia’s illness and family complications. Yet this season there was more optimism, more resolve to say the word ‘no’. He admits to ‘floundering’ at times, but returns stubbornly to his work and makes genuine progress. ‘I wish to God I was born with more method in my madness – but it’s coming,’ he tells Arthur Symons. And, he confides to Quinn, ‘I’m beginning to take a really miser’s interest in my own value.’ One of his problems is that, in periods of enthusiasm, he is inclined to turn away from his past to pursue anything new. ‘I think little of my etchings so far,’ he informed Quinn (28 May 1910), who had bought almost all of them, ‘ – but I’m keen to do a set of dry-points soon.’ Temptation came to him in the form of an invitation to South Africa, where he was asked to found a school, decorate Parliament and paint ten portraits of South African celebrities for one thousand pounds (equivalent to £47,000 in 1996). These offers he turned down.
He was helped in his resolution by a book that Quinn had sent him early in May: James Huneker’s Promenades of an Impressionist. He had been prepared to dislike it. At first sight there appeared too many Parisian anecdotes, too many picturesque phrases, and eulogies of bad artists such as Fortuny and Sorolla. But it was characteristic of his new seriousness this year to get beyond first sight. He persevered with the book and found it useful. ‘He [Huneker] reminded me of many a thing I used to know but had, to my shame, forgotten,’ he explained to Quinn (25 May 1910).
‘His fresh and unfailing enthusiasm for a crowd of merits lesser minds think mutually destructive, is splendid… it is the gesture of a generous and hearty man – who seems to overflow with intellectual energy and does not husband it like poorer men… This book gives me the courage and humility of my boyhood. It is strong crude air after the finicking intellectuality of London which drives a sensitive spirit into subterranean caverns where thoughts grow pale like mushrooms. I have been assailed with manifold doubts and have taken refuge in dreams when I should have sharpened my pencil and returned to the charge. An artist has no business to think except brush in hand.’
‘I am keen on a good show in the autumn,’ Augustus had told Quinn (19 May 1910). The show which opened at the Chenil in December contained thirty-five drawings and etchings in the upper rooms, and downstairs fifty small ‘Provençal Studies’ in oils. It was the drawings upstairs that tempered the hostility of critics with a tone of regretful wonder; but it was the oils that represented his new achievement. Sometimes he saw these panels as preliminary studies for a set of complete fresco works on a magnificent scale, for he had been fired by Roger Fry’s call in the Burlington Magazine the previous year for him to be given a great wall in some public building and a great theme to illustrate it. ‘In Watts we sacrificed to our incurable individualism, our national incapacity of co-operating for ideal ends, a great monumental designer,’ Fry had written. ‘A generous fate has given us another chance in Mr John, and I suppose we shall waste him likewise. What would not the Germans do for a man of his genius if they ever had the chance to produce him?’32 Such stirring words rang sweetly in John’s ears; but they took no account of his lack of consistency, the fact that he painted best when in the grip of some intense but fleeting mood – the intensity arising from its very transitoriness. Fry, in many ways the greatest and most influential critic of his age, had little sense of individual talent in relation to particular theories. John was an unlikely person to co-operate, publicly and for any length of time, for civic ends. But Fry’s commendation had a heroic tone that went on echoing in Augustus’s imagination. Besides, it came on top of the big ambitions of Will Rothenstein and the immeasurable hopes of Hugh Lane on his behalf, as well as Charles Conder’s view that large decorations were John’s forte. In 1939, when opening an exhibition of photographs of contemporary British wall paintings at the Tate Gallery, he remarked: ‘When one thinks of painting on great expanses of wall, painting of other kinds seems hardly worth doing.’ Shortly afterwards, in a restaurant, he asked: ‘I suppose they’d charge a lot to let Matt Smith and me paint decorations on these walls.’33 Later still Joyce Cary was to use this frustrated longing to be a painter on a monumental scale in the creation of Gulley Jimson, the ebullient artist of his novel The Horse’s Mouth (1944).
The oil sketches at the Chenil Gallery revealed, for the first time, a gift for colour. The pale hills of Provence with their olives and pines and their elusive skies, the summer light across the Étang mysteriously moving with sun and shade, seemed to have brought Augustus into a more vivid contact with nature. These figures or groups of figures reflect life as in a ballet – the girl on the sea’s edge poised like some dancer, her hand on the barre of the horizon. The colour is clear and untroubled, brushed on with hasty decision – there is no niggling detail: they are austere, these panels, and often shamelessly unfinished. ‘The technique appears to be, at its simplest, to make a pencil drawing on a small board covered with colourless transparent priming,’ commented David Piper; ‘then the outlines are washed in with a generous brush loaded with pure and brilliant oil colour – and there’s a happy illogicality about it, for the lines of the drawing… are those of any John drawing, subtly lapping and rounding the volume they conjure up, but they are obliterated by the oils, and the result for effect relies on the inscape of vivid colour, on contrasting colour, and the broad flattened simplified pattern.’34
Never in his work had the tension between dream and reality, the ideal and the actual, been presented so lyrically by means so simple; never had the content been raised so free of a mere imitation of nature. John has no message for us. A painter, he told John Freeman, ‘leaves his emotion behind so that people can share it’. The emotion in these pictures comes from the choreography and reflected light, from a sense of volume and outline. His method seemed far removed from the ordinary language of British art, and critics argued that he was using a curious shorthand. The most appreciative was the poet and dramatist Laurence Binyon, who had recently been appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. ‘Somehow everything lives,’ he wrote after seeing this Chenil Gallery exhibition.
‘Even the paint, rudely dashed on the canvas, seems to be rebelling into beauties of its own. Mr John tries to disguise his science and his skill, but it leaks out, it is there… I do not know how it is, but these small studies, some of them at least, make an extraordinary impression and haunt one’s memory. A tall woman leaning on a staff; a little boy in scarlet on a cliff-edge against blue sea; a woman carrying bundles of lavender: the description of these says nothing, but they themselves seem creatures of the infancy of the world, aboriginals of the earth, with an animal dignity and strangeness, swift of gesture, beautifully poised. That is the secret of Mr John’s power. He is limited, obsessed by a few types… his ideas are few… But in it there is a jet of elemental energy, something powerful and unaccountable, like life itself.’35
In the course of this review Binyon compared these Provençal Studies to the brilliant colour and simplified form of Gauguin. Other critics compared this new work to that of Matisse,36 Van Gogh37 and Jules Flandrin,38 all of whom were then exhibiting at the Grafton Gallery. The coincidence points to a parallel development in the minds of John and Roger Fry. In the month that John first saw the wall paintings of Luca Signorelli, Fry was writing of Signorelli as ‘one of the family of the great audacious masters’.39 The names of both Fry and John had, in the past, been primarily associated with those of the Old Masters. What they believed they had discovered was the modernity of certain Old Masters, such as Masaccio and Signorelli. Their enthusiasm for modern French painters sprang from their new understanding of the Italian Primitives.
John thought of Fry as a powerful writer, a disappointing artist and a man of credulous disposition who had nevertheless discovered ‘wonderful things’. It was, as Quentin Bell wrote, ‘remarkable’ for a man of Fry’s temperament and training to have realized that ‘Cézanne and his followers were not simply innovators but represented also a return to the great tradition of the past, for such a conviction, which does not seem wonderful to-day, required an extraordinary effort of the mind in the year 1910’. It was perhaps even more remarkable that Augustus John should independently have guessed at a similar connection at the same time.40
‘I seem to find I can paint better in France – and I meet a few people after my own heart.’
Augustus John to John Sampson (September 1919)
‘It is good for him [Augustus] to be over here and meet such different people… I don’t want to see any English pictures again except those by 2 or 3 artists.’
Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt (February 1918)
‘A bloody show!’ John’s words, reverberating down the decades, have been hailed as the first cry of the future Royal Academician.
He did say them – to Eric Gill who reported them by letter to Will Rothenstein. They represented his first reaction, not so much to the pictures themselves but to the chatter and outcry that rose from the first Post-Impressionist exhibition. From this time on he was to become increasingly touchy about publicity. It seems certain, from the date Gill must have written to Rothenstein, that Augustus had denounced the exhibition before going to see it. Certainly his first sight of it was distorted by all he had heard and read which, like a film, seemed to come between him and what he saw. He did not visit the Grafton until the show had been running a month. ‘There is a show of “Post-Impressionists” now on here,’ he noted in a letter to Quinn (December 1910), ‘and my post-impression of it is by no means favourable.’ That was all. Perhaps he was fearful of Quinn transferring his agency fees to Fry. However, in the last week of the exhibition, when the noise had died down, he went again. His opinion of the pictures is set out in a long letter to Quinn (11 January 1911).
‘I went to the “Post-Impressionists” again yesterday and was more powerfully impressed by them than I was at my first visit. There have been a good many additions made to the show in the meanwhile – and important ones. Several new paintings and drawings by Van Gogh served to convince me that this man was a great artist. My first view of his works disappointed and disagreed with me. I do not think however that one need expect to be at once charmed and captured by a personality so remarkable as his. Indeed “charm” is the last thing to talk about in regard to Van Gogh. The drawings I saw of his were splendid and there is a stunning portrait of himself. Gauguin too has been reinforced and I admired enormously two Maori women in a landscape. As for Matisse, I regard him with the utmost suspicion. He is what the French call a fumiste – a charlatan, but an ingenious one. He has a portrait here of a “woman with green eyes” which to me is devoid of every genuine quality – vulgar and spurious work. While in Paris the other day I saw a show of paintings by Picasso which struck me as wonderfully fine – full of secret beauty of sentiment – I have admired his work for long… I forgot to mention Cézanne – he was a splendid fellow, one of the greatest – he too has work at the Grafton.’
It would take another ten years for him to come round to Matisse. Meanwhile he helped Quinn to buy a Gauguin ceiling (July 1913), and recommended (3 December 1912) work by Manet and Degas. He also wrote about the work of Maurice Denis and others (17 May 1912):
‘I think Denis has a certain talent… I think him an intelligent, ingenious, and sincere man who makes the most of his gifts within the contemporary field. He is not, in my opinion, great by any means. Picasso now has genius, albeit perhaps of a morbid sort…
I wish we had gone to see Anquetin while in Paris. A man of immense gifts. Bye-the-bye if you come across a painting by Daumier, freeze on to it! One of the great Frenchmen. El Greco too is now coming into his own. A terrible, mysterious Spaniard – or rather Greek.’
He was interested by his British contemporaries too, writing copiously about their work to Quinn so that, in this way, he could help them without reprisals of gratitude. Such methods appealed alike to his generosity and secretiveness, and accurately reflected his attitudes from 1910 into the 1920s. For himself he bought work by, among others, Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts and Christopher Wood. But about Ricketts and Shannon, artists who seemed to have more in common with himself (such as a reverence for Puvis de Chavannes), he was lukewarm: ‘I have never succeeded in feeling or showing any great interest in his [Shannon’s] work tho’ I have remarked that personally he shows himself a man, one would say, of character,’ he wrote to Quinn on 25 August 1910. ‘He has a reserve which contrasts with the funny effervescence of Ricketts – who is the cleverer chap; but as for him, he has lost his innocence, he is corrupt… A man of his intellectual parts should keep himself straighter – at the risk of being stupid even.’41
Quinn relied on Augustus for information about contemporary British art. The first artist he recommended was Gwen who, like himself, was absorbing aspects of Post-Impressionism into her work, flattening the contours, emphasizing surface pattern. He was concerned, not about her artistic reputation, which was secure in his eyes, but her economic survival and her morale. ‘I am touched by your gentle solicitude,’ she told him in 1910. ‘I think it would be wise to shake off this funeste fatigue.’42
In her dealings with Quinn, Gwen is in many respects the reverse of her brother. From Quinn’s point of view, it was like looking towards their pictures through opposite ends of a telescope: his so awfully near, hers infinitely distant. Yet he was not a man to give up. He began in 1909 by offering her thirty pounds (equivalent to £1,400 in 1996) for any picture she cared to send him, and when that failed he paid her in advance and arranged for her to have an annual stipend. He badgered and bullied her until she felt breathless. After eight years of financial support he possessed only four of her paintings; after more than twelve years he owned six paintings and a few drawings. She was an extraordinary challenge to him, but he persevered, and eventually succeeded in buying almost every picture she sold. She thought him acquisitive and domineering, and ‘he bores me’. Yet his patience, financial generosity, genuine interest and enduring encouragement stimulated her and during a period of six months in the last year of his life she sent him half a dozen paintings and five drawings. Meanwhile, watching their negotiations anxiously from the sidelines, Augustus continued counselling Gwen to retain Quinn’s goodwill, while triumphantly forfeiting it himself.
He recommended work by John Currie,43 Epstein and Jacob Kramer, the early paintings of Mark Gertler and the later carvings of Eric Gill, as well as pictures by Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore,44 Derwent Lees, C. R. W. Nevinson, Wilson Steer and Walter Greaves.45 Often he would write enthusiastically about painters working in styles very different from his own. Alvaro (‘Chile’) Guevara he described as ‘the most gifted and promising of them all’ (16 February 1916), but he was also impressed by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who, he wrote (3 April 1915), ‘is a man of talent. His things look as if they have been sat on before they got quite hard. Some of them look like bits of stalactite roughly resembling human forms. But they are wittily conceived.’ Most of all he wrote about David Bomberg. ‘You ought to get more Bombergs,’ he advised Quinn46 (26 January 1914), ‘he is full of talent.’ Following the lead of Marinetti, the initiator of Futurism – ‘a common type of the meridional; naif, earnest, and ignorant. But we are very friendly’ – Bomberg’s painting took a course that was ultimately unsympathetic to Augustus. But, with reservations, he continued to praise him (in company with ‘another Futurist called Giacomo Balla who is good’) – singling out his famous ‘Mud-Bath’.
There is no mention of Bomberg in Chiaroscuro or in Finishing Touches, the two autobiographical volumes Augustus wrote late in his life; and almost none of the other artists upon whose behalf he had secretly exercised himself. He took to writing only in his early sixties at the end of the 1930s, and, by the time his fragments of autobiography were put together as books in the 1950s and early 1960s, he was distrustful of his own spasms of generosity, and no longer interested in the unfamiliar. Of Picasso, for example, he wrote: ‘Such ceaseless industry, leading to a torrent of articles de nouveauté, may seem to some, capricious and rootless, but it undoubtedly deserves its reward in the greatest snob-following of our time’ – a sentence that was rewarded by Picasso’s classification of Augustus as: ‘The best bad painter in Britain’.
It can therefore be misleading to reconstruct the young man from what was written by the disaffected older man. As a guide to his artistic taste, there exist eight long articles47 he wrote for Vogue in 1928 on modern French and English painters. These articles demonstrate how catholic and near-contemporary his taste remained until his fifties – though he had grown resentful of the power of fashion in art, for which he blamed the dealers. The value of the French tradition, which depended upon ‘the unceasing enthusiasm of French painters towards a personal expression’, was beyond fashion. Those French painters he pointed to as having created a climate favouring innovation were Manet, Monet (‘in the entrancing waterlilies of his later years’), Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro – ‘these are the pioneers who led painting from the halting deliberation of David to the courageous or even risky contact with the open air. Monet, Renoir, Degas not tentatively, but with conscious authority, released that long-confined expression of instant response to the aspect of the visible world.’ The battle of the Impressionists had long ago been fought and won, but he deplored the labelling of Post-Impressionism applied to the later Van Gogh, Gauguin and Émile Bernard because ‘their work and their own individuality was much more significant than, and much more distinct from, the work of the Impressionists themselves.’ After Gauguin and Van Gogh, the next painters in the grand line of French art were rather less to his liking. The atmosphere had become too cultured. He praises, with reservations, the work of that ‘lazy giant’ Derain, but deprecates his pedantry; while the developments since 1912 in the styles of Picasso and Matisse seem to have reversed his attitude to them. Picasso, whose Blue and Rose periods he had loved, appeared to be growing metaphorically false. ‘Matisse remains the best, the most sensitive, of French painters, for Matisse having abandoned his early essays in imbecility, has by dint of assiduity and method achieved the foremost place in his generation as an exquisite paysagist and painter of genre.’
He also picks out ‘three old gentlemen’, Bonnard, Jean-Louis Forain and Georges Rouault, as being above competition – ‘individual and isolated examples of the glory of French painting’. And among the younger ones he chooses Marc Chagall for ‘his admirable handling of paint’, Othon Friesz and, above all, André Segonzac, who ‘conceived the landscape in its fundamental unity and basic rhythm… setting free its deep burden of emotion in low and thrilling chords of colour’.
His criticism of British painters is more complicated since it sews together paragraphs of interrupted friendship with passages of tentative appreciation – the two someti mes embroidered with double entendre:
‘With Mr Henry Lamb we have another type of mind, more self-conscious but less free [than Matthew Smith’s]. He seeks, with an almost mathematical ingenuity, to invent new harmonies of colour in combination with a most searching analysis of character. This passionately serious painter, for whom any intellectual concession is an impossibility, remains still insufficiently recognised. For so many amateurs, an easy and comforting facility is more attractive than Mr Lamb’s intransigence and the almost moral integrity of his art.’
The theme which emerges from this art criticism is a belief in individual accomplishment independent of art trends. Augustus comforted himself with the notion that posterity amends the injustices of contemporary neglect and that no effort of creative merit could fail to be recognized in the course of time: but he did not really believe it. There was no sign, for instance, that the work of Paul Maitland or W. E. Osborn would be revived. Yet there was a certain luxury in protesting against the inevitable.
His protest lay against Paris: not as a symbol and repository of the great French tradition of painting by which he himself had profited, but as a forcing house of the international picture bourse. Paris had become the world’s greatest stock-exchange for art, the Mecca of the amateur, the student, and above all the dealer. A great machinery for the encouragement of the young was centred there and people arrived from all over the world in search of revelation. That a great tradition had made Paris famous was taken to imply that it was Paris which had made the tradition. Yet many painters had had a bitter struggle to establish themselves in the city of which, after their deaths, they were the pride. Constantin Guys had been, in Baudelaire’s words, ‘le peintre inconnu’; Honoré Daumier a political suspect and journalist-illustrator to the end of his life. The Post-Impressionists found it no easier. Biographies of Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh all told a similar story of derision, lack of understanding. Henri Rousseau ‘le Douanier’ and Modigliani, whom in great poverty Augustus visited a few years before his death, were two recent victims of incomprehension on the part of ‘the great art city of the world’. By the late 1920s their pictures all fetched enormous prices, and Paris, on their posthumous behalf, did herself great honour. The huge combination of studio and dealer’s shop that had been constructed there was an empty shell: the goddess of art had paused – and now moved on.
There is a danger of the individual and national voice being lost in an international lingua franca.’ This became the basis of Augustus’s complaint against Roger Fry and his Omega Workshops which, full of bright ‘rhombuses, rhomboids, lozenges, diamonds, triangles and parallelograms’,48 had been set up shortly before the Great War to give young artists the chance to earn money from many sorts of commissions – for murals, painted furniture, rugs and carpets, mosaics, pottery or stained glass. Augustus came to believe that the gifts of the Bloomsbury painters were misappropriated by Fry (though he did not see that this might also be partly true with regard to himself). Duncan Grant, for instance, had ‘an innate sense of decoration [and]… exhibits a natural lyricism in his work which appears to owe less to definite calculation than to irrepressible instinct for rhythmical self-expression’. But his talent was misdirected by Fry’s critical ideology, so that his versatile temperament absorbed ‘with an ease nearly related to genius the most disconcerting manifestations of the modern spirit’.
A better course, Augustus believed, was exemplified by an artist whose work had something in common with Duncan Grant’s, Matthew Smith. He too was influenced by the modern spirit, but had taken from it only what was useful:
‘French influences are inevitably to be noted in his work, but the fulness of form which characterises so many of his figures has a distinct relationship with Indian and Persian drawings. With a cataract of emotional sensibility he casts upon the canvas a pageant of grandiose and voluptuous form and sumptuous colour, which are none the less controlled by an ordered design and a thoroughly learned command of technique. This makes him one of the most brilliant figures in modern English painting. Aloof and deliberately detached from the appeals of ordinary life, he sits apart and converts what to other men are the ever-partial triumphs of passion into permanent monuments of profound sensory emotion. In flowers, fruit and women he finds the necessary material for his self-expression, and from them he has evolved a kind of formula which represents his artist’s inner-consciousness. And he has never risked the danger which threatens those who make bargains with society by attempting the almost impossible task of combining fine painting with satisfactory portraiture.’
Of all living British painters Matthew Smith was the one whose abilities Augustus most admired. The nature of his admiration, as revealed here, was partly a stick with which to beat himself. The source of Augustus’s own inspiration was South Wales, but he felt he was denied access there by the presence of his father. He had found in Provence, and very soon would find in North Wales too, landscapes that through a mysterious process of self-identification and self-abandonment liberated his imagination. He had found also an artist, another Welshman, with whom he now entered a brief period of mutual apprenticeship, radiant, and unique in his career.
‘When shall I come to Wales again?’
Augustus John to John Sampson (undated, c. May 1910)
‘Since I left it I find myself to be very much of a Welshman and would like to be back.’
J. D. Innes to Augustus John (4 August 1913)
During 1910, the first of Augustus’s Slade contemporaries, William Orpen, quietly joined the Royal Academy. This appeared the dull side of Virginia Woolf’s brilliant Post-Impressionist symbol. With extraordinary precision art history was repeating itself and the enfants terribles of a decade ago were starting on their journey to become respectable Old Men. Their rebel headquarters, the New English Art Club, was now twenty-four years old. French-built to withstand the assaults of British Academicism, it now stood, a British fortress against the advance of French Post-Impressionism. What was needed, apparently, was a newer Salon des Refusés to oppose the old Salon des Refusés, whose tyrannical rule was felt by younger artists far more acutely than the remote indifference of Burlington House.
The first expression of this need had been Frank Rutter’s Allied Artists’ Association, a self-supporting concern modelled on the Parisian Société des Artistes Indépendants. All artists, by paying an annual subscription, could exhibit what works they pleased without submitting them to a censorious jury. Founded in 1908, in July of which year it held its first mammoth show at the Albert Hall, it soon gave birth to the ‘Camden Town Group’ and the ‘London Group’, which in 1914 was to swallow them both. Augustus was a founder member of the Allied Artists’ Association, though he seldom exhibited. ‘John never does exhibit anywhere unless you go and fetch his pictures yourself,’ Rutter explained. ‘…He joined because, like the good fellow he is, he thoroughly approved of the principles of the A.A.A., and knew it would help others though he had no need of it himself.’49
The ideals of the Allied Artists’ Association were soon immersed in combative art politics. On Saturday nights its members – usually Augustus, Robert Bevan, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore, Lucien Pissarro, Rutter himself and Sickert – would meet at a little hotel in Golden Square, then go on afterwards to the Café Royal. And almost always the talk would turn, and return, to the question of whether they should capture the New English Art Club or secede and set up a rival society. Augustus was what Rutter called ‘consistently loyal’ to the NEAC. In several respects his position was closest to the Protean figure of Sickert. Both were opposed to ‘capturing’ the New English, and Augustus believed furthermore that any other group they might found must be truly independent rather than a rival. Only in that way could it faithfully represent their ideal of exhibiting freely, and plot a course of tolerance and diversity between the various rocks of art fashion. The result of these talks was the formation in 1911 of the Camden Town Group, dominated by Gilman, Ginner, Bevan and Gore, and watched over by the benevolent eye of Sickert. Though unconnected with Camden Town, Augustus was admitted to this group, which marked an important defection from the New English Art Club whose original aims it nevertheless almost exactly reproduced. He exhibited only once with them, though he liked to look in on their weekly meetings at 21 Fitzroy Street, and surreptitiously buy pictures both for himself and for Quinn.
Then, in 1912, two things happened: he turned down Clive Bell’s invitation to show work at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition; and, leaving the Camden Town Group, he ‘flew back to the New English’. When, in 1914, the London Group emerged as the spearhead of modernity, Augustus’s name was, for the first time, not among Britain’s avant-garde.50
It is easy to draw from these two acts a false conclusion. Augustus was prolific; he had a wealthy American patron, and the use of a London gallery where he could show his pictures. With his large family, he needed more money than many other artists, but his work was now fetching good prices – the small oil panels at the Chenil had sold for forty pounds (equivalent to £1,800 in 1996) each and some of them were soon changing hands for seventy and eighty pounds. He was deeply uninterested in art politics. What he wanted was as many alternatives as were practicable – all sorts of exhibitions where, irrespective of style, artists could display and sell their paintings. But the Camden Town Group – named, in deference to Sickert, after the working-class area which provided subject matter for many of its members’ pictures – though it contained better painters, seemed narrower than the New English. Besides, John’s vibrant landscapes were quite out of place in a Camden show. The decision to show nothing at its two exhibitions in 1910 had not been one of art policy: no one could ‘go and fetch his pictures’ while he was abroad that year. The year had ended with his one-man show at the Chenil for which he reserved all his recent work; but in 1911 he was again exhibiting with the NEAC. Nevertheless he had not quarrelled with the Camden Town painters, whose work he continued recommending to Quinn.
Yet behind his decision to withhold work from the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition there lay Augustus’s involuntary involvement in a sudden clash between Roger Fry and Will Rothenstein. The enmity which flared up between these two didactic painter-politicians seems partly to have arisen from Rothenstein’s attitude to the new power Fry was exercising on behalf of the younger contemporary artists. Fry had been given temporary control of the Grafton Gallery which, he innocently told Rothenstein, ‘seemed to me a real acquisition of power’. He planned to stage there a large exhibition by living British artists and, very late in the day, invited Rothenstein to submit – adding by way of inducement: ‘John has promised to send.’51 This invitation, however, was not only delayed but also restricted to Rothenstein’s recent Indian work, which Will knew in his heart was far from being his best. Worse still, he himself had been pondering upon a similar plan; but while he pondered Fry had gone ahead with his own arrangements without benefit of Rothenstein’s collaboration. Many years later (27 July 1920) Fry admitted to Virginia Woolf that ‘I used to be jealous of Prof. Rothenstein, who came along about four years after me and at once got a great reputation, but’, he added triumphantly, ‘I wouldn’t change places with him now.’52 From all sorts of people Rothenstein was picking up rumours of Fry’s schemes. He felt offended. ‘I have heard no details of your Grafton schemes at all and was waiting to hear what it is you propose,’ he pointed out to Fry (30 March 1911). ‘…You have been too busy to tell me of a thing which is of some importance.’ Fry, however, seems to have been anxious to establish his Grafton Group to a point where Rothenstein, once admitted, could not alter it. ‘Do let us, however, get rid of misunderstandings,’ Rothenstein pleaded, under the threat of being left out altogether (4 April 1911): ‘we are both of us working for the same thing and it seems absurd that there should be anything of the kind… But I don’t think you realise how ignorant I am of your intentions and of your powers.’
It was this fact of their ‘working for the same thing’ that divided them. Rothenstein felt that if Bloomsbury was sponsoring the Grafton Group, he would be at a disadvantage. He therefore sought to discover a point of principle with which to misunderstand Fry’s intentions. Since Steer and Tonks had already refused to let their pictures be shown in company with those of younger artists, there seemed a good chance that Fry’s scheme could be halted. The particular point of principle that Rothenstein turned up concerned the selection of the show, which apparently was to be made by Fry alone. In place of such dictatorship, Rothenstein suggested an ‘advisory committee of artists’, and recommended the sort of people – Augustus, Epstein, Eric Gill, Ambrose McEvoy – who might sit on it. These were all artists, friendly to Rothenstein, whose work Fry wanted to include. By refusing this suggestion Fry ran the risk of alienating them. In his reply to Rothenstein (13 April 1911) he insisted that it was ‘inevitable that I should appeal to various artists to trust me with large powers since I have the actual control and responsibility on behalf of the Grafton Galleries. Now you know me well enough to know that I am not unlikely to listen to advice from you and that I should give every consideration to any suggestions which you or John or McEvoy might make and I should be delighted if you would co-operate; at the same time I could hardly go to the other groups of younger artists, who are quite willing to trust me personally, and say to them that their work must come before such a committee as you suggest for judgement; nor can I possibly get rid of my responsibilities to the Grafton Galleries.’
But Rothenstein resented being made, as it were, a mere minister without portfolio in Fry’s new government: he wanted a cabinet post – preferably that occupied by Clive Bell. Was it not he, Will Rothenstein, who had first established lines of communication between France and England while Fry was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? Although, in the past, Fry had written generously in praise of his work, Rothenstein refused to trust his judgement.53 Didn’t everyone know how naïve he was, how credulous? But Fry was at a loss to account for Rothenstein’s non-cooperation. ‘I gather you are very much annoyed with me,’ he wrote to him (13 September 1911), ‘but I simply can’t disentangle the reason. No doubt it is all quite clear in your mind, but I haven’t a clue.’
Although Rothenstein was out of things after he left for the United States in October 1911, his tactics affected Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which eventually included only a small British group among French and Russian sections. If McEvoy seems to have been a pawn in the complicated chess game that had developed between these two painter-impresarios, Augustus had been a knight who found himself being moved strongly about the board forwards and sideways on behalf of Rothenstein’s team. Great efforts were made to capture him. As late as the summer of 1912, Fry was writing to Clive Bell: ‘I’m delighted that John wants to show.’ But in the event he did not do so. His letter of refusal was sent not to Fry but to Clive Bell:
‘Dear Bell,
I received your very enigmatic letter. I am sorry I cannot promise anything for the “Second Post-Impressionists”. For one reason I am away from town, and for another I should hesitate to submit any work to so ambiguous a tribunal. No doubt my decision will be a relief – to everybody.
Yrs truly, Augustus John.’54
It was a relief, primarily, to Augustus himself. ‘I am conscious that the various confabulators find the question of my inclusion embarrassing,’ he had confided to Wyndham Lewis, ‘and I would wish to liberate their consciences in the matter if I could find adequately delicate means of doing so.’ Once he was clear of the whole bloody show he felt marvellously disencumbered. He had owed some loyalty to Will Rothenstein, though he might feel closer to Fry and some of the Camden and London Group painters. He was not, however, close to Clive Bell, who was to launch upon his later work a strong attack,55 valuing it as ‘almost worthless’. It was one of those pieces of Bell’s journalism that, Fry complained,56 ‘have done me more harm than all the others’.
The consequences of an artist’s absence from the Second Post-Impressionist show were ‘swift and severe’. He was simply ‘not a Post-Impressionist according to the definition which Bell put forward in his selection of English artists’, S. K. Tillyard wrote in The Impact of Modernism.
‘When, for instance, Augustus John was left out of the show, his work was no longer described as being connected with Post-Impressionism. But such painting was obviously not Academic… The absence from the 1912 show of John and some members of the Camden Town group increasingly left critics and public without any acceptably “modern” language of description to apply to their work and in particular to their subject matter. Hence John, and, as time went on, Sickert too, became increasingly difficult to evaluate and categorise. As the Post-Impressionist version of the past became gradually accepted, the two artists also became hard to place within any “development” of English painting, and impossible to “rehabilitate” without a re-evaluation of the past.’57
John had no modern group, society or workshop from which to conduct such an exercise in re-evaluation. His two pictures, ‘Lynn Cynlog’ and ‘Nant-ddu’, listed as numbers 1 and 2 in the first Camden Town Exhibition of 1911, were Welsh landscapes which illustrated his distance from this metropolitan group. For John, the right place was far away from the metropolitan art world, in North Wales or southern France, not alone, but with J. D. Innes.
*
James Dickson Innes was nine years older than Augustus. ‘Born and bred in Wales,’ Augustus wrote, ‘to which country he felt himself bound by every tie of sentiment and predilection’,58 he had nevertheless practised eating black ants at school in order to establish his French ancestry.59 By the autumn of 1907, when he first met Augustus, Innes was living in Fitzroy Street. ‘A Quaker hat, coloured silk scarf and long black overcoat set off features of a slightly cadaverous cast with glittering black eyes, wide sardonic mouth, prominent nose, and a large bony forehead invaded by streaks of thin black hair. He carried a Malacca cane with a gold top and spoke with a heavy English accent which now and then betrayed an agreeable Welsh sub-stratum.’60
It was during his first visit to France with John Fothergill in April and May 1908 that Innes’s painting life really began. They travelled to Caudebec, Bozouls and (‘because it looked so good on the map’, Fothergill explained) to Collioure, where Derain and Matisse had worked two or three years before. The impact of southern light upon Innes increased his awareness of colour and intensified his involvement with Nature in a manner similar to Augustus in Provence. Having fallen ill, apparently with spots arising from his failure, over a long period, to wash, he returned alone via Dieppe and was found to be suffering from tuberculosis. Such a diagnosis meant probable death. Almost the only treatment was rest. Innes was not the person to accept such passive medical advice. The TB had attacked his teeth so that he could not chew properly: but he could drink, and sometimes did so heavily. There was one other pleasure the disease did not quench (as a romantic adventure with a young Algerian carpet weaver was to demonstrate): tuberculosis was said to stimulate sexuality.
Early in 1909 Innes had visited Paris with Matthew Smith, but does not seem to have been particularly interested in the French painters who (some of them posthumously) were about to invade England. Once again illness curtailed his visit and he was sent to convalesce at St Ives. But in the spring of 1910 he was back in Paris and it was here, at a café in the boulevard du Montparnasse, that he met and fell in love with Euphemia Lamb. Together they made their way back to Collioure, Euphemia dancing in cafés to help pay their way.
As with so many British artists, this year was crucial for Innes. He had looked for guidance to John Fothergill. But Fothergill himself was in need of guidance. A romantic-looking young man, lithe and elegant ‘like a young fawn’, with almond-shaped eyes and a light curling beard, he had been admired by Oscar Wilde and by the surrealist lesbian painter Romaine Brooks. Caught in the cross-currents of his sexual ambiguities, he then came under the protection of E. P. Warren and his brotherhood of aesthetes. Early in 1910 Fothergill and Innes ended their friendship. It seems that Fothergill’s relationship with Innes was to some degree homosexual. There was a self-destructive aspect to Fothergill – an artist, gallery proprietor and classical archaeologist – who took up innkeeping. Such a masochistic vein Innes, with his violent Swiftian imagery, had been well fitted to exploit.
‘[Derwent] Lees tells me strange things about Innes,’ Fothergill complained to Albert Rutherston, ‘ – in short – [Euphemia] Lamb off – (sounds like 11 o’clock p.m. at a nasty eating house) and also his allowance from mother – gone to Paris, his savings gone also. Knocked a bobby on the head and arrested. He was also wounded in the head in a back street in Chelsea along with John in a fight. What stupidities some people allow themselves to indulge in because they call themselves artists.’
And the company he kept! Drunkards, practical jokers, loose women, known eccentrics. No wonder his mother had cancelled his allowance – Fothergill knew just how she must be feeling. One day when Innes, Horace de Vere Cole and Augustus were in a taxi they ‘bethought themselves of the rite of “blood brotherhood”… Innes drove a knife right through his left hand. One of the others [Augustus] stabbed himself in the leg and was laid up for some time afterwards. Cole made a prudent incision, sufficient to satisfy the needs of the case. The driver was indignant when he saw the state of his cab and its occupants, but the rite had been performed and no lasting damage was done.’61
Both Innes and Augustus, as John Rothenstein observed,62 were obsessed ‘by a highly personal conception of the ideal landscape which also haunted the imaginings of Puvis de Chavannes’; both, in the brilliant Mediterranean light, were working rapidly in high-key colours, and rediscovering what they felt they had first known in their sunlit days as children in Wales. Both were looking for what Augustus, writing about Innes, called ‘the reflection of some miraculous promised land’.63
It was in the autumn of 1910 that Innes and Augustus began seeing a lot of each other. Augustus’s exhibition at the Chenil in December 1910 was followed by a one-man show of Innes’s watercolours, and Augustus immediately wrote to Quinn advising him to buy some of them.
‘He’s a really gifted chap and shows a rare imagination in his landscapes. It is true he has not done much yet, being quite young, but if he can keep it up there can be no doubt about his future. London doesn’t do for him and he’s off to Wales and later to the south.’64
It was a relief to leave London and paint their way over the moorland and mountains from Bala to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where there were no theories of what should be painted or why. Innes visited London for exhibitions and would sometimes stay on, obeying what he called the ‘stern call of dissipation’. These were innocent romps. ‘Innes has just been given the option of 40/- or a month [in jail] for pulling Bells in the King’s Rd,’ Augustus wrote to Sampson after one episode. Innes was by now a bearded figure, still with his wide black Quaker hat, but permanently covered with paint, permanently ill and permanently out of doors, preferring to live rough and sleep under the stars. One night, wandering upon the moors of North Wales, he had come upon the lonely inn of Rhyd-y-fen and been cared for by its landlord, Washington Davies. Waking up next morning Innes had seen the mountain of Arenig against the sky and fallen in love. ‘Mynedd Arenig remained ever his sacred mountain and the slopes of the Migneint his spiritual home.’65 Upon the summit of this mountain, under the cairn, he was to bury a silver casket containing his letters from Euphemia.66 For him she was Arenig. This was the magnetic point to which, like the needle of a compass, he always returned.
Compelled, like a lover, to broadcast his feelings, Innes confided to Augustus about Arenig, and the two of them made a plan to meet at Rhyd-y-fen that March. ‘Our meeting was cordial,’ Augustus remembered, ‘but yet I felt on his part a little reserve, as if he felt the scruples of a lover on introducing a friend to the object of his passion.’67 Behind the inn, to the south, rose the flanks of Arenig Fawr, and beyond the little lake of Tryweryn they could see in the distance the peaks of Moelwyn. ‘This is the most wonderful place I’ve seen,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia (March 1911). ‘…The air is superb and the mountains wonderful… We are now off for a week to see a waterfall that falls 400 feet without a break.’ They decided to look for a cottage and found one some three miles from Rhyd-y-fen on the slopes of the Migneint by a brook called Nant-ddu. They furnished it sparsely and moved in when Augustus returned during May. ‘I think Innes was never happier than when painting in this district,’ Augustus wrote.68
‘But this happiness was not without a morbid side for his passionate devotion to the landscape was also a way of escape from his consciousness of the malady which then was casting its shadow across his days… This it was that hastened his steps across the moor and lent his brush a greater swiftness and decision as he set down in a single sitting view after jewelled view of the delectable mountains he loved before darkness came to hide everything… ’
‘Before working with John,’ wrote the art critic Eric Rowan, ‘Innes had been painting in water-colour… After John’s arrival in North Wales, Innes began to copy his technique of making quick sketches in oil paint on prepared wooden panels.’69 Though rapidly done, these panels had often entailed long expeditions over the moors looking for that moment of illumination which would suddenly burst through the procession of clouds. He worked like a man condemned. The effect of this upon Augustus was extraordinary. Never before had he met someone whose swiftness exceeded his own. What he had once done at the Slade for others, Innes, acting as a pacemaker, could now do for him.
But there was another way in which Innes helped. ‘He was an original, a “naif”,’ Augustus wrote70 – and in a letter to Quinn (15 June 1911) he describes him as an ‘entirely original chap and that’s saying a lot. He is not the sort who learns anything. He will die innocent and a virgin intellectually which I think a very charming and rare thing.’ Augustus did not imitate Innes or seek to learn from him any very painterly secrets. It was Innes’s example that inspired him. He had felt recently that his own innocence, the quality which W. B. Yeats had found so remarkable, was in jeopardy. Innes helped him to repossess it – so much is evident from his letter to Quinn in which, passing from Innes to himself, he adds: ‘I am on my way I think to get back (or forward) to a purely delightful way of decorating which shall in no way compete with the camera or the coal-hole. But one has a lot to unlearn before the instinct or the soul or what you call it can shine out uninstructed.’
It was ironic that their chief disciple should have been a copycat of genius, the Australian painter Derwent Lees. ‘I tire of seeing my own subjects so many times,’ Innes wrote of Lees’s pictures. Besides Inneses, Lees could paint McEvoys and Johns71 fluently. He had come from Melbourne, after a duty stop in Paris, to London, and now taught drawing at the Slade. A fair-complexioned man, rather thin yet somehow giving an impression of plumpness, he was remarkable, in the days when artificial limbs were still unusual, for a fine and exciting false right foot, complete with wooden toes in which, amid much giggling, a Slade girl once got her finger caught.
The pictures which these three painted before the war mark a short phase in British art which, though it has been labelled ‘Post-Impressionist’, belongs more properly to the tradition of the symbolist painters.
But the war was to signal the end of their landscape painting.
‘There is no doubt that he pines for comrades & is sick of his chance pub acquaintances… but [I] much doubt whether he has not become inaccessible.’
Henry Lamb
‘It was cruel to leave Provence,’ Augustus had complained to Ottoline on his arrival back in England in September 1910. Only a month before he had started to feel homesick – but for what home? London really suited neither Dorelia, nor himself, nor the children who, especially Ida’s David, fell far too readily under the sway of Mrs Nettleship. ‘Dorelia (my missus) is very keen on a house in the country,’ Augustus reminded Quinn (December 1910), ‘and we shall have to look out for one soon. She tends to get poor in London.’
He had recommenced work on Hugh Lane’s decorations – no longer in Lane’s house but at the Chenil Gallery. ‘I think you will find Chenil’s quite a good place now,’ he reported with some optimism to Will Rothenstein, ‘and Knewstub is improving.’ Determined to get Lane’s pictures done by the spring ‘or perish’, he several times gave up ‘touching a drop of liquor’ and felt ‘exceedingly good’.
Having the Chenil as his office brought some alleviation to their Church Street problems, but it fell far short of solving them. The old difficulties crowded in. ‘Do you want a ring?’ Augustus suddenly invited Dorelia: but answer there came none. He had moved up his squadron of caravans to Battersea ‘so that we may turn into the van any hour’. As soon as spring came they might begin trekking over England: the possibilities were endless.
Some days over these next twelve months, Augustus would leave for the Chenil in the morning – a distance of five hundred yards – and not return that night at all. Next day Dorelia would receive a note from Essex, Berkshire or Brittany: ‘the country is so beautiful – you wouldn’t believe it – I suddenly quitted London.’ In October he went to France; in November he took off to see Eric Gill at Ditchling, discussing there the question of a New Religion and a co-operative scheme for taking a house from which their work could be sold independently of the dealers. In December he hurried back to Charlie McEvoy’s ‘pig-stye’ at Wantage: ‘Mrs McEvoy frequently wishes you were here,’ he wrote to Dorelia – adding hastily: ‘So do I.’
A family Christmas at Church Street being obviously unsupportable, he once more set off for the Chenil and arrived this time in Paris. ‘I have been so embêté lately and have taken refuge in Paris and have neglected all my pleasures,’ he explained to Ottoline (27 December 1910). ‘…I found London quite deadly and think of going south again till England becomes more habitable. I hear Lamb has been doing your portrait72 – le salaud!’ He dined with Royall Tyler off stuffed pigs’ trotters; saw Epstein and Nevinson, and squared up to Boris Anrep;73 searched in vain for Gwen; attempted to teach Euphemia to ride a bicycle; was chased by a Swedish tiger-woman from whom he escaped through a smoke screen of Horace Cole’s practical jokes (including, apparently, a mock operation for appendicitis); and with devastating innocence concluded: ‘Paris is certainly preferable to Chelsea. I think I’d like to live here.’74
For most of this time he stayed at 40 rue Pascal with Fabian de Castro, the Spanish guitarist who, having outwitted his gaolers in Madrid, was now writing his autobiography. ‘He has wandered all over Europe,’ Augustus warned Quinn, ‘and even across the Caucasus on foot and speaking only Spanish – and has done everything except kill a man.’
He was thinking of passing on to Marseilles with a Miss George, possibly Teresa George who had called on him to say that Edwin, his father, was seeking her hand in marriage. ‘He and I had something in common after all, then,’ Augustus concluded. At any rate, he asked in a letter to Dorelia, she ‘might be useful, posing?’ But instead of Marseilles, he arrived in London leading, like small deer behind him, a troupe of his cronies up to the front door of Church Street. What with the cook’s two children to reinforce Augustus’s six, and the intermittent appearances of Helen Maitland and Edie McNeill to reinforce those of Fabian de Castro and Miss George, the place was crowded as for war. One packed night during the first week of January 1911, fire broke out in the house, and Augustus, wakened by screams, ‘leapt out of the room half-crazy and found our servant on top of the stairs burning like a torch. I happened to have been sleeping in a dressing-gown by some happy chance and managed to extinguish the poor girl with this. But it was a terrible moment… fortunately her face, which is a good face, was untouched. She was burnt about the arms, legs and stomach… She had come up the stairs from the dining-room, blazing – the smell nearly made me faint afterwards. It was the hottest embrace I’ve ever had of a woman.’75 They summoned a ‘smart little doctor’ to do the repairs to the girl and to Augustus himself, whose left hand and leg and areas nearby had got toasted without, he was anxious to demonstrate, putting him ‘out of action in the slightest degree’.76 He was, however, ordered to stay in bed. ‘This will mean keeping quiet for a few days,’ he told Quinn (5 January 1911), ‘after which I want to take one of my vans on the road for a week or so and then get back to work with full steam up.’
For Dorelia it was not these conflagrations so much as the convalescences that were arduous; not the explosive rows but the periods of ‘keeping quiet’. She, who could enjoy-and-endure so much of the heroic, found herself strangely vulnerable to the trivial. A small thing it was that finally cracked her: the matter of spitting. Fabian de Castro was a splendid guitarist, but he would spit in the bath, and this infuriated Dorelia. She lay awake thinking about it, and finally she put up a notice: PLEASE DO NOT SPIT IN THE BATHROOM. Then, when he took no notice of it, she left.
She left for Paris, and she left with Henry Lamb. It was a casual business. ‘Dorelia is in Paris for a few days and I in London,’ Augustus remarked in the course of a letter to his old Slade friend Michel Salaman dealing with the more pressing matter of ponies. But it was not casual for Lamb. ‘I stayed more than a week,’ he wrote to Lytton Strachey (1 February 1911): ‘seeing for the first time the city in all its glamour of history, art and romance. But I should explain Dorelia was there and that I came back with her in a motor car belonging to an American millionairess [Mrs Chadbourne]. Now I am completely rejuvenated and working with tenfold industry’ Intermittently Dorelia would have this effect on him, but his love for her in the shadow of Augustus caused him much pain and perhaps accounted for the wounds he inflicted on those, like Lytton Strachey, who fell in love with him. On the evening of their return, after they had parted, Lamb wrote to Ottoline:
‘I arrived about 6 this evening having travelled since very early on Sunday with Dorelia, Pyramus and Mrs Chad, in her motor. The excitements of Paris came in an unusually trebled dose, and the final shaking of the journey have reduced me too low… I have lived too giddily these last days to give them the thought they must have. It is an odd and desolate sensation to spend the evening alone. I must turn into bed immediately in the hope of a braver morning moral.’
By the time Dorelia arrived back in Church Street, ‘full steam’ was up. Augustus and his friends had journeyed into Essex for a gypsy evening during which Euphemia executed a fantastic belly dance, writing her name and address on the shirt fronts of those she favoured as she whirled past them. Then, on their return, Horace Cole charged his motor car into a cartload of miscellaneous people injuring many, one severely. Innes, too, had ‘been doing la Bombe lately by all appearances’, Augustus advised Dorelia; and McEvoy, in her absence, had sprouted ‘a moustache like an old blacking brush’. Now there was the Gauguin Ball in London; and after that Lady Gregory had invited him back to Coole. But first, he decided (10 February 1911), ‘I want to go south again and work in the open.’ This was his way of announcing he was going west to meet Innes. But after returning from some intense days round the lakes and mountains of old Merionethshire, he found Dorelia had gone off with Lamb again. ‘Dorelia did come the last day at Peppard,’ Lamb wrote to Strachey (11 May 1911); ‘we walked through divine woods and lunched in an exquisite pub with the politest of yokels and I… got of course quite drunk. Then I had another evening with her all alone at Bedford Square. It was more than the expected comble [climax].’
Lamb’s original fantasy of ‘a discreet form of colony’ which he had illustrated in his letter to Ottoline with an amoeba-like drawing of Johns, Maitlands, Morrells and himself, was almost being translated into fact. Like a rock-pool by the sea, the colony was sometimes teeming, sometimes vacant. Innes and Euphemia and Epstein (whose ‘weak point’, Augustus disapprovingly noted, was ‘sex’); Alick Schepeler and Wyndham Lewis – all these and countless others would float in and be carried out from time to time, causing a little ripple. But for Lamb there was no one so important as Dorelia. He writes about her in a tone – rueful, tender, oblique – he reserves for no one else. He saw and heard too little of her; but he felt hopelessly in her debt.
When Augustus returned to North Wales in May he took Dorelia with him. But she did not like the bare unruly place and came back alone. ‘We are getting restless about moving,’ Augustus had confided to Quinn (10 February 1911). Dorelia was certainly restless. Cut off from the country she seemed to lose strength. There was no sun in London, no air, no time, no involvement with real things. She had to get away.
They had written to a number of friends asking them to look out for a house in the country. Investigations had not begun well. Pursuing a house in the west with Charlie Slade, Augustus tripped, fell, damaged his leg and returned home an invalid. ‘Please get me a house, John,’ he had desperately wired to his friends the Everetts. In reply he received a list of questions with intervening spaces, which he loyally filled in and sent back. Shortly afterwards, Katherine Everett came upon Alderney Manor, a strange fortified bungalow, larger than most houses, which had been built by an eccentric Frenchman. It was set in sixty acres of woodland near the Ringwood road outside Parkstone in Dorset, included a walled garden, cottage and stables – all for a rent of fifty pounds a year (equivalent to £2,290 in 1996). The owner, Lady Wimborne, a keen Liberal and evangelical leader, insisted in conversation with Katherine Everett that ‘we should be pleased to have a clever artist for a tenant.’77 Dorelia was ready to take the house sight unseen, but Augustus, in the guise of a practical man, cautioned her: ‘The house is no doubt lovely in itself, but it must be seen – so much depends on the placing of it.’ They therefore went down to spend a few days with the Everetts, who lived some three miles from Alderney.
‘I can still visualize the group coming up our pine-shaded, sun-dappled drive,’ Katherine Everett wrote. ‘Mrs John, who was leading a grey donkey with a small boy astride it dressed in brilliant blue and another equally vivid small boy at her side, wore a tight-fitting, hand-sewn, canary-coloured bodice above a dark, gathered, flowing skirt, and her hair very black and gleaming, emphasized the long silver earrings which were her only adornment.’78
‘It’s a good find,’ Augustus informed Quinn, ‘any amount of land with pine woods goes to it, and inexpensive.’79 Some repairs and alterations were needed and, while these were being arranged, the Johns camped in the Everetts’ grounds, amusing themselves by decorating the small empty gardener’s cottage where they ate, painting the walls black and the furniture scarlet.
‘One afternoon,’ Katherine Everett remembered, ‘the children decided to get the red and black paint off their persons, so they all undressed and, with turpentine soap and scrubbing brushes, set to work to clean themselves up. It was while they were so occupied that Lady Wimborne paid her first call.’80
For a moment Alderney seemed to tremble in the balance, but Lady Wimborne, her liberal principles fully extended, sailed past this test and all was settled. Over these summer months, Dorelia spent her time preparing for their move. ‘D. has gone to live for ever near Poole,’ Lamb wrote in despair to Lytton Strachey. But already, in the second week of July, he had joined her there for what he called ‘a supreme time’. In a letter to Strachey (24 July 1911) he described what was to become for him a second home.
‘She [Dorelia] lives in an amazing place – a vast secluded park of prairies, pine woods, birch woods, dells and moors with a house, cottages and a circular walled-garden. And, pensez, all these you could have possessed for £50 a year – we could have possessed them!! It was very hot when I was there and lovely naked boys running about the woods. John was away. In the course of some almost endless conversations with D. I thought her as superior as ever, but in danger of becoming overgrown in such isolation.’
On leaving Alderney, Lamb crossed over to France, a sudden enterprise inciting him to carry off with him Dorelia’s sister, poor picturesque Ede’ – a substitution he instantly regretted.
‘Funny things continue to happen,’ Augustus told Ottoline (14 July 1911). While Lamb was lingering at Alderney, Augustus had been in Liverpool finishing his portrait of Kuno Meyer – a good portrait though painted in an ‘awful cellar’ at the Sandon Studios Society. He liked to keep up his Liverpool associations. ‘I am really attached to Liverpool,’ he told his friend, the architect Charles Reilly with whom he was lodging, ‘and I would rather paint a Liverpool portrait than another.’ Reilly was roused from sleep one night by Augustus climbing through his bedroom window; next day the playwright Harley Granville Barker was surprised at finding himself cross-examined over dinner on the subject of ‘a horse and trap’; then Innes was infuriated on being joined at Nant-ddu by the painter Albert Lipczinski and his beautiful wife Doonie, sent expressly from Liverpool – ‘they are incredibly poor’, Augustus explained; the Sampsons and Dowdalls were of course visited, and Susan their maid. And all Liverpool was praised and blamed: ‘The Mersey is a grand thing. The ordinary Li-pool population is awful – hopeless barbarians.’81
Though nothing appeared to have altered, the acquisition of Alderney marked the beginning of a new pattern in the lives of Augustus and Dorelia. They moved in during August, though he kept on his studio at the Chenil Gallery. ‘We have left Church Street for this place which does well for the kids,’ he announced to Quinn (16 August 1911). ‘…My studio here is still unfinished and this has lost me a lot of work. My missus is well and gay but I very much fear she is in for something rather unnecessary.’
Augustus could not help responding optimistically to everything that was new. But to Henry Lamb the future seemed black: ‘One of the chief temptations,’ he confessed, ‘[is] to succumb to the general pressure of the news that Dorelia is enceinte again, which means she may die at any minute.’82