There’ll be a good time everywhere.’
And there was. Everyone wanted to be young again, and to forget not only the war but the ideals that had been contaminated by it. Enjoyment was to be the new currency – enjoyment spent as an unprecedented freedom to act, to experiment, to travel. The Continent became transformed from a battlefield into a playground. It was as if youth had suddenly been invented and pleasure become compulsory. There was no one who had been unaffected by those four years of terrible fighting: the whole country was scorched. Now it set about applying a balm.
To no category of people did this freedom seem to apply more directly than the New Woman. During the war her capabilities had been astonishingly displayed in the police, the munitions factories, and on the land. In the twenties she changed into a boy. No longer did she take up her hair and let down her hems to signify at sixteen that she was an adult: her hems went farther up and her hair was cut, redefining the frontiers of gender and adulthood.
People began exploring new entertainments – nightclubs, cocktails, cinemas, open-air breakfast parties and the thé dansant. ‘I have a thé dansant to-morrow,’ John announced from Mallord Street, ‘ – about 3,000 people are coming.’ Parties grew more informal and gyrated to more syncopated rhythms, jazz on the gramophone and exotic dances – the shimmy, the Charleston, the black bottom, the foxtrot. The handsome woman in the hansom cab was overtaken by a fast woman in a fast car. Glamour had come to London. There was a whirl of glass beads and pearls, sparkling paste, rouge, plucked eyebrows, brilliantined hair, sticky scarlet lips, surprised faces. Coloured underclothes broke out in shades of ice-cream: peach, pistachio, coffee. Young men sported plus-fours, big bow ties, motoring caps, gauntlets, co-respondent shoes. John himself sprouted a dazzling waistcoat and suits of decisive check tweed.
There was an epidemic of health. ‘Vapours’ were no longer admired, neurasthenia went out of date. Young wives drilled themselves in natural-childbirth exercises, practised art and craftwork for charity. At weekends everyone seemed to stay with everyone else in draughty country houses, playing bridge and tennis. Nature was again important: a million women cycled out beyond the suburbs.
The twenties was not a cynical but a sentimental decade. Under the high kicks lay a deep disillusionment, beneath the quickstep slow disintegration. Social divisions were being creakingly readjusted. The social centre of gravity in Britain was on the move.
To the Old Guard, those dinosaurs from Victorian and Edwardian England, Augustus John was still ‘disgusting John’, a rascal in sinister hirsute league with those other dangerous spirits – D. H. Lawrence, Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey – all of them plotting to do away with what was decent in the country. But to the Bright Young Things, John was a ready-made hero, one of the pioneers of the new freedom. This postwar mood seemed sympathetic to him. He appeared to recover himself and gain a second wind. He travelled greater distances, drank greater quantities, made more money, did more portraits. He painted popular people: film actors, airmen, matinée idols, beauties and beauticians, Greek bankers, infantas, Wimbledon champions, novelists, musicians. The Emperor of Japan called one morning and was polished off in an hour. The new cosmetics made a false barrier between the painter and his subject, but John knew about barriers. His most glittering portraits – of the smouldering Marchesa Casati posed before Vesuvius, and of Kit Dunn seen as the arch flapper, and Poppet as a provocative sex-kitten – are extraordinarily vivid.
The spirit of the age was a fair-weather friend to John. The sun shone, the breeze blew, he sped along: it did not matter where. He was invited everywhere, though the weather of his moods made the journey tempestuous. Wherever he went, his gift for boredom dramatically asserted itself. ‘What a damnable mistake it is to go and stay with anybody,’ he cried out in one letter to Dorelia. Many of the London hostesses were too sophisticated for his appetite. He was sometimes abominably rude to them, but his apologies were full of charm, and all was forgiven this half-tamed society artist.
He had become one of the most popular men in the country. In Soho restaurants ‘Entrecôte a la John’ was eaten; in theatres any actor impersonating an artist was indistinguishable from him; in several novels he was instantly recognizable as ‘the painter’.1 He began to use a secretary. ‘Is there room for Kathleen Hale?’2 he asked Dorelia somewhat desperately. There was, and he started to employ this twenty-two-year-old girl (later to become celebrated herself as the creator of the marmalade cat Orlando) primarily, he explained, gesturing his hand across his stomach as though guarding against onslaught, to provide a barrier between him and the hostesses, journalists and probationary models who solicited him.
‘He offered me £2 a week, a spare bedroom in his Chelsea house, and meals,’ Kathleen Hale remembered. When she took up her duties, she found piles of unanswered letters (often commissions for portraits), unpaid bills and beautiful drawings lying all over the table, chairs, piano, floor, mostly stained by teacups, marked by wine and whisky glasses, dusted with cigarette ash. ‘We had lots of silly fun, but getting him to start work was always a tussle of wills,’ she wrote. ‘The minute he had finished his morning painting session, his only idea was to join his friends at a local pub… There were moments of leisure when he taught me how to play chess… and how to play shove-ha’penny… jabbing at those highly polished ha’pennies, skidding them across the slippery wood.’
After a few days Dorelia came up to inspect John’s new secretary. Seeing them teasing each other, ‘she looked piercingly at me as if she doubted our relationship. A moment later the suspicion had changed.’ But it was some time before Dorelia trusted her; though Kathleen Hale was captivated by Dorelia who ‘was to have more influence on me than anyone I had ever met’.
Though John was then at the height of his fame, he seemed unspoilt. To his new secretary he appeared tired, his moustache tobacco-stained, beard grizzled. ‘But the man had panache, and his character was magnetic,’ she wrote. ‘He was a bit of a dandy, only wearing… the best silk shirts, and wonderful wide-brimmed hats… He was broad-shouldered, and muscular, and moved surprisingly lightly on his small feet… He had a feminine ability to draw people out.’ Nevertheless he always seemed on ‘a knife-edge of sensibility’, she saw, ‘poised to take things the wrong way and snap off a few heads. I never heard him shout; rather he would rumble, puff, or growl.’
But the overriding impression John made on her was of a paralysed giant. ‘I always felt that there was more to Augustus than he could ever express, and, though he appeared uninhibited, he seemed to me to be always trying to break through tremendous frustration – as if there was a volcano inside him that might erupt at any moment,’ she wrote. ‘…To his little daughter Vivien, Augustus was “the King of Men”; but I thought him a king in captivity, hounded by two black dogs: one his shyness, the other his despair.’3
He seemed best able to escape these two black dogs in the blurred tobacco smoke of his Mallord Street parties. They would begin at five and last till five, and they appeared to have what the painter Christopher Wood called ‘a remarkable feature… there was not one ugly girl, all wonderfully beautiful and young’. Though they regularly ended ‘in the most dreadful orgy I have ever seen’, Christopher Wood concluded: ‘One always enjoys oneself so much at his house, he is such a thorough gentleman.’4
More coveted still was an invitation to Alderney. ‘He has lots of ponies, dogs and all kinds of animals which roam quite wild all round the house,’ Christopher Wood explained to his mother (n October 1926).
‘…We arrived to find old John sitting at his long dining table with all his children and family followers. We took our places quite naturally at the table where there was a perfect banquet with all kinds of different drinks, which everyone – even the children going down to ten years of age and even seven, and all the cats and dogs partook of. Afterwards we took off our coats and waistcoats and had a proper country dance. John has a little daughter of fifteen, like a Venus, whom he thinks a lot of… [He] is the most delightful person.’
Dancing and motoring were the obsessions of the twenties. ‘We often had afternoon jazz sessions,’ Vivien wrote, ‘dancing the Charleston, Black Bottom, or anything new.’5 Dorelia never danced, though she was often near by, watching and smiling. John could not be prevented from taking the floor. ‘The tango can’t be resisted,’ he admitted. More irresistible still were motor cars. He had first been infected with this virus in 1911 when, throwing Mrs Strindberg off the scent, he was chauffeured through France with Quinn. ‘It can’t be denied there’s something gorgeous in motoring by night 100 kilometres an hour,’ he told Ottoline Morrell.6 Two or three years later he had had a whack at steering Gogarty’s canary-coloured Rolls-Royce through the west of Ireland, and concluded that he ‘must get a Ford’. But it was not until 1920 that he acquired, in exchange for a picture, a powerful two-seater Buick with yellow wheels and a dicky. After enduring half an hour’s lesson in London, he filled it with friends and set off for Alderney. Apart from barging into a barrel organ and, so far as the passengers could judge, derailing a train, the car enjoyed an immaculate journey down – and this despite the fact that John’s lesson had not touched upon the philosophy of gear-changing, so that it had been in first gear from start to finish. ‘The arrival at Alderney was rightly considered a great triumph,’ Romilly John recalled.
All his sons insisted on being taught immediately – in fact they taught one another. It was then Dorelia’s turn. By evening the house was full of brand-new drivers. ‘After that we always seemed to be whizzing… up to London,’ Romilly remembered. ‘In those days the roads were still fairly empty, and motoring was still a sport. We nearly always came up with another fast car, also on its way to town, and then we would race it for a hundred miles. No matter who was driving, we made it a point of honour never to be outdone, and we very seldom were. When our car and its rival had passed and repassed each other several times, emotion would work up to a white-heat, and every minor victory was the signal of a wild hilariousness.’7
Though the family inherited his talent, the John style of motoring was seen in its purest form whenever Augustus took the wheel. In fine country, on a good day, he was apt to forget he was driving at all, allowing the car to pelt on ahead while he stared back over his shoulder to admire some receding view. Indeed the car often performed better like this than when he bent upon it his fullest attention. Then, roaring like a wounded elephant, it would mount hedges, charge with intrepid bursts towards corners, or simply explode. Once, when hurtling towards a fork in the road, John demanded which direction to take, and, his passenger hesitating a moment, they bisected the angle, accelerating straight into a ploughed field until brought to a halt by the waves of earth. Another time, he ‘awoke to find himself driving through the iron gate of a churchyard’.8 Because of feats like these, the car soon began to present a dilapidated appearance, like an old animal in a circus: the brakes almost ceased to operate, and the mechanism could only be worked by two people simultaneously, the second taking off the handbrake at the precise moment when the first, manipulating the knobs, pedals and levers as if performing on an organ, caused the engine to engage with the wheels. But though he occasionally admitted it to be suffering from a form of indigestion known as ‘pre-ignition’ or to be unaccountably off colour (‘pinking somewhat’), John would loyally insist that his Buick was ‘still running very sweet’. It was true that sometimes, ‘like a woman’, the car refused to respond and had to be warmed up, cajoled, petted, pushed. At last, yielding to these blandishments, she would jerk into life and, with her flushed occupants, drag herself away from the scene of her humiliation to the dispiriting cheers of the assembled voyeurs. In her most petulant moods, she would react only to the full-frontal approach. But once, when John was winding the crank (the car having been left in gear on the downward slope of a hill), she ran him down. His companion, the music critic Cecil Gray, ‘frantically pushing and pulling every lever I could lay my hands and feet on’,9 was carried off out of sight.
Not that I would cast a slur
No; but accidents occur,
And your driving not your drawing
Was what there might be a flaw in.10
Even if accidents were plentiful, as Gogarty acknowledged, there were almost no deaths and the Johns themselves seemed marvellously indestructible. They were, however, extremely critical, even contemptuous, of one another’s skill. Dorelia, for example, would not applaud John’s inspired cornering: while he irritably censored her triumphant use of the horn. She was, so Kathleen Hale remembered, like a lion at the wheel, brave and imperturbable. ‘She didn’t seem to understand the danger.’ But none of them ‘felt safe’ while being driven by the others, and did not scruple to hide this. ‘I will not attempt to conceal,’ wrote Romilly John, ‘that some of us were secretly glad when some others incurred some minor accident.’11
Towards people outside the family, though dismissive of their ability, they were nervously polite. An episode from Lucy Norton’s motoring career shows John’s kindness on wheels at its most characteristic. The incident happened in 1926 or 1927 when she was in her early twenties.
‘I had recently purchased a motor-car, and John thought a long country drive would be the thing to give me experience. Night-driving experience, he said, was very important. I picked him up at Mallord Street early on a May morning. He appeared in a beautiful Harris-tweed coat, his usual large gypsy hat, several scarves with fringed ends, a bottle of whisky in case of need, and a bottle of gin for a friend.
All seems to have gone well until we reached Winchester, when I was turning to the right as John was saying “turn left”, and we mounted, very slowly, a lamp-post. John said nothing but I could see he was shaken. We… had a superlative lunch and about six o’clock started for home.
I suppose we must have gone about ten miles or so, when I was overcome with the strong suspicion that the back door of the four-doored Morris Cowley (I had bought the cheapest car, so that it would not matter if I hit things) was not shut. I turned to shut it – not realising that, as I pivoted with one hand back, the other on the steering wheel would follow me round. The next thing was a mildly terrific crash, as the car hit the soft bank at right angles on the other side of the road. John rose upright in his seat, lifted me also to a standing position behind the wheel, and clasping me to his shoulder said in tones of sympathetic disgust: “You simply cannot trust the steering of these modern cars! It’s too bad!”’12
Such imaginative courtesy was often useful in court. The biographer Montgomery Hyde, who happened to be passing one day, observed how John, coming out of his drive ‘fairly rapidly’,13 cannoned into a steamroller which was doing innocent repairs to the road outside his gate. Very correctly John reported this incident but the police, having their own ideas, replied with a summons. In due course he appeared before the local Bench but was acquitted because, the magistrate explained, he ‘behaved in such a gentlemanlike manner’.
As it whizzed through the twenties this car took on many of John’s characteristics. It became, in effect, a magnified version of himself, and its exploits drew attention to a developing feature of his life. He seemed to have no sensitivity to danger. ‘How we never got killed in this car was a miracle,’ Poppet recalled.14 The detached feeling that had first invaded John at the front during the war – the calm knowledge that he might be struck dead at any second – grew more established. ‘He might easily have been killed,’ the music critic Cecil Gray calculated, ‘…but Augustus has always lived a charmed life where cars are concerned.’15
To more than one person in his later years John spoke of suicide: how he must resist the temptation to give into it. His carelessness seemed deliberate. But Dorelia helped to keep him ticking on. Sometimes he longed – or so it appeared – to make what haste he could and be gone: but she never let him.
In spite of all vicissitudes, the Buick continued to function with increasing noise and pathos ‘and was only abandoned at last’, Romilly remembered, upside-down and panting terribly ‘somewhere near London’.16
‘If it’s beauty, it’s love in my case.’
Augustus John to John Freeman
‘The women! ah! the women!’
Arthur Symons to Augustus John
He had said goodbye to his mistresses and, by the end of the war, taken leave of friends. ‘What casualty lists!’ he exclaimed in a letter to Quinn.17 ‘How can it go on much longer? Among my own friends, and I never had many – [Dummer] Howard, [Ivor] Campbell, Heald, Baines, Jay, [Tudor] Castle, Rourke, Warren, Tennant… We must be bleeding white – and it seems the best go down always.’ The eccentrics survived: Trelawney Dayrell Reed, aloof and stammering, to be the perfect subject for John’s El Greco phase; Horace de Vere Cole, to become a victim of his own sinister practical jokes; the odd and fascinating Francis Macnamara, with his soft Irish voice, blue eyes, string-coloured fringed hair and small trim beard, who, surrounded by bottled ships and thundering treatises and rejuvenated by monkey glands, became Dorelia’s brother-in-law and eventually the father-in-law of Dylan Thomas. The boys’ old tutor, John Hope-Johnstone, also danced back ‘like an abandoned camel’18 and re-engaged himself as Robin’s philosopher and guide. Henry Lamb, too, his health fearfully damaged after being gassed in the war, floated back into the orbit of their lives, a dry and caustic figure now, furtive and uneasy, like a ghost of the dazzling youth who had served Augustus and who still trailed after Dorelia as she helped to nurse him into health.
Another damaged survivor was the great Rai, John Sampson, torn for years between patriotic pride and parental anguish as his elder son, after being wounded four times, emerged from the war gloriously decorated; while his younger son, reported missing early in 1918, was killed somewhere in France. He had separated from his wife Margaret who continued living in Wales with their daughter, while Sampson himself lodged with one unfortunate landlady after another in Liverpool. But Liverpool after the war was tense and discontented. ‘The streets are intolerable now,’ he wrote, ‘with all sorts of motor traffic… [and] heaps of accidents.’19 Illness, age and poverty prevented him from adjusting to these post-war times as John appeared to have done. He envied his friend’s success: ‘John must now be at the top of his profession,’ he wrote to Margaret, ‘but what I envy him most is meeting all these interesting people on the free and easy terms that obtain between artist and sitter. [Admiral] Fisher’s conversation must have been worth listening to.’ But with all John’s gifts – ‘friends, freedom, genius, wealth, fame’ – Sampson sometimes wondered ‘whether he is happy’.20
The two friends kept up their intermittent correspondence, often falling into Romany, ‘this dear language of ours’. ‘Your letters charm me as they always did,’ John assured Sampson, because ‘our friendship has meant a very great deal to me and our gypsing together [is] one of the major episodes in my blooming life.’21 Whatever changes were spreading across the world, Sampson went on ‘putting luxuries before necessities’ – that is, his work before comfort. He soldiered on with his great The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, carrying his assault on reflex verbs during the early stages of the war, conquering word-formation and taking on inflexion. By September 1916, as British troops captured Dar-es-Salaam and introduced tanks on to the Western Front, Sampson ‘completed the imperative’, his grandson Anthony Sampson writes with justifiable pride, ‘and was advancing upon the present tense’.22
In July 1917 he finally handed in his dictionary to Oxford University Press. It ‘should prove to the judicious reader a complete guide to sorcery, fortune-telling, love and courtship, kichimai [inns], fiddling, harping, poaching and the life of the road generally,’ he told John, ‘ – in fact I hope it may prove the Romani Rai’s Bible.’23
John was all impatience. ‘I hope your publisher will hurry up… The news that we may soon see the proofs of the book is great,’24 he wrote in 1919. By then the dictionary had already been at the publisher two years and seemed miraculously suspended there ‘like Mahomet’s coffin’, as Sampson described, ‘balanced between earth and heaven’.25 A year later some specimen sheets appeared. ‘It’s always a joy to me to read a word of the old tongue,’ John replied after seeing these sheets on 14 July 1920, ‘and now we shall soon have the big book at last.’ Three-and-a-half years later, on 25 January 1924, he was enquiring: ‘When will the book be out? I WANT IT.’26 So did Sampson. After putting his whole life into this work, it was a torment to have it halted in this way. It had only been by ‘not looking at the task ahead’ that he had been able to complete it. ‘There may be three people in England who will buy a copy,’ he had written to his son Michael, ‘but I doubt it.’ One of those who did buy a copy when it eventually came out in 1926 was John, though the book took a further year to reach him. ‘It will be my livre de chevet [bedside book],’ he promised Sampson.27
How was it that this exploration of a fast-dying secret language, spoken by a few score of persons in the heart of Wales, which had been pursued with so comprehensive a neglect for remuneration, could bring such pleasure? It was a work of unfathomable love. The book’s strange spell shines through Sampson’s autobiographical preface.
‘My collections have been gathered in every part of Wales where members of the clan were to be found, following the Gypsy avocations of harpers, fiddlers, fishermen, horse-dealers, knife-grinders, basket-makers, woodcutters, fortune-tellers, and hawkers. From ancient men and women, their faces a complex of wrinkles, to tiny children out of whose mouths Romani falls with a peculiar charm, all have been laid under contribution...’
One of those who understood what Sampson had achieved with this ‘piquant blend of sound science and inconsequent levity’ was that other great Rai, Scott Macfie. In his review for the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Macfie introduced readers to some of the people they would meet in this vocabulary:
‘Black Ellen the teller of tales, Alabama the sorceress with her hollow voice, William who had the misfortune to be transported, Hannah who when her child died suckled two bloodhounds… We are invited to their lodging, “the barn of laughter”, become their friends, discover the nicknames, and admire the diabolical tones of the Gypsy voice in moments of ironic pleasantry. They tell us… : “We are all wanderers: the dear Lord created us so.”’
John still felt a kinship with these wanderers who could thaw his loneliness as could few of the interesting sitters he painted, whose company Sampson sometimes envied him. But he was no longer painting gypsies, or Dorelia, or his children, Kathleen Hale observed, ‘nor living in Romany style. All this had been overtaken by the need to support his increasing family, and the growing demands on him both socially and financially.’28 His success was a veneer that did not please him, but which he made little effort to strip off. Sometimes he pretended to find satisfaction in it. ‘Having been regarded as a kind of “old master” for a long time,’ he wrote in 1928, ‘I am now hailed as a “modern” which you must admit is very satisfactory.’29 This was the same year as he admitted to Ada Nettleship: ‘I don’t find it at all amusing to paint stupid millionaires when I might be painting entirely for my own satisfaction.’30 From a superficial point of view his career bloomed in the 1920s while that of Sampson withered. But in his heart he agreed with the implication of the dictionary, where Sampson had questioned whether ‘Madam Civilisation may not have put her money on the wrong horse?’
*
John appeared superior to the needs of ordinary friendship. ‘Is it because I seem an indifferent friend myself?’ he asked Will Rothenstein. ‘I know I have moods which afford my friends reason for resentment; but I love my friends I think as much as anybody – when they let me.’31 What he needed in the way of friends was variety, from which, like notes on a piano, he could select any tune of his choice. Though many had gone down, more were stepping forward, like the fresh row of a chorus, to fill their places. There was Joe Hone, rare phenomenon, an Irishman of silence; Roy Campbell, the big-action maverick poet from South Africa, with his black cowboy hat, white face and flashing blue eyes, dressed in clothes that ‘appeared to have been rescued from the dustbin’;32 T. W. Earp, ex-President of the Oxford Union, a soft-spoken, gently humorous man, his hair close-cropped, his head shaped like a vegetable, who had taken his lack of ambition to the extreme of becoming an art critic; Ronald Firbank,33 his nervous laugh like the sound of a clock suddenly running down, his hands fluttering with embarrassment, trying to live down ‘the dreadful fact that his father had been an M.P.’; and A. R. Orage, John’s ‘man of sense’,34 the wayward editor of the New Age and advocate of the Douglas Credit Scheme.
Such friends provided new worlds for John. He was easily transplanted. Having been a Welshman, gypsy, nomad, teacher, he was soon to turn Academician, illustrator for Ronald Firbank, and stage designer for Sean O’Casey and J. M. Barrie. He had been on amicable terms with Bloomsbury, still maintained good relations with the Sitwells, and was an intermittent comrade-in-arms of Wyndham Lewis. By the 1920s he had moved into the land of the affluent upper classes – of Lord Alington, Lord Tredegar (Evan Morgan) and Lord Berners. It was not true that he never looked back – such was not his nature. But the distance over which he had to look to connect other parts of his life lengthened.
He had crossed into this aristocratic world at the Paris Peace Conference. It was here that his friendship began with T. E. Lawrence who, singling him out as the perfect image-maker, returned again and again (concealing his ‘hideous’ motorbike behind the bushes) for ‘fancy-dress’35 portraits of himself as Café Royal Arab or pale aircraftman. But it was the Marchesa Casati, of the archaic smile and macabre beauty, who beckoned him into international high society. As Luisa Ammon, daughter of a Milanese industrialist, she had been, it was said, a mousy little girl. But, inspired by the example of Sarah Bernhardt, she decided to turn herself into a theatrical work of art and her world into a stage. As the young wife of Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, noblest of Roman huntsmen, she pounced like a panther on to life: and somewhat overshot it. The mousy hair burst into henna’d flames; the grey-green eyes, now ringed with black kohl and treated with toxic belladonna, expanded enormously, fringed with amazing false eyelashes like peacock’s feathers. Her lips were vermilion, her feet empurpled, her sphinx-like face, transformed by some black-and-white alchemy, became a painted mask. By taking thought she added a cubit to her stature, raising her legs on altitudinous heels, and crowning her head with top hats of tiger skin and black satin, huge gold waste-paper baskets turned upside down, or the odd inverted flowerpot from which gesticulated a salmon-pink feather. It was for her that Léon Bakst, soaring to his most extravagant fantasies, designed incroyable Persian trousers of the most savage cut; for her Mariano Fortuny invented long scarves of oriental gauze, soaked in the mysterious pigments of his vats and ‘tinted with strange dreams’.36
She lived, this decadent queen of Venice, in the roofless ‘Palazzo Non Finito’,37 on the Grand Canal where Bakst choreographed her bals masqués. She would appear with a macaw on her shoulder, an ape at one arm, or a few cobras. As a backdrop she redesigned her ballroom with caged monkeys which gibbered among the branches of lilac as she floated past, pursued by a restive ocelot held on its leash by a black keeper, his hand dripping with paint. But there were failures. The ‘slaves’, painted with gold, collapsed; her costume – an affair of armour pierced with a hundred electric arrows – short-circuited. By the spring of 1919 she had left Venice and her husband, achieved poetic status as mistress of the symbolist ‘Prince of Decadence’ Gabriele d’Annunzio and, having exhausted one huge fortune, was preparing to demolish a second.
Casati’s witch-like aspect often provoked terror. But John, unlike most of her admirers, was a romantic only by instalments. Visually she stimulated him, but in other ways she made him ‘laugh immoderately’.38 Where T. E. Lawrence beheld a ‘vampire’, John saw only ‘a spoilt child of a woman’ ringed about with the credulity and suspiciousness of a savage. Yet, as the vigour of his two portraits shows, he found her dramatically exciting.
She had been painted by innumerable artists as Joan of Arc, Pulcinella, Salome, the naked Eve. To Marinetti and the Futurists, she was their Gioconda; to Boldini, who portrayed her smothered in peacock feathers and arched over cushions like a pretend-panther, she was Scheherazade; to Alberto Martini, she became an art-nouveau Medusa. But to John, who painted her twice in April 191939 in the Duchess of Gramont’s apartment on the quai Malaquais, she was something else again: a pyjama’d figure, with dramatic mascara, poised with a provocative elbow before a veiled view of Vesuvius where, as the unbidden guest of Axel Munthe, she overstayed her welcome by some fifteen years. Romanticism and irony were perfectly blended to produce what Lord Duveen was to call ‘an outstanding masterpiece of our time’.40
‘He painted like a lion,’ sighed Casati. ‘Le taxi vous attend,’ he writes to her from Paris. ‘Venez!’ They flung themselves towards each other. Sex was not the real attraction between them. Casati took other people’s admiration for granted, like a perpetual chorus singing invisibly while she stood on stage alone. For she was intensely narcissistic. John responded to her exhibitionism. It was her sheer extraordinariness he loved – she was more tempestuous and terrifying than Ottoline had ever been. Though Marinetti dedicated his Futurist Dance Manifesto to her in 1917, she lived always for the present, converting everything she touched into make-believe, using all her camp artillery to keep reality in retreat. John relished her gypsy-like fervor and, under the brazen theatricality, what he judged to be her ‘perfect naturalness of manner’.
She wanted for nothing until the 1930s when the last penny of the last fortune had been squandered and the curtain came down on her performance. She fled from her Palais Rose at Neuilly to England. In England there was charity, a pale but persistent kindness, first from Lord Alington, then, for the last dozen years of her life, from a Wodehousian platoon of old fellows – the Duke of Westminster, Baron Paget-Fredericks, Lord Tredegar and, most constantly, John himself with whom she stayed for a time in Chelsea. ‘Je serai ravi de vous revoir, carissima,’ he gallantly welcomed her, enclosing ‘un petit cadeau’. He warned her that ‘Londres n’est pas gai en ce moment’, but she knew there was nowhere else she could shelter. She lived in a small dirty flat within, however, a house that had once been Byron’s. The layers of powder grew thicker; the stories of Italy longer; her clothes more faded and frayed; her leopard-skin gloves spotted with holes; her thin figure, subsisting on opium and cocaine, turned into an assemblage of bones. But she had never valued comfort and did not miss it now. Despite the squalor, she played, to the last notes, this ghostly echo of the d’Annunzian heroine. ‘Bring in the drinks!’ she would call, and a bent Italian servant would shuffle forward with a half-empty bottle of beer. What money came in she tended to spend at once, shopping in Knightsbridge and Mayfair for Spider, her Pekinese. Her one asset was absolute helplessness, which threw responsibility for her survival on to everyone else. Her friends paid an allowance each week into her bank from where she would collect it by taxi. The bank statements show that, for over a decade, John was her most persistent source of income. She did not need very often to beg from him: he gave spontaneously, regularly, small sums with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God generosity. ‘Ayez courage, carissima, et croyez à mon amitié sincère.’ It did not occur to her to do otherwise. ‘Je suis bien triste que vous êtes toujours dans les difficultés,’ he wrote again, with more apprehension. But when, during the early 1940s, she asked for more money to remove these difficulties, he fell back into explanations: ‘Le gouvernement prend tout mon argent pour ce guerre et j’ai des grandes dépenses comme vous savez.’ The aphrodisiac notes now gave way before a crisp commercial correspondence – ‘Voici le chèque’. But she did not embarrass him with gratitude and they remained friends until her death in 1957. His last portrait, painted in 1942, shows her wearing a half-veil, the elaborate golden fichu gathered at her chest matching the eyes of the staring black cat on her lap. She is seated in an upright chair against a theatrically stormy sky – a sad, sinister, witch-like figure still held together with some vestiges of dignity.41
Casati occupied a unique place in the latter part of John’s life. She should, he once suggested to Cecil Beaton, have been shot and, like Spider, stuffed – she would have looked so well in a glass case. The other women in his life were for more active employment and, from the 1920s onwards, began to arrange themselves into a pattern. There were the occasional models; there was the chief mistress who looked after him in town and abroad when Dorelia was absent; and there was the Grand Lady, to be defined neither as model nor mistress, who conducted his life in society.
John’s principal mistress during these years was Eileen Hawthorne, ‘an uncommon and interesting type’, he suggested to Maurice Elvey, ‘ – at any rate she would like to do some work in films.’ Pictures of her constantly appeared in the press – a new portrait by Lewis Baumer or Russell Flint; an eager advertisement for bath cubes, lingerie, eau-de-cologne; or simply as ‘Miss 1933’. The most extraordinary feature of these pictures was that, though she appeared forever young and glamorous, none of them looked the same. As queen of the magic world of cosmetics she could change her looks from day to day. This was her ‘mystery’. She was known by the newspapers as the girl of a thousand faces. Each morning she re-created herself, and again each evening. Superficially, it was impossible to tire of her.
But she was not a good model for John. Hardly had he begun to apply his brushes than her features would start to re-form themselves. She was always painting herself more fluently, it was said, than he was.
There were other problems too. He suspected that she did not possess a flair for discretion. The man who, twenty years before, advised Sampson to ‘sin openly and scandalize the world’ had grown timid of scandal himself. Experience, like a great wall, shut off his return to innocence. His letters to Eileen Hawthorne exhibit more anxiety than enjoyment. He asks her, because of Dorelia, not to telephone him in the country; he begs her to avoid journalists – especially on those occasions when she happens to be missing a tooth or is unable to conceal a black eye. He wishes he could trust more wholeheartedly her ability to hide things: for example, pregnancies. Though he shared her favours with the composer E. J. Moeran, it was John who, after some grumbling, paid for the abortions. He had no choice. Otherwise her mother would get to hear of them, and then the world would know.
This climate of secrecy did not suit John, but it was necessary. He divided his life into compartments as irretrievably lonely people do. It is unlikely, for instance, that Eileen Hawthorne ever met the redoubtable Mrs Fleming. She was the widow of Valentine Fleming, a millionaire Yeomanry officer and Member of Parliament for Henley: ‘one of those rare, slightly baffling Edwardian figures of whom nothing but good is ever spoken’,42 who had been killed after winning the DSO in the Great War. She was rich; she was handsome – dark, with a small head, large eyes and autocratic features. The three portraits he painted of her in her forties show ‘a Goyaesque beauty, hard, strong-featured, the self-absorbed face of an acknowledged prima donna used to getting her own way’.43 Upon her four ‘shiny boys’ (as John called them) – Peter the author and explorer, Ian the creator of James Bond, Richard a prosperous banker, and Michael who died of wounds as a prisoner of war after Dunkirk – she had laid an obligation to succeed. She believed in success, and herself led a successful life in society. In 1923 she moved to Turner’s house at 118 Cheyne Walk, a few minutes’ walk from Mallord Street. It was a luxurious place, superb for entertaining, with a large studio at the back, all drastically improved since J. M. W. Turner had lodged there in old age. Sitting at the bar of the Aquatic Stores next door ‘fortifying the inner man’ against his entry into Mrs Fleming’s luncheon parties, John sometimes thought of Turner – how he would have preferred the grosser amenities of Wapping. Often John needed drink to confront these social occasions, but the money, the aura of success, the opportunities – these could not be denied. Eve Fleming passionately admired him, he could not help feeling some admiration for her, and many people who came to Cheyne Walk admired them both. In such company it was possible to forget a bad day’s work.
In his biography of Ian Fleming, John Pearson describes Mrs Fleming as ‘a bird of paradise’, extravagant, demanding, a law to herself. She was, he wrote, ‘a rich, beautiful widow – and, thanks to the provision of her husband’s Will, likely to remain one.’ In order to ensure that his millions remained within the family, Val Fleming had left her almost all his wealth on condition that she remained a widow. If she remarried, most of the money would pass to her sons. Nevertheless, such was her attachment to John that, despite everything, she dreamed of taking him away from Dorelia and having a child by him. She would turn up at Alderney, drive him off in her Rolls-Royce, and tell him that she would give up her fortune if he would give up Dorelia. Poppet remembered that her mother ‘hated’ Eve Fleming ‘and suffered quite a lot’.44 For Eve was a most insistent woman. She could not endure coming second to anyone. After one of her Rolls-Royce tutorials, John suggested that he might briefly marry Eve, have a child by her, then obtain a quick divorce and return to Alderney, all for the sake of a quiet life – in which case, Dorelia replied, she would no longer be there. She might have left with Henry Lamb.
What appeared to be a solution to their problem had already been brought to the door of Mallord Street one afternoon in the late spring of 1921 by John Hope-Johnstone. He arrived with a girl of sixteen – a little old for his own taste since he was one of those people for whom time passes too rapidly. He had seen her at the Armenian café in Archer Street, introduced himself, then taken her in a cab to meet Compton Mackenzie. They’d had a grand time. Now, since she was an avid admirer of John, they’d come to see him too. Her name was Chiquita. John grunted and let them in.
She was an engaging creature, very tiny, with a dark fringe and a low rippling laugh, and she specialized in ‘cheekiness’. While the men growled away in conversation, she flitted round the enormous studio, aware of John’s eyes, like searchlights, travelling all over her as she moved. Soon she began to chatter, telling stories about herself – how her mother had run away to New Orleans with a Cuban leaving her to be brought up by a funny old man with whiskers; how she had been a tomboy, climbing trees, stealing apples, getting spanked and, at the age of fifteen, ran away from school to join a travelling theatre company.
‘When can I paint you?’ John interrupted. ‘Come to-morrow at four.’
‘I’ll come at five,’ Chiquita retorted.
It was agreed that she should wear the same clothes – a blue blouse, black stockings, red skirt – and that he would pay her a pound for each sitting: handsome wages. She came at five, carrying as a weapon and badge of her sophistication a long cigarette holder.
As a sitter she was frightful. She chattered all the time, while John’s expression darkened dreadfully. She could not understand why he seemed so ‘terribly ratty’. One afternoon he interrupted her by demanding to know whether she would take off her clothes. She agreed, provided there was somewhere private to undress. Then she came back into the studio wearing a dressing-gown. He began to work – and after a few minutes, while she lay there nakedly chattering, he pounced. She remembered him being so old, the coarse beard, smell of whisky and tobacco, no words, just grunting and snorting…
Later, on discovering she was pregnant, Chiquita approached Dorelia. It seemed the natural thing to do. They arranged that she should have an abortion, but Chiquita did not take to the specialist and eventually refused to go through with the operation. ‘It was a very drastic time in my life but I was too young to be unhappy,’ she remembered.45 The atmosphere at Alderney where she went was wonderfully comforting. ‘It was a lovely summer,’ she wrote, ‘and we slept outside in the orchard in the communal bed there… We used to light a little bonfire down our end… it was fun – there weren’t any strict rules, one could get in through the window without being nagged at.’ Pigs and red setters stalked the garden; there were picnics, rides in the pony cart and, under a sign that read ‘Bathing Prohibited’, there was bathing. Dorelia was always near ‘and she always looked pretty super especially when she wore her sun bonnet and picked currants’.46 Dorelia never referred to her pregnancy, suggesting, after a few months, that Chiquita wear a cloak ‘because she would look so fine in one, and they were becoming very fashonable’.
At the beginning of March they took her to a nursing home where, on 6 March 1923 she gave birth to a daughter whom she called Zoë. John arrived bringing masses of flowers, but when Chiquita came out he tactfully withdrew to Spain.
She had a little money, and quickly got some jobs as a photographer’s model. Zoë meanwhile was fostered in Islington by a policeman and his wife whose own daughter, ‘Simon’, was later to marry Augustus’s eldest son David. One day Chiquita received an invitation to call on Mrs Fleming. The meeting was not easy. Eve Fleming’s imperious manner brought out everything that was rebellious in Chiquita, and when she offered to adopt the baby, provide it with a good home and education, Chiquita refused – though accepting some clothes and the assistance of a nanny. It seems that Mrs Fleming hoped to increase the pressure of her persuasion, but before she had any opportunity a row broke out over the clothes, all of which were marked ‘Fleming’. From this time on the two women were enemies. ‘If she [Chiquita] had a million pounds a year, I still should not alter my opinion that she ought not to have the bringing up of that baby or of any other,’ wrote Mrs Fleming.47
Each weekend Chiquita would call at Islington and pick up Zoë. One Saturday the baby was collected early – by Mrs Fleming, who rushed her off to North Wales in the hope that Chiquita would not trouble to pursue them. Over the crisis lawyers soon began to circle. John, innocently returning from Spain, was horrified. He had supported, in his absence, Mrs Fleming’s plan and arranged anonymously through her and a solicitor to offer Chiquita twenty pounds down and a pound a week thereafter in exchange for the baby. What could be fairer? But instead of this quiet ‘baby agreement’ he was confronted with a cause célèbre. There was no alternative but to return the baby.
Chiquita had various allies, in particular Seymour Leslie (‘a grinning society microbe’ John called him) to whom she blurted out her story one evening at the Eiffel Tower. She was determined to ‘fight like a tiger’ to keep Zoë, she insisted. ‘I trust no one with Zoë’s happiness as I do myself. I am waiting for Mrs Fleming to return. I would like to kill her...’ Vowing indignantly to help, Seymour Leslie called for pen and ink and drew up a contract, signed by the proprietor Stulik and the head waiter Otto, undertaking to pay for Zoë provided Chiquita agreed to live with him as his mistress. This settled, they hurried off to Paris for four days of celebration.
The agreement lasted some six months. ‘I used to lead him a pretty good dance,’ she recalled, ‘…tho’ he made me happy in a strange sort of way.’ He let her have fun, but what she really wanted was marriage. When Seymour Leslie returned from a visit to Russia in the autumn of 1923, he found her married to Michael Birkbeck, a friend of John’s, and living with him and Zoë in the country.
Mrs Fleming was not used to being worsted. ‘My dreams of a happy home’, she wrote, ‘…have fallen to the ground.’ In place of dreams she was surrounded by clouds of ‘reprehensible gossip’. ‘It seems to be a mistake to be the good Samaritan or to feel things,’ she complained to Seymour Leslie. ‘People don’t seem to understand either, and only to imagine the worst motives for one’s actions.’ The deplorable affair had made her ill. ‘I have done my best,’ she declared, ‘and have had to retire to bed, really exhausted with this worry.’ At night she would dream ‘of drowned babies with dead faces and alive eyes looking at me’. She had sons, but she wanted a daughter: John’s daughter. It should all have been so easy. John himself felt exasperated. ‘There’s no peace for a man at all,’ he complained to the Rani. Had Ida lived, he sometimes thought, it might have all been different. ‘Failing her, one simply tries all the others in rotation – I’ve nearly reached the limit.’
But the game had to be played ‘to the last spasm’. Eve Fleming wanted a child: she must have one.
In March 1925, when John went to Berlin to paint Gustav Stresemann, the German Foreign Minister (and a former Chancellor), Eve, who was a friend of the British Ambassador in Berlin, Lord D’Abernon, went too and stayed with John at the British Embassy. Early that summer she called together the staff at Cheyne Walk, announced that she was closing the house and going on a long cruise. A postcard of snow-capped mountains that December informed John of the birth of a daughter. At the end of the year she returned with her ‘adopted’ daughter wrapped in a shawl – the adoption, she let it be known, having been arranged by the Royal Physician, Lord Dawson of Penn. On 18 June 1926, the child was baptized Amaryllis Marie-Louise Fleming at a private ceremony in Cheyne Walk, the word ‘unknown’ being entered against the parents’ names on the certificate. After a public baptism a fortnight later another certificate was issued identifying Amaryllis as the ‘adopted daughter of Mrs Valentine Fleming’.
Amaryllis’s childhood was very different from Zoë’s, but both girls grew up not knowing who was their actual father. Rumours of their parentage, fanned by John’s intermittent forgetfulness as to its secrecy, blew around them and eventually reached Zoë in her late teens, Amaryllis in her early twenties. After an initial smokescreen of indignation, John was happy to accept them both as part of the tribe. ‘You were found in a ditch,’ he told Amaryllis at the beginning of a dinner in the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square. But at the end of the dinner, he gave her a great slap on the back: ‘So you’re my little girl, are you? Well, don’t tell your mother.’48
Zoë and Amaryllis felt wonderfully at home with Augustus and Dorelia in the country. Once they turned up on the same day, and John, his eyes glinting, airily introduced them: ‘I believe you two are related.’ Amaryllis’s career as a cellist gave him much pleasure. He would listen to her on the radio and write her letters of congratulation on her ‘howling success’. He also turned up at her first promenade concert, where he judged her triumph in terms of the number of people in tears during the slow movement. He felt proud that she with her red hair and the black-haired Zoë were such fine-looking wenches. Each of them sat for him. ‘I could paint you on your back...’ he offered Amaryllis. Zoë, too, who had gone on the stage and was everybody’s understudy, was ‘a first-rate sitter, and useful’, he judged, ‘in other ways too’.49 But neither of them would ever understand the need for so much secrecy, and both despised their mothers for the years of lying.
‘You will be a giant again.’
T. E. Lawrence to Augustus John (19 April 1930)
‘I kept procrastinating.’
John to Ottoline Morrell (27 March 1929)
‘Augustus John, whose brain was once teeming with ideas for great compositions, had ceased to do imaginative work and was painting portraits,’ wrote Will Rothenstein of these years between the wars.50 Though he was to return over the next two decades to ‘invented’ landscapes on a large scale, and though he continued to paint at all times from nature, adding, on Dorelia’s instructions, flower pictures to his repertoire in the 1920s, portraits dominated John’s work until the Second World War. He was always ‘dying to get through with them and tackle other things’, but ‘Alas! that seems to be my perpetual state!’51
The most celebrated portrait of this period was of Guilhermina Suggia, the exotic Portuguese cellist under whom Amaryllis Fleming briefly studied in the late 1940s. John began this work early in 1920 and, after almost eighty sittings, finished it early in 1923.52 It took so long and involved her calling at Mallord Street so incessantly that a rumour spread that they were living there together – and Amaryllis was their daughter. The portrait had been begun at the suggestion of the newspaper owner Edward Hulton who was briefly engaged to Suggia and who intended the picture to be a betrothal offering. By the time the engagement lapsed, John was committed to the painting.
‘To be painted by Augustus John is no ordinary experience,’ Suggia allowed. ‘…The man is unique and so are his methods.’53 Throughout the sittings she played Bach, and this forestalled conversation – John continuing to hum the music during lunch. ‘Sometimes’, Suggia noticed, ‘he would begin to walk up and down in time to the music… When specially pleased with his work, when some finesse of painting eyelash or tint had gone well, he would always walk on tiptoe.’54 As a rule she posed for two hours a day, but by the third year she would sit for another two hours in the afternoon.
Those who visited the studio during these years were aware that a terrific struggle was taking place. John was attempting to paint again: that is, not simply draw with the brush. From week to week the picture would change: sometimes it looked good, sometimes it had deteriorated, and at other times, in spite of much repainting, from gold then to white then to red, it appeared almost unchanged. As with a tug of war, tense, motionless, no one could tell which way it would go.
Suggia herself was ‘more delighted with the result than I should have thought possible’. It is a rare, full-length profile portrait which shows her holding the cello between her legs, like a male player, instead of in the side-saddle position women were then expected to use. Not being a commission, it had been painted for exhibition and sale, and as Andrew Wilton writes, ‘to create a striking image, and to cause a stir that would promote both sitter and artist’. In these aims it was immediately successful. It was bought for three thousand guineas (equivalent to £80,600 in 1996) from the Alpine Gallery by an American collector in 1923, shown in 1924 at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition, where it won first prize, and the following year acquired by Lord Duveen who presented it to the Tate Gallery in London.
It was to be a popular painting. Though it does not possess the overwhelming power of ‘The Smiling Woman’, painted in John’s prime, with which it has sometimes been compared, it is nevertheless a spectacular essay in painterly rhetoric, and catches very memorably the exotic image of a performer who, during her residence in England between 1912 and 1923, often lifted audiences – including even such a reputedly cold fish as Lytton Strachey – into ‘a state of ecstasy’.55 With her head so erect, her eyes closed in concentration, her right arm theatrically extended to form a dramatic V-shape (the echo of which in the sitter’s neck, the background drapery and long ruby-red skirt gives the composition its aesthetic unity), Suggia embodies the romantic idealization of musicianship. In the emphasis which John throws on the visual drama of her performance, in its very excess, there is an agreeable suggestion of irony. For though Suggia looked every inch a prima donna and gave an impression of romantic boldness her playing was actually ‘calculated, correct and classical’, her accompanist Gerald Moore remembered,56 and her bow-hold, clearly to be seen in John’s portrait, could not deliver the power her attitude proclaimed.
Even in this accomplished big work, six feet tall and almost as wide, the painting of the long train of the skirt is uneven. This was a result of his impatience of which he tried to make a virtue – the virtue of concentrating on essentials. ‘There are coarse passages to be found even in those pictures generally reckoned to be among his successes,’ wrote the art critic Richard Shone. ‘The shoes of William Nicholson, for example, are more like Sargent at his worst, and John seems to make very little of the draperies in the background.’57
Something seemed to have snapped in John as a result of the extended effort he put into this picture. Never again did he seriously attempt anything so ambitious. The portrait of Thomas Hardy, for example, done some six months after the completion of ‘Suggia’, is a dry impasto laid straight on to the canvas, which is barely covered in parts (the hairs of the moustache are attached to a piece of unprimed canvas). In treatment and colour scheme it is reminiscent of his three emphatic studies of Bernard Shaw.
John had met Hardy at Kingston Maurward on 21 September 1923 and, after several visits to Max Gate, the house in Dorset that Hardy had designed himself, polished off the portrait by the middle of the following month. Hardy was then eighty-three. ‘An atmosphere of great sympathy and almost complete understanding at once established itself between us,’ John recorded.58 They did not talk much, but John felt they were of a kind:59 ‘I wonder which of the two of us was the more naïve!’ He painted Hardy seated in his study, a room piled to the ceiling with books ‘of a philosophical character’. Hardy wears a serious, querying expression; he looks stiff, but is bearing up. It is the portrait of a shy man, full of disciplined emotion. ‘I don’t know whether that is how I look or not,’ he said,60 ‘but that is how I feel.’ The picture was painted at the suggestion of T E. Lawrence and bought by Sydney Cockerell for three thousand pounds on behalf of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. ‘If I look like that the sooner I am under the ground the better,’ Hardy remarked to Cockerell. But in fact ‘the old man is delighted, & Mrs Hardy also,’ T. E. Lawrence told his mother. ‘It is seldom that an artist is so fortunate in his sitter’s eyes.’61 After his death in 1928, Hardy’s widow Florence reported him as having said to her that he would rather have John’s portrait in the Fitzwilliam than ‘receive the Nobel Prize – and he meant it’.
In a letter to Hardy, John suggested that this portrait was ‘merely preparatory to another & more satisfactory picture which I hope to do with your help, later on’.62 It was only by labelling his paintings as preliminary studies for more elaborate compositions that he could decide to stop working on them. Where there was infinite time there was infinite delay, infinite painting out and indecision. Some critics interpreted this dissatisfaction as a quest for perfection. But he painted without premeditation, asking his sitters sometimes what background colour they would like, at other times whether they thought he should introduce a flower or a bowl of fruit, or simply demanding: ‘Tell me what’s wrong with this arm.’ When Lord David Cecil inquired what aesthetic motive there had been for making the colour of his tie darker than it actually was, John replied that some black paint had accidentally got mixed into the red, and he thought it looked rather good. He liked, starting perhaps with an eye, to exaggerate the figure as he worked downwards, as El Greco or Velazquez might, for grand manner. His unfinished work is often better in these later years because it manages to convey powers, latent in him, on which he could no longer call. It must be ‘hard’, T. E. Lawrence sympathized (9 April 1930), ‘to paint against time’. But time was a false friend to John – a substitute for concentration. It remained to Dorelia and close brave friends to rescue, by one subterfuge or another, what pictures they could before they were painted into oblivion.
The longer he worked the more difficult it became to persuade him to stop. With commissioned portraits there was often some limitation that imposed a discipline, though it afforded little pleasure. Of all these ‘boardroom’ portraits, his favourite was of Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England. Begun on 1 April 1930, it was completed a year later, Norman’s hair subsiding in the interval from grey to white. To John’s mind he was ‘an almost ideal sitter’, taking apparently no interest whatever in the artist or his picture. ‘It was in a spirit of severe reserve that we used to part on the doorstep of my house,’ John recorded, ‘whence, after looking this way and that, and finding the coast clear, Mr Norman would venture forth to regain his car, parked as usual discreetly round the corner.’63 What John did not know was that, on arriving back at his office, Norman was transformed, regaling everyone with descriptions of the Great Artist at work. ‘It’s marvellous to watch him scrutinizing me,’ he would rhapsodize, ‘…then using a few swift strokes like this on the outline and dabbing on paint like lightning. What a heavenly gift!’64
John represents the two of them as sharing a sense of isolation. Though the banker seemed ‘troubled with graver problems than beset other men’, it was not difficult, John recalled, ‘to offset Mr Montagu Norman’s indifference to my activities by a corresponding disregard of his’.65 At rare moments ‘our acquaintance seemed to show signs of ripening’, and then, so he told Michael Ayrton, a curious attraction would rise up in him for this dry, preoccupied, semi-detached figure. To John Freeman he later remarked: ‘It seemed to give him pleasure.’ But he was referring to the sittings, not the portrait itself which, with its hard eyes, nervously taut mouth and haunted expression, shocked Norman so much that he refused to let it hang either in his home or at the Bank of England – where, nevertheless, it now hangs.
‘Sometimes’, John recalled, ‘Lord D’Abernon would come to chat with my sitter. The subject appeared to be High Finance. I was not tempted to join in these discussions.’66 D’Abernon, a trustee of the National Gallery in London, was another of John’s subjects; his portrait, completed after Montagu Norman’s, had been started early in 1927. As the second ceremonial portrait of John’s career, it invites comparison with ‘The Lord Mayor of Liverpool’ but falls incomparably short. It is neither caricature nor straight portrait study: it is a false creation. John himself affected to believe it a finer painting than ‘Suggia’, but this judgement rested on the greater time it had taken him, and on his wish to obtain for it the same price – three thousand pounds (equivalent to £79,500 in 1996). Sometimes, during this five years’ marathon, he was tempted to give up: then another cheque, for five hundred or a thousand pounds, would arrive and he was obliged to paint wearily on. ‘I hope’, he wrote rather unconvincingly to Dorelia, ‘old D’Abernon won’t peg out before the portrait is done.’67 To gain wind it was necessary for him to puff enthusiasm into the ordeal. On 18 December 1927 he writes to D’Abernon that the portrait is ‘too fine a scheme’ to take any ‘risks’ with. Since Lady D’Abernon had a villa in Rome, might it not be ‘a practical plan’, John wondered, ‘for me to come to Rome in February where I could use a studio at the British School’?68 Two years later, on 8 December 1929, Lord D’Abernon notes in a letter to his wife: ‘The Augustus John portrait at last improving – the face less bibulous. Seen from five yards off – it is a fine costume picture.’69 John had brought in a stalwart Guardsman to stand wearing the British Ambassador’s elaborate uniform, but eventually this soldier collapsed and John fell back on a wooden dressmaker’s dummy, the character of which is ‘well conveyed in the completed work’. By the autumn of 1928 he is begging Dorelia to ‘undress that awful dummy and put d’Ab’s clothes in his trunk’.70 But still the work went lamely on. Like Macbeth, he had reached a point from which it was as tedious to retreat as to go on. He put the best face he could on it: ‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.’
The portrait, now in the Tate Gallery, is dated 1932, in which year it was finally handed over to Lord D’Abernon. ‘There are only two styles of portrait painting,’ says Miss La Creevy in Nicholas Nickleby: ‘the serious and the smirk’. ‘Lord D’Abernon’ is not smirking and he is not serious. He is nothing. A photograph of Lord D’Abernon posing for the picture ‘shows how unlike him the “parade” portrait was and is’, his wife noted on the back.
On other occasions, when his soul revolted against such formal work, John could be less accommodating. After finishing the portrait of the Earl of Athlone, he agreed to show it the following day to the sitter’s wife. She arrived with her husband and went into his studio. Two minutes later they burst out, looking furious. John stood in the doorway quietly lighting his pipe as they drove off. Egerton Cooper, who had watched the incident from his studio near by, hurried over to ask what was wrong. ‘I tore the painting to pieces,’ explained John. ‘I suddenly couldn’t bear it.’
Another time it was the sitter who dismantled a portrait. During part of the summer of 1920, John had been at work on ‘His Margarine Majesty’, the fish and soap millionaire Lord Leverhulme. Although ‘strongly inclined’ to have his portrait done by John, Leverhulme had begun the first sitting by warning him he could spare little time and that he was an almost impossible subject, no artist (excepting to some degree Sir Luke Fildes) having done him justice. When the time was up, great praise was lavished on the picture: by John. It seemed, he said, to breathe with life and self-satisfaction and only lacked speech. Leverhulme himself did not lack speech, and finding the portrait very ‘humbling to pride’ and a ‘chastening’71 reflection, argued that neither the eyes, nor yet the mouth, nor even the nose were his, though it was probably the bloated face and grasping fingers that hurt him, if not the informality and small size for ‘under a thousand pounds’ commission. Whatever the deficiencies, John, proffering his palette, invited His Lordship to make the amendments himself. This offer was declined and the picture, with all its alleged faults intact, paid for and dispatched.
John had then gone down to Tenby. Returning to Mallord Street late in September he discovered the portrait had been returned to him – at least, that part representing Lord Leverhulme’s stomach, shoulders, arms, hands and thighs, though not his head, which had been scissored out. That evening (31 September 1920) John sat down and wrote: ‘I am intensely anxious to have your Lordship’s explanation of this, the grossest insult I have ever received in the course of my career.’
Leverhulme’s reply four days later shone with friendliness. He felt ‘extremely distressed at the blunder that has occurred’, but added: ‘I assure you it is entirely a blunder on the part of my housekeeper.’ He had intended hanging the painting in his safe at Rivington Bungalow, but overlooked ‘the fact that there were internal partitionings and other obstacles that prevented me doing this’. After a bold prognosis, he settled on a surgical operation, removing the head, ‘which is the important part of the portrait’, and storing it safely away. This letter, culminating with an urgent request to keep the matter dark, was succeeded by an invitation to ‘dine with my sister’. To his surprise, John appeared dissatisfied with this answer, and the correspondence between them persisted in lively fashion over the next ten days until suddenly appearing in full on the front page of the Daily Express.72 It was a case of the Baronet and the Butterfly in reverse. ‘I actually frightened him into violence,’ John told T E. Lawrence.73 Leverhulme insisted that he had a right to deal with his own property – a little trimming here or there – as he chose. Even the copyright, he hazarded, belonged to him. As for the publicity, it was not of his choosing: ‘all that I am impressed by is that Mr John can get his advertising perfectly free… whereas the poor Soap Maker has to pay a very high rate for a very bad position in the paper.’
For John it had begun as a matter of principle. He took the Whistlerian view that money purchased merely the custodianship of a picture. Whatever the legal rights, he was convinced of his moral right. ‘Formal portraiture implied a subservience of artist to patron increasingly unacceptable to artists imbued with a romantic concern for expression, particularly self-expression,’ wrote the art historian Edward Morris.74 The history of John’s ‘Leverhulme’ was to take its place between Sargent’s ‘Henry Irving’ and Graham Sutherland’s ‘Winston Churchill’.
The excitement provoked by this beheading was tremendous. Newspapers throughout Britain, the United States, Europe and as far off as Japan trumpeted their reports of the affair. Students of the London art schools marched on Hyde Park ‘bearing aloft a gigantic replica of the celebrated soap-boiler’s torso, the head being absent’.75 In Paris there was furore; in Italy a twenty-four hour strike was called involving everyone connected with painting – even models, colourmen and frame-makers. ‘A colossal effigy entitled “IL-LE-VER-HUL-ME” was constructed of soap and tallow, paraded through the streets of Florence, and ceremoniously burnt in the Piazza della Signoria, after which, the demonstrators proceeded to the Battisterio where a wreath was solemnly laid on the altar of St John.’76
Appalled by the rumpus, John backed away to Lady Tredegar’s home, near Broadstairs; but the reporters, discovering his hiding place, besieged him there. ‘I did not want this publicity,’ he prevaricated. ‘I get too much as it is.’ Nevertheless, some papers were announcing that he intended to press the matter to the courts so as to establish a precedent for the protection of artists. ‘The bottom fact of the case is that there is something in a work of art which, in the highest equity as distinct from the law, you cannot buy,’ declared the Manchester Guardian.‘…Whatever the law may allow, or courts award, the common fairness of mankind cannot assent to the doctrine that one man may rightfully use his own rights of property in such a way as to silence or interrupt another in making so critical appeal to posterity for recognition of his genius. The right to put up this appeal comes too near those other fundamental personal rights the infringement of which is the essence of slavery.’
The country waited for this Wilberforce of the art world to act. But after this great roll of drums, there was nothing. For John, unlike Whistler, had no relish for court work. He did not have the stamina of his own indignation, and his sense of humour outran his sense of honour. He ended the affair with a joke, exhibiting his portion of the portrait above the title ‘Lord Leverhulme’s Watch-chain’. For years he patiently preserved this decapitated torso while the missing head continued to stare unseen in its depository. Then, in 1954, by what Sir Gerald Kelly, the President of the Royal Academy, described as ‘hellish ingenuity’,*1 the two segments were sewn together and the picture elevated to a place of honour in the Leverhulme Art Gallery at Port Sunlight.
Some sitters were pleased with John’s portraits of them – Lord Conway of Allington was ‘as proud as a peacock with two tails to be thus glorified by you’.77 But generally John was suspicious of praise and would tell admirers that they ‘didn’t know a painting from a cowpat’. It was surprising how much controversy his portraiture attracted. ‘I painted what I saw,’ he remarked of Lord Spencer’s portrait. ‘But many people have told me I ought to have been hung instead of the picture.’ Men he was tempted to caricature, women to sentimentalize. For this reason, as the examples of Gerald du Maurier and Tallulah Bankhead suggest, his good portraits of men were less acceptable to their sitters than his weaker pictures of women.
John had painted du Maurier in four sittings during 1928, but the picture had lain in his studio in Mallord Street until Tallulah Bankhead found it there early in 1930. At her insistence it was shown, with her own portrait, at the Royal Academy Summer Show that year when together they caused a sensation. Tallulah reserved her portrait for the special price of one thousand pounds, but the du Maurier was for sale. Since his knighthood in 1922, du Maurier had become the acknowledged sovereign of the British theatre. But in John’s portrait, one of his more sombre studies, the actor-manager’s expression appeared almost criminal. Du Maurier had prayed never to see the picture again, and after it was exhibited at Burlington House he issued a distressed statement proclaiming that it ‘showed all the misery of my wretched soul… It would drive me either to suicide or strong drink.’78 John, apparently at a loss to account for this response from so fashionable an actor, suggested that perhaps it was insufficiently permeated with sex appeal: ‘In my innocence I had omitted to repair his broken nose.’79
John had imagined the picture hanging at the Garrick Club, but Tallulah herself bought it (‘even though I had to go in hock’80) and carried it off to the United States. It was, however, her own portrait that, as her legend grew, became the more celebrated. ‘My most valuable possession is my Augustus John portrait,’ she wrote in her autobiography:81 and since Lord Duveen had offered her one hundred thousand dollars for it, this may have been literally true. Opinion since then has moderated. The judgement of one critic in 1930 – that it was ‘the greatest portraiture since Gainsborough’s “Perdita”’ – now looks excessive.82 According to some who saw it, John’s first image of Tallulah – a thin face blown lightly on to the canvas – had been exquisite. But the finished work was a little disappointing. ‘Perhaps she has just that initial quality and no follow through,’ T. E. Lawrence tactfully suggested.83 Tallulah’s friends objected that the baleful fragility of the painting had little connection with her ravishing beauty – the blue eyes, voluptuous mouth and honey-coloured hair falling in waves on to her shoulders. Yet over the years she suffered a curious change into the very replica of this picture – either an act of will on her part or, on John’s, of foresight.
‘I’m not a fashionable portrait painter,’ he told John Freeman.84 Perhaps the most endearingly deficient picture of his career was the painting of the Queen (now the Queen Mother) he failed to finish between the years 1939 and 1961.
John had been tentatively suggested as a royal portrait painter by Lord D’Abernon as early as 1925. In his shocked rejection, King George V’s Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham, replied (11 December 1925): ‘No! H.M. wouldn’t look at A.J.!! and so A.J. wouldn’t be able to look at H.M.!!’ The notion merited only a joke. Then, in 1937, shortly after George VI had come to the throne, Hugo Pitman (who had been in love with her and become her stockbroker) nervously invited John to meet the new Queen – provided he arrived dead sober. The implication angered John. For a moment he looked murderous, then, his face clearing, he inquired: ‘Must I be dead sober when I leave?’ One way or another the meeting had gone well. The possibility of a portrait was touched on, though nothing decided. ‘It is very nice to know that the Queen still wants me to paint her,’ John wrote to Maud Cazalet two years later. ‘Needless to say I am at her service and would love to do her portrait whenever it is possible.’ In September the outbreak of war seemed to put an end to this plan. ‘No chance of doing Her Majesty now...’85
But to John’s surprise, the Queen did not see the war as an obstacle. ‘The Queen is going to sit for me,’ he wrote on 23 November 1939, ‘…I shall probably start on it in a few days.’86 At this time of crisis, an inspiring new picture of the Queen in Garter robes was what the nation needed. John, who had overlooked the national significance such a portrait might have, was thinking more informally. The Queen could sit, he thought, during weekends at Windsor Castle – it would be ‘a well-earned rest’ for her. ‘I would stay in some pub,’ he explained to Mrs Cazalet, ‘and no doubt there’s a suitable room at the castle for painting.’87 If not, doubtless there’d be something at the pub – ‘one could keep it very dark’. The Queen, he hoped, would wear ‘a pretty costume with a hat’: something ‘décolletée’. She would be a tremendous success in Hollywood – the destination he vaguely had in mind for the portrait.
Arrangements were completed in October. The portrait was to be painted in Buckingham Palace, where a room with a north-east aspect had been set aside. All painting equipment must be dispatched in advance. John himself should seek admittance by the Privy Purse entrance. It was possible that Her Majesty might be graciously pleased to accept the picture as a token of the artist’s ‘deep admiration and respect’. The first sitting was scheduled for Tuesday, 31 October 1939 at eleven o’clock, but the Queen would consent to receive him at two forty-five on the Monday afternoon for a preliminary interview.
John was horrified. By the time Monday came he felt ‘very odd’ and wired to call the meeting off. It had been, he diagnosed, an attack of the influenza, though with a slip of the pen he described himself as suffering from ‘the influence’.
The Palace, meanwhile, awaited news from him ‘to say when you will feel yourself available again’.88 Sittings began next month. ‘I’m dreading it,’ John told Egerton Cooper as he set off in a taxi. What should the Queen wear? At last an evening gown was agreed on, but an extraordinary eagerness to discover fresh difficulties possessed John. ‘Is there a platform available at the Palace?’ he suddenly demanded. ‘It should be a foot from the ground or slightly more.’ Could they, he also wanted to know, import an easel with a forward lean? By the beginning of 1940, the sittings were transferred to another room, where John had installed a new electric daylight system. ‘I feel sure it will prove a success and will illuminate Your Majesty in a far more satisfactory way besides rendering one independent of the weather.’ It was the weather,89 nevertheless, that offered the next interruption. ‘The temperature in the Yellow Room is indistinguishable to that reported in Finland,’ the Queen’s Private Secretary advised, ‘and Her Majesty would like therefore to wait until some temperature more agreeable… makes resumption of the portrait possible.’ There was no difficulty here: John knew how to wait. But when sittings started again in March fresh difficulties had bloomed. Though there was much chinoiserie ‘from the Brighton Pavilion. Quite amusing in itself’,90 there was ‘lack of back-ground,’ John ejaculated. ‘…What is wanted is a tapestry of the right sort – with a bit of sky and landscape. Perhaps I shall have to invent one.’ The Palace, anxious for John to avoid invention, hurried in tapestries and decorations. These, at John’s request, were subsequently removed, and afterwards at John’s insistence returned. With and without them, he struggled on. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if people have been peeping at the beginning of it and seeing it merely sketched out in green,’ he suspected. ‘…I loathe people peeping… ’ Green, he had decided, was a mistake. But when he arrived at the Palace to change it to blue, Her Majesty was not there. ‘As the Queen understood from you that you were going to have your tonsils out, Her Majesty made other arrangements,’ her secretary explained.
The trouble was John’s paralysing shyness. He could not overcome it. ‘She has been absolutely angelic in posing so often and with such cheerfulnes,’ he told Mrs Cazalet on 13 June 1940. But he could make no contact with her – she was not real. He wanted to make her real… Good God! It was an impossible situation.
Something of these inhibitions was sensed at Buckingham Palace. In next to no time sherry was introduced into the sittings; and then, in a cupboard reserved for John’s painting equipment, a private bottle of brandy. As a further aid to relaxation, the Griller Quartet (unnervingly misheard by John as the ‘Gorilla Quartet’) was wheeled into an anteroom to play works by English composers. Eventually it was Hitler who came to the rescue, his blitz on London providing the ostensible motive everyone had been seeking to end the ordeal. ‘At this moment, what is described as “the last sitting” is proceeding,’ the Queen’s Private Secretary wrote on 26 June 1940. John put his bravest face on the matter: ‘it looks very near done to a turn,’ he told Mrs Cazalet.
During the summer he described the portrait as ‘lingering’, adding that ‘H.M. is the best of women and I am very devoted to her.’ That autumn it was moved to his studio in the country where he continued to brood over it. ‘I can see a good Johnish picture – not a Cecil Beaton creation or anything of that sort,’ he had claimed. Later, on 10 February 1941, he evolved a new plan ‘to bring Mr Cecil Beaton to the Palace to take some photographs of Her Majesty, which should help me to complete her picture’. The Queen agreed to this. She did more: the following year she wrote to remind John of her portrait, suggesting that it might help matters if she wore a hat. ‘If you are in London, I could come to your studio if you have any windows, for we have none in Buckingham Palace, and it is too dark and dusty to paint in anyway.’91
John felt acutely his sense of failure. He shut away the portrait and no one was allowed to see it. In December 1948, the Queen wrote again suggesting a drawing of her daughter Margaret: ‘I could easily bring her to your studio, and I promise that I won’t bring an orchestra with me!’92 Nothing came of this or of her wish to commission a cartoon from him for a tapestry, and it was not until the early 1960s that the Queen Mother, as she had become, finally took possession of the portrait. Under thick dust and massed cobwebs, in a world of rats and spiders, it had lain with canvases from all periods in one of the cellars below John’s studio. Here in 1960 a foraging West End dealer stumbled across it. ‘Perhaps the Queen Mother would not mind deferring the completion of her portrait till next spring when the light would be more favourable,’93 John urgently requested on 30 July 1960. In March 1961, at a show of John’s ‘Paintings and Drawings not previously exhibited’, and despite a desperate last-minute attempt by John to withdraw it, the portrait was revealed to the public. Shortly afterwards a shipping company, to commemorate the launching of a large tanker, presented it to the Queen Mother. ‘I want to tell you what a tremendous pleasure it gives me to see it once again,’ she wrote to John on 19 July 1961. ‘It looks so lovely in my drawing-room, and has cheered it up no end! The sequins glitter, and the roses and the red chair give a fine glow, and I am so happy to have it… ’94
After almost twenty-two years the portrait had come home where, greatly loved, it remained. It is not the picture of a queen, nor of a woman: but of a fairy princess. It is disarmingly unfinished, and no masterpiece. Stern critics have condemned it. Yet the sitter has seen something to which others are perhaps blind.
‘I believe Papa’s chief ambition in life is to see me an R.A. I fear he will die a disappointed man.’
Augustus John to Gwen John (May 1920)
From commissioned portraits, with all their rules of vanity and forced politeness, John turned with relief back to the ranks of his family. For them there was little relief. The ordeal of sitting had begun at the age of two-and-a-half. To the girls, Poppet and Vivien, he was a fearful figure. Each morning they would wait to discover which of them was doomed for the day. Their tears were stemmed with lumps of sugar: and the painting went remorselessly on. The slightest movement of the head or body was immediately corrected with the point of the brush used like a conductor’s baton.
The studio was John’s battlefield. His preparatory drill never changed. Though he might debate with a woman about the wearing, or not, of a dress, he seldom posed his subjects. ‘Sit down!’ was his instruction to men on leading them up to the platform. After that the sitter was merely an ‘object’, an arrangement of shapes, surfaces and colours. John would come up very close, too close, and glare. It was difficult not to start back at the ferocity of those glaring eyes an inch away. Then with a grunt he retreated: and battle began.
He painted with intense physical concentration, working without words, breathing heavily, occasionally stamping his foot, drawing on his pipe which uttered small bubbling sounds. Sometimes it appeared as if he had stopped breathing altogether, and then everything seemed to stop – the clocks, the bees, the birds on the trees. Perspiration broke out on his temples, the pipe trembled between his lips, and the only sound for miles seemed to be the brush jabbing on the canvas. Suddenly he would jump backwards, knocking over a chair; there was a crash and a curse, and he would begin pacing back and forwards. The sitter, his body aching as if on a rack, appeared forgotten. Finally a rest was called, like half-time at a football match, and John would sit down for a long look at the canvas. Two or three minutes later he was up and at it again.
There were variations in this drill. Occasionally he played music on the radio, or if things were going well the silence might be splintered by a Welsh poem or a snatch of song. Sometimes he smoked cigarettes instead of a pipe, and as he advanced and retreated before the canvas, he would throw the stubs into a corner, unerringly missing the ashtray and waste-paper basket, and a few times starting a small fire. For those who were practised sitters it was possible to tell which part of them he was working on, and to keep that part alive: and invariably when he came to the mouth he would summon his own lips into a rosebud.
Whatever the variations, it was the bursting effort to concentrate that impressed his subjects. The studio seemed to throb with energy as he worked. But somehow the moment of finishing never quite arrived and then, at the bell for tea, he would stop instantly, like a cricketer drawing stumps.
These seemed the methods almost of an action painter rather than the Royal Academician he had recently become. Over a number of years his election as an Associate had been painfully imminent – so much so that it had become his habit to leave the country at the time elections took place. ‘Noticed with the greatest relief that I was not elected,’ he wrote from Dieppe to Cynthia Asquith in May 1920. Yet by this time his persistent non-election had in itself become considerable news, pulling the headlines from under the feet of those who had been chosen. ‘We learn’, announced The Times in 1920, ‘that Mr Augustus John has received no direct intimation of any decision of the Royal Academy to open its doors to him.’95 People looked to his election as a symbol of Burlington House being prepared to accept what were called ‘broader views and wider sympathies’. In a letter to his sister Gwen, he makes it clear that he had allowed his name to be put up, ‘but made sure they wouldn’t elect me by making certain uncomplimentary statements in the press. It has been an amusing history altogether.’96 Yet when the offer did come in April the following year, he decided to accept. Then he grew defensive. ‘To many’, he wrote, ‘it seemed to be not a triumph but a surrender. Had I not been a Slade student? Was I not a member of the New English Art Club? Did I not march in the front ranks of the insurgents? The answer to these questions is “yes”. But had I cultivated the Royal Academy in any way? Had I ever submitted a single work to the Selection Committee?… History answers “no”. Without even blowing my own trumpet the walls of Jericho had fallen!… I acknowledged and returned the compliment.’97
But the fact was that John had taken pride in being outside the Royal Academy. ‘Never exhibited at R.A.’, he scrawled across the form when sending five pictures to the ‘Exhibition of Works by Certain Modern Artists of Welsh Birth or Extraction’. Old Edwin John would sometimes write to Gwen telling her how ‘very sorry’ he was that Gus had not become a Royal Academician. ‘He practically asked not to be elected.’98 Did his election as an Associate mean that Gus was moving in his father’s direction? In any event he had made his father a happy man.
In December 1928 he was elected to full membership and the process of ‘self-sacrifice’, as he called it, was complete. But his passage with the RA was far rougher than his autobiographical writings allow. To start with his father wrote to congratulate him on achieving the crown of his career. Then Sean O’Casey wrote to commiserate with him on being ‘soiled’ by contact with the World, the Flesh and the Devil – ‘three excellent things,’ John retorted. ‘…I assure you that it won’t make the slightest difference to me… at any rate, it will be a useful disguise. Cézanne longed for official recognition and the Legion of Honour – and didn’t get either. Van Gogh dreamt of electric light, hot and cold water, w.c’s and general confort anglais. I have them all and remain unsatisfied.’99
The chief use of Burlington House lay in providing a new market for his wares at a time when the New English Art Club had faded.*2 It was, as he explained to his old Slade friend Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘the cheapest & probably the best place to show at’.100 But he hated sitters who were anxious to have their portraits shown at the Academy. ‘Kindly get it into your head that the R. Academy is not the important thing,’ he instructed one of them. ‘What is important is to do the picture.’101 T. E. Lawrence had the right attitude. ‘Damn the Academy, please, for me!’102 John’s view depended partly upon the President. In 1928 he was reasonably happy exhibiting pictures there; in 1938 he rebelled. It was in this year that Wyndham Lewis painted his portrait of T. S. Eliot. In the spring it was submitted to the Hanging Committee of the Royal Academy which, to Eliot’s relief and Lewis’s indignation, rejected it. On learning this, John at once issued a statement full of powerful negatives for the press:
‘I very much regret to make a sensation, but it cannot be helped. Nothing that Mr Wyndham Lewis paints is negligible or to be condemned lightly. I strongly disagree with this rejection. I think it is an inept act on the part of the Academy. The rejection of Mr Wyndham Lewis’s portrait by the Academy has determined my decision to resign from that body… I shall henceforth experience no longer the uncomfortable feeling of being in a false position as a member of an institution with whose general policy I am constantly in disagreement. I shall be happier and more honest in rejoining the ranks of those outside, where I naturally belong.’
This statement provoked an extraordinary response in the press in Britain, the United States and, breaking through the walls of art insularity, France. ‘Premier May be Questioned’, ran a headline in the Morning Post. ‘He has been meaning to [resign] for years,’ Dorelia wrote to his son Edwin. ‘There was a devil of a fuss.’103 With some bewilderment, it was reported that the Academy itself had received no notification of John’s resignation. In fact he had written a formal letter to the President, Sir William Llewellyn, three days beforehand, but neglected to post it. ‘After the crowning ineptitude of the rejection of Wyndham Lewis’s picture I feel it is impossible for me to remain [any] longer a member of the R.A.,’ he told Llewellyn. He had been searching round for an escape partly because he disliked Llewellyn. The Eliot portrait provided him with a perfect motive, and he wrote to Lewis to thank him: ‘I resign with gratitude to you for affording me so good a reason.’
Lewis was delighted, suggesting that all sorts of politico-artistic activities should issue out of this rumpus, including the formation by the two of them of a new Salon des Refusés. But John demurred, delivering instead a neatly placed blow, just below the belt, when he let it be known that he had not seen the portrait of Eliot at the time of its rejection. ‘I wasn’t thinking of doing anybody a kindness and I don’t give a damn for that picture,’ he assured Laura Knight, ‘but I acted as a better R.A. than you and others who let the show go to pot from year to year. I know I haven’t done anything directly to affect the policy of the Institution. It seemed pretty hopeless to oppose the predominant junta of deadly conservatism which rules. If by my beastly action I shall have brought some fresh air into Burlington House I shall feel justified.’104
Two years later, Llewellyn having left, he accepted re-election to become what Lewis described as ‘the most distinguished Royal Academician… of a sleeping-partner order’. In 1944 he almost woke up to find himself President. Once again the romance of honour attracted him, but common sense counselled refusal: once again he prevaricated. ‘I would of course like to do my best for the R.A.,’ he confided to Philip Connard, ‘and would be fully conscious of the honour of such a position but am only doubtful of my ability to cope with the duties, official and social, it would entail. Here’s the snag. Apart from this, as P.R.A. is only an extension of R.A. I would have no logical reason to refuse.’105 This snag was successful enough to stave off his election, and by seventeen votes to twenty-four he secured second place. ‘I was in grave danger of being elected PRA recently,’ he told Edwin, ‘but to my great relief [Alfred] Munnings quite rightly was preferred.’106
During the 1920s, John had allowed himself to be overtaken by several major changes in the gallery world. Once the war was over, Knewstub, slightly bombed, emerged to dream again. From his upstairs room at the Chenil he gazed across Chelsea and saw in his mind a great art centre with himself at its summit.107 The idea was irresistible. Although he had no head for business, he was possessed of a genius for advertisement. He whispered into the ears of the wealthy; he wrote well-directed letters of indignation and enthusiasm; he interviewed himself in newspapers. News of his dreams travelled to Boston and Calcutta.108 Then, towards the end of 1923, vast notices began to spread themselves across the press.109 His arguments were simple. The galleries of London were closing. The old Grosvenor Gallery had long ago collapsed and its successor, the New Gallery, been converted into a cinema. The Grafton Gallery, until recently the home of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, was now a dance hall. The Doré Gallery and Messrs Dowdeswell’s in Bond Street, the Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall: all had disappeared. The Society of British Artists and the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, in Suffolk Street and Pall Mall East respectively, were threatened with demolition. In such conditions living artists had almost nowhere to exhibit their pictures. ‘The root of the difficulty is obvious,’ Knewstub proclaimed, ‘as is the remedy.’ The difficulties were rates and rents; the remedy decentralization. ‘A new and commodious Art Institution, untrammelled by the impossible burden of West End expenses, has become an urgent need of the day.’ Chelsea, with its literary and artistic traditions, was ‘unquestionably the alternative’.
The New Chenil Galleries was an enlargement of the old Chenil on a Napoleonic scale. The adjoining premises were taken over and, with the aid of George Kennedy, the Bloomsbury architect, robust plans were planted for a ‘temple of the muses’. ‘Under three spacious new roofs’, explained Knewstub, ‘are to be large and small galleries for paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture; a musical society; a literary club or institution, a school of art, a large block of private studios, a first-class restaurant, a cafe or lounge, a library, and a hall that may be let for lectures, concerts, dancing, and other social gatherings.’110
In a letter (30 January 1924) written for publication, John applauded Knewstub: ‘I consider you deserve great credit for showing the imagination to conceive and the business ability to bring to fruition so ambitious an undertaking.’ With the significant exception of The Economist,111 congratulations flowed in from every quarter. Knewstub was beside himself. He published a prospectus; he held meetings; he offered large quantities of shares for subscription; he invented several ‘honorary advisory councils’ on which John’s name was prominent; and he appointed directors including (besides himself) an editor of the Queen, the proprietor of a defunct rival gallery, an eminent conductor and a catering expert. On Saturday, 25 October the foundation stone was laid. After a few words from John Ireland representing music, John himself entered the ring amid cheers, smoking a cigarette and with marks of deep concentration on his brow. Baring his head, he spoke. Though inexperienced in laying stones, he had read that it was customary on these occasions to slay a man and lay his corpse in the foundation of the building, so that his spirit would guard the place from malevolent influences: he now appealed for volunteers whom (raising a mason’s mallet) he could offer an expeditious exit and any amount of posthumous glory. His large uneasy eyes contemplated a crowd that numbered the leonine belletrist Augustine Birrell, the Sitwell brothers in plain clothes, and James Pryde wearing a blue Count d’Orsay coat and soft travelling hat. No one coming forward, John (hoping this would ‘do the trick’) placed a George V half-crown on the lower stone and energetically applied the mortar, bespattering the noblemen and artist’s models in the front row. Suddenly a choir, conjured up by Knewstub, broke into a rendering of ‘Let us now praise famous men’, while John and the other famous men stiffened to attention. ‘In Paris’, commented the Manchester Guardian Weekly, ‘such a figure would be continuously before us on the revue stage and the comic press.’112
A year later the building was ready. Much impressed by its ‘solidity and elegance’, John assured Will Rothenstein that ‘Knewstub with all his faults deserves considerable credit.’ Knewstub not only deserved it, he needed it. By the end of 1926 he was bankrupt, and had resigned his managing directorship – ‘taking a very necessary and long overdue rest and medical treatment’, was how he phrased it in a rather desperate letter to John. The fact was that financial humiliation had finally sent him mad. Searching for someone on whom to stick his own incompetence, he settled collectively for the Bloomsbury Group which, he revealed to John, was scheming to get control of ‘this enterprise of mine’. If it succeeded, ‘there would be a pitiable outlook both for you and for the Company’s liability to you.’ Such financial threats were familiar to John from the days when he had lost money in the original Chenil Gallery and the Chelsea Art School through Knewstub, who ‘was the curse of the place’, as he now told his American dealer Mitchell Kennerley.’113 Nevertheless, Knewstub had a final plan for making the New Chenil ‘one of the most vital Art interests in the world’. Since he had ‘spared no effort whatever and… involved myself substantially in debt’, why should not John and a few other well-known artists ‘get together’, sell their pictures and hand him the money: in short, hold ‘an Exhibition for my benefit’?114 When John declined, Knewstub suddenly realized it had been his disloyalty that, on top of the General Strike, was responsible for the debacle. ‘I’ve known John for twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘If you’d known him for half that time you’d realise what a feat it was.’ To long service, honour is due. But Knewstub’s complaint that John abandoned him in this year of need was a more complicated matter.
On 22 October 1925 John had received a letter from Dudley Tooth explaining that his gallery in Bruton Street was no longer to be exclusively associated ‘with the academic works of deceased masters of the British School’, but intended to ‘deal in the best modern art of to-day’. The letter, asking John to let the gallery handle his future work, apparently went unanswered. Then, in 1926, John held a joint exhibition with his sister Gwen at Knewstub’s New Chenil Gallery. When Dudley Tooth wrote again, on 9 February 1928, Mrs Fleming, acting as go-between, gave him little chance of success. But by that time Knewstub had collapsed and John, who had tried unsuccessfully to find someone to take over the Chelsea art emporium, finally decided to invade the West End. At a meeting on 12 March 1928, Tooth proposed setting up an agency to deal with all John’s pictures (excluding portraits painted to private commission), and holding a one-man show to identify the gallery as John’s sole agents. To these proposals John agreed, his first exhibition at Tooth’s being held in April 1929. It was into this exhibition that Virginia Woolf dashed and ‘was so shocked that I came out again’, she told her sister Vanessa Bell (28 April 1929). ‘You can’t conceive – if I’m to be trusted – the vulgarity, banality, coarseness and commonplaceness of those works, all costing over £400 [equivalent to £10,800 in 1996] and sold in the first hour.’115 Though he could still rake in the money, the ‘age of Augustus John’ was well and truly over.
All this postdated Knewstub’s period of utmost need. After 1927 his friendship with John ceased. When J. B. Manson appealed for a fund to assist him, he received from John a categorical reply: ‘I shall certainly not help Knewstub or any other crooked swine.’116 To many this smelt of ingratitude. But he believed that, in addition to making a hole in his own pocket, Knewstub had taken advantage of Gwen John’s financial innocence to cheat her of fifty pounds. Yet he did help Knewstub’s wife and at least one of her children ‘on the understanding that K[newstub] is to know nothing,’ he instructed Manson. ‘I gather that K’s family see nothing of him and don’t particularly want to.’117
For years Knewstub had modelled himself on John, training his wife to resemble Dorelia; and now John had deserted him. He retired to Hastings, to the singing of the birds and of his kettle. ‘A well-fitted cellar of the best would certainly rejuvenate me,’ he suggested. But in vain. He fell back pitiably on tea. ‘Possibly’, he estimated, ‘the outstanding comfort I have is being able to make good hot tea very easily in the morning… It is an almost indispensable stimulant and restorative.’ He luxuriated in the ‘humiliation’ of National Assistance – which showed how far ‘on the downward path’ he had travelled. He threatened to ‘sell my few possessions’, even his ‘worn out lot of rubbish and rags’; he threatened to live to a hundred so that he might receive a royal telegram for his ‘dear ones the generations ahead’; he threatened, most embarrassingly, to start again: ‘I think I must somehow refit myself with Evening Dress,’ he calculated. Refitted thus, he proposed to write doggerel for charity, in particular the Women’s Voluntary Service. Or else: ‘A lavatory attendant would not be too great an effort,’ he told one of his sisters, ‘and would allow me ample time for quiet meditation.’ But when the family, responding to this blitzkrieg, implored him to visit them, he shook his head. ‘I have had nearly half-a-gallon of my blood drawn from my arm by way of donation to the Blood Transfusion Service,’ he explained, refusing the invitation. ‘…I am by far and away the oldest in the whole of this South-East Area Service. The true “Blue Blood” is graded “O” – as mine is – and is the most suitable for a child, or even the most delicate of patients. So you will understand, my dear, that I cannot abandon my interests in this town – only a fortnight ago I was called upon for another pint… Courage as always, until the final peace comes to us.’
So he lived on, an old man ‘making my own bed; blacking my own grate; washing my own shirt; darning my own socks; and doctoring myself. Upon his family, he took revenge for the bitterness of his life, smiling with self-pity, bragging of his modesty, rubbing his poverty into their faces like an enormous scab. Had he mentioned the time, he often wondered, Augustus John ‘said to me nearly forty years ago that in his opinion your tactfulness was the greatest of your many charms’? He would have liked to remind John of that now, face to face, here in Hastings.
But John had escaped and was moving into new territories.
‘I am employed mainly in accepting invitations & getting out of keeping them.’
Augustus to Dorelia (27 April 1924)
‘Whenever I see a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape I am reminded of him,’ wrote the painter A. R. Thomson. Most years, ‘to refresh myself’, John would ease his way down to Provence, taking the wine ‘with great gusto’.118 One day he would suddenly announce that they were off, and everything was dropped. Cats, daughters, perhaps a son or governess – all filed into the train and by night meandered through the charging carriages, while John sat peacefully asleep in the corridor.
But Martigues was no longer the place it had been before the war. More cafés were opening up on the cours de la République, more motor cars herded under the plane trees. A new bascule bridge was put up, useful but unbeautiful. Creeping industrialism was beginning to mar that air of innocence which had first attracted John to this little community of fishermen. Progress did not stampede through Martigues: it infiltrated. For ten years he and his family continued to come and then, submitting to the advance of commercialism, left for ever.
Bazin, that essayist of the air, was now dead and his daughter, it had to be admitted, ‘rather mad’.119 Once intended as mistress for Quinn, she was recast as Poppet and Vivien’s governess. The two girls loved the Villa Ste-Anne. ‘It seems to me’, wrote Poppet,120 ‘that life went by very smoothly on these visits to Martigues. There were great expeditions round the country and picnics as many as we could wish for… Saturday nights were very gay’, dining ‘chez Pascal’, then descending to the Cercle Cupidon and dancing to their heart’s content while John, a glass of marc-cassis at his elbow, sat proudly watching them. Like the village girls, Poppet and Vivien danced together until, tiring of this, Poppet took to lipstick. ‘After that we hardly missed a dance with the young men.’ These young men would present themselves at John’s table to ask for his permission then, after the dance was over, escort the girls back to him. ‘Augustus seemed to enjoy watching us and sometimes would whirl us round the floor himself,’ Poppet remembered.
‘Then suddenly one Saturday night at dinner he looked at me with a glaring eye and growled: “Wipe that muck off your face!” Whereupon Vivien piped up with: “But she won’t get asked to dance without it – they’ll think she’s too young.” Augustus was furious. “Wipe it off!” he shouted, “and stop ogling the boys!” Then I lost my temper (always a good thing to do I later found) and I flew at him, telling him it was he who ogled all the time and that I must have picked up the habit from him – also that I noticed the girls he ogled used lipstick and I was jolly well going to do so too! This made him laugh, the whole thing passed off and I continued to dance with le joli garçon every Saturday night… So life went on.’121
For John, life depended upon weather, flowers, girls. If the sun shone there was a chance of happiness. Though ‘there was a brothel near John’s villa I always found him playing draughts,’ protested A. R. Thomson. ‘…He liked to wander in back streets of old France, smell of wine-and-garlic or wine-and-cheese in his nostrils.’ Then, if he spotted an unusual-looking woman he would rise and with swollen eyes, pursue her. But more often he found the models he needed from among his family, posing them in a setting of olive or pine trees, the speckled aromatic hills beyond and, further off, bordering the blue Étang, distant amethyst cliffs.
But there were other days when the sun refused to shine and he would energetically tinker with plans to be off elsewhere, anywhere. ‘The weather is cold and grey,’ he wrote to Dorelia. ‘…There’s nothing much in the way of flowers here and I have no models. I might as well be dead.’ He would decide to leave, return to London, paint portraits; then the clouds dispersed and he was suddenly negotiating to buy another house there. ‘Martigues is like some rustic mistress one is always on the point of leaving,’ he confided to Mitchell Kennerley, ‘but who looks so lovely at the last moment that one falls back into her arms.’122
*
John’s scheme, ‘quite wise for once’,123 was to pass his winters in Provence painting intermittently out of doors, and then, in the spring or summer, explore new regions. In May 1922 he found himself in Spain. His son Robin was then in Granada studying Castilian affairs with the tutor. ‘I don’t know if I can get painting materials in Spain,’ John had hesitated; and then: ‘Spanish people, I imagine, are hideous.’124 But he went.
But he went first to Paris for a hectic week with Tommy Earp, then descended south. ‘Down here in the wilds life is much calmer,’ he assured Viva Booth, ‘indeed there are perhaps too many vacant moments and unoccupied gaps.’ Like all his random travels, there was no plot or continuity. Spain was a series of impressions: in Madrid the sight of Granero, the famous matador, limping from the ring where, the following Sunday, he would be killed; at the Café Ingles other heroes of the bullring in Andalusian hats and pigtails ‘looking rather like bulls themselves’,125 vibrating with energy; the blind, hideously deformed beggars crouching in the gutters and appealing for alms; and, at evening, the ladies of the bourgeoisie collecting in the pastry-shops to ‘pass an hour or two before dinner in the consumption of deleterious tarts and liqueurs’.126 Then, in the Alhambra, a glimpse of two friends: Pepita d’Albaicin, an elegant gitana dancer, and Augustine Birrell again, until quite recently Chief Secretary for Ireland – ‘a surprising combination’; and at Ugijar the spectacle of Robin full of silent Spanish and the tutor taking very bad photographs.
By mid-June his white paint had ‘just about come to an end’127 and he started back, crossing the Sierra Nevada and descending on the north to Guadix, where he was to catch a train to Barcelona.
‘The ascent was long. Snow lay upon the heights. At last we reached the Pass and, surmounting it, struck the downward trail. A thick fog veiled the land. This suddenly dispersed, disclosing an illimitable plain in which here and there white cities glittered. The distant mountains seemed to hang among the clouds. At our feet blue gentians starred our path, reminding me of Burren in County Clare… the country became more and more enchanting. As we rode on, verdurous woods, grassy lawns and gentle streams gladdened our eyes so long accustomed to the stark and sunbaked declivities of the Alpujarras.’128
Spain, John told Dorelia, was ‘very fine in parts, but there are immense stretches of nothing’. The spirit of the counry had come near, but it had not taken hold of him. ‘Art, like life, perpetuates itself by contact,’ he wrote. The moment of contact came as he was leaving Barcelona. ‘I was walking to the station, when I saw three Gitanas engaged in buying flowers at a booth. Struck numb with astonishment by the flashing beauty and elegance of these young women, I almost missed my train.’ He went on to Marseilles, but the vision of these gitanas persisted: ‘I was unable to dismiss it.’ In desperation he hired a car and returned all the way to Barcelona. But ‘of course I did not find the gypsies again. One never does.’
Spain incubated in his mind, but never hatched. When he flew back there in December 1932 on his way to Majorca, rain was to make the world unpaintable; after which Franco, like a hated bird of prey, kept him off until too late.
‘I am sure it will stimulate me,’ he had written to Ottoline Morrell, ‘and I shall come back fresher and more myself.’129 In fact he came back as someone else. He had seen many pictures in Spain. ‘At the Prado I found Velasquez much greater and more marvellous than I had been in the habit of thinking,’ he told Dorelia. ‘There is nobody to touch him.’ He went to the Academy of San Fernando and the shabby little church of San Antonio de la Florida to see the Goya frescoes of the cupola: ‘My passion for Goya was boundless.’ The streets of Madrid seemed to throb and pulse with Goyaesque characters afterwards, bringing the place alive for him. There were other paintings too that ‘bowled me over’: Rubens’s ‘The Three Graces’ and, ‘a dream of noble luxury’, Titian’s ‘Venus’. Only El Greco, at the Prado, disappointed him. Yet, mysteriously, it was El Greco who was to affect his painting. John’s ‘Symphonie Espagnole’ of 1923 is a self-confessed essay in the El Greco style that marshals all the mawkishness and conveys little of the ecstatic rhythm. These weeks in Spain form a parallel to his journey through northern Italy in 1910. From Italy he had discovered a tradition to which he belonged; in Spain he lost himself. ‘He is painting very much like El Greco now since his visit to Spain,’ Christopher Wood noted in December 1922. This influence of El Greco became a mannerism. The lengthening of the head worked well for few of his sitters, and the elongation of the body seemed to draw life out of it. It was an attempt by John to speak a new language, but he could say little in it that was original.
*
It was as a Distinguished Guest of the Irish Nation that in the summer of 1924 John went with Eve Fleming to Dublin. The occasion was a festival of ‘fatuous self-glorification’ called the Taillteann Games. Oliver St John Gogarty, as commander of the social operations, had billeted him with Lord Dunsany in County Meath. ‘Here I am entrapped,’ John wrote desperately from Dunsany Castle. ‘…Mrs Gogarty has developed into a sort of Duchess. I must get out of this. It was very fool-hardy to have come over.’130 Gogarty had warned Dunsany not to give John any alcohol – which made Dunsany determined to offer his guest as much as he could want. This would have suited John well, had Gogarty not confided to him that Dunsany was a fierce teetotaller. The result was that, in an agony of politeness, John persisted in refusing everything until, according to Compton Mackenzie, ‘Dunsany started to explain how to play the great Irish harp… After they went to bed Augustus climbed over the wall of Dunsany Park and walked the fourteen miles to Dublin.’131
During the festival banquet the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army delivered a long speech in Gaelic during which the municipal gas and electricity workers decided upon a strike. Unperturbed by the blackness, the Commander spoke on. After a minute, John leant over to Compton Mackenzie, and whispered: ‘What’s going on?’ Mackenzie explained. ‘Thank God,’ breathed John. ‘I’m only drunk then. I thought I’d gone mad.’
*
For one month in the spring of 1925 John stayed at the British Embassy in Berlin and, with a key to the side entrance, was free to explore this ‘strange and monstrous city’ at all hours. His impressions were scattered: Max Liebermann at eighty painting better than ever; ‘some marvellous wall decorations brought back from Turkistan by a German digger’;132 beer ‘like nectar’; and girls, ‘hearty creatures and sometimes very good looking’ who, on a more vital inspection, were revealed as being men ‘devoted to buggery’ and ‘furnished by the police with licences to adopt female attire’.133 As for embassy life, it was all very swell but ‘too strenuous for me… there are hours of intense boredom.’
Of the three portraits John painted while in Berlin with Eve Fleming, the most important was of Gustav Stresemann, the German Foreign Minister. It was Lord D’Abernon who arranged the sittings during which the Locarno Treaties advanced to the point of signature. In Lord D’Abernon’s diplomatic language, Stresemann’s ‘lively intelligence and extreme facility of diction’ inclined him ‘to affect monologue rather than interchange of ideas’.134 The British Ambassador could not get a word in. By early March, when sittings began, their negotiations had reached the verge of collapse. It was then that he had his idea. Since John knew little German, D’Abernon reasoned, there could be no grounds for not carrying on their discussions while he worked. The advantage was that Stresemann would be ‘compelled to maintain immobility and comparative silence’. John, by treating the German Foreign Minister as one of his own family, exercised his role strongly. At the first sitting, after a sentence or two from Lord D’Abernon, Stresemann broke in and was about to go on at his customary length when John ‘armed with palette and paint-brushes’ asserted his artistic authority. ‘I was therefore able to labour on with my own views without interruption,’ D’Abernon records. ‘…The assistance given by the inhibitive gag of the artist was of extreme value… Reduced to abnormal silence… Stresemann’s quickness of apprehension was such that he rapidly seized and assimilated the further developments to which the Pact proposals might lead.’135
The Locarno Pact, for which Stresemann was awarded the Nobel Prize, was eventually less controversial than the portrait. Stresemann faced it bravely and ‘even his wife’, John reported, ‘admits it’s like him at his worst’.136 To Dorelia he wrote: ‘I like Stresemann. He is considered the strongest man in German politics.’ But Lord D’Abernon, who now felt some tenderness for Stresemann, thought the painting ‘a clever piece of work’ though ‘not at all flattering: it makes Stresemann devilishly sly.’137 This proved an accurate foretaste of popular reaction. Nobody much liked Stresemann, and no party trusted him. When the portrait was shown in New York in 1928, John was much acclaimed for his ‘cruelty’. Modestly he rejected this praise. ‘I have nothing to do with German politics, but I thought Stresemann an excellent fellow, most sympathetic, intelligent and even charming,’ he wrote on 13 March 1928 to Mitchell Kennerley,138 adding with less modesty: ‘One must remember that even God chastises those whom he loves.’
*
Apart from Stresemann’s silences, John had not greatly relished Berlin. The motor cars, the hard-boiled eggs, combined with a lack of handkerchiefs, unnerved him. He felt ‘very impatient’ to go somewhere new, and paint. ‘For God’s sake learn up a little Italian,’ he urged Dorelia. It was May when he boarded the train for Italy, with Dorelia, Poppet and Vivien. Romilly too was coming. ‘In a fit of megalomania’,139 he had decided to cross the Alps on foot, aided by the tutor with fourteen schoolgirls ‘on their way to spend a week-end in Paris’.140 Drifting through Italy at the head of the main party John lost his wallet with all their money in it. This calamity, though credited to the quick fingers of Italian train thieves, may in fact have been attributable to Eileen Hawthorne’s abortion for which urgent funds had just then been prescribed. For some days John’s party were luxuriously stranded in the most expensive hotel in Naples (the only one that would accept their credit), and when they finally approached the ‘barbarous island’ of Ischia, their destination, they were irritated to see Romilly, his feet in ruins, waving to them from the harbour.
Skirting the shores, John sought anxiously for some pictorial motif. They were to stay at the Villa Teheran, a little wooden house with a veranda, that stood by itself on a miniature bay. It belonged to Mrs Nettleship and, being loaded with fleas, proved uninhabitable: ‘it was clear this place offered nothing to a painter.’141 John marched his family off to Forio, the next town along the coast, and quartered them more happily above some vineyards overlooking the sea. The oleander, nespoli, quince, orange, lemon and pepper trees, ‘with the addition of a bottle of Strega’, contributed greatly, John recalled, ‘towards our surrender to the spirit of the place. Indeed, at night, when the moon shone, as it generally did… resistance had been folly.’142 But it was as holiday-maker, not primarily as painter, that John surrendered. He would float on his back in the phosphorescent sea for hours, while Dorelia bathed more grandly in a black silk chemise that billowed about her as she entered the waves. There were picnics on the beach, sunbathing on the long flat roof of their new villa, and expeditions through the island behind a strongly smelling horse. ‘Apart from drowning, life on the island presented few risks,’ John grumbled.143 Even the werewolves, reported to range the mountain, remained invisible. So, it was back to portrait painting, ‘finding myself very well occupied here with the two superbly fat daughters of the local Contessa’.144 The cook’s little girls also came to sit, side by side in a window, wearing alarmingly white-starched dresses. But a portrait of Mussolini, arranged by an ardent Fascist they had met, fell through. In his place Dorelia assembled various exotic blooms: and so John added to his flower pictures, the best of which, wrote the art critic Richard Shone, have ‘something of the freshness of Manet’s late flower paintings’.145
*
John was destined to cross the Atlantic six times; and, in one form or another, the United States visited him several times more. The purpose of all this traffic was the innocent one of ‘making a useful bit of money’.146
He had first attracted attention in the United States when, in 1910, his portrait of William Nicholson was shown at the Carnegie Institute’s International Exhibition in Pittsburgh. Travelling there for the first time thirteen years later it was as the guest of the Carnegie Institute, which had invited him to act as the British representative on its jury. He embarked on 28 March 1923, elated to be on his way at last to the land of his boyhood day-dreams. ‘The Americans all wear caps and smoking-suits in the evenings, and smoke very long cigars,’ he wrote to Dorelia from the SS Olympic. ‘They are very friendly people.’ When his hat flew off into the sea, they rushed up in numbers to offer him their own which, one by one as he accepted them, also flew off. ‘There must be a continuous track of caps along our route.’ On board he met several passengers who petitioned him to paint portraits: Mrs Harry Payne Whitney, ‘quite a pleasant woman but infernally lazy’; a ‘big fat sententious oil king… who argues with me’; and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who told him ‘startling things about the spook world. It really seems quite a good place somewhat superior to this one in fact… Lady Conan Doyle is like people I’ve met in my youth – all spiritual love and merriment and dowdy clothes.’
Of all contemporary British artists, John was then the best known in northern America. At the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York no other modern painter, with the exception of Odilon Redon, had been so well represented.147 The huge Armory had been packed with the elite of New York ‘cheering the different American artists, cheering Augustus John, cheering the French...’148 Critics and journalists had soon been dispatched to interview John, and many reports of his ‘recent activities’ appeared in American papers. ‘Augustus John is now at the height of his fame,’ the New York magazine Vanity Fair had declared in June 1916. ‘Not even the war… has taken public attention off Britain’s most conspicuous native painter.’
On arriving, hatless, in New York harbour he was penned down by a press of journalists who, like pirates, boarded the ship even before it berthed. ‘They sought to get a “story” out of me. I stood them a drink instead.’149 They were delighted by his appearance – ‘thoroughly consistent in living up to what he ought to look like’; he thought them ‘nice boys’.
That evening, after dinner at the Coffee House, Frank Crowninshield whirled him round the city and eventually landed him back at the Biltmore Hotel ‘exhausted and bewildered by an orgy of colour, noise, smartness and multitudinous legs’.150
Of Pittsburgh, where he arrived next day, John remembered little but the boundless hospitality of its natives and the ‘infernal splendour’ of their steelworks. He did not stay long. He had been invited to Buffalo to paint an impeccable old lady, Mrs Goodyear. On the station platform at Buffalo the sitter’s son, Conger Goodyear, was surprised to see hovering at John’s elbow the Assistant Director of the Carnegie Museum, John O’Connor. O’Connor whispered that he had come to explain away the ‘extraordinary capacity’ of John’s drinking habits. ‘I replied, somewhat haughtily that I thought Buffalo men could take care of themselves in the drinking line,’ Goodyear reported. ‘Pittsburgh might have suffered but I had every confidence in my fellow citizens. I was wrong.’151
John was lodged at the Saturn Club, reputedly – in those days of Prohibition – ‘the most bibulous of our social institutions’. He appreciated the compliment. ‘This club is a very good place’, he acknowledged, ‘full of determined anti-Prohibitionists… There is a little back room with lockers all round the walls in which the members keep their “hootch”. About 6 o’clock this room gets densely packed with a crowd of vociferating men wildly mixing cocktails. I have the freedom of Conger Goodyear’s locker.’152 For part of the first evening, about which he could recall nothing, his host ‘participated lap by lap’. ‘The following afternoon and evening I decided to stay aloof and keep count,’ Goodyear wrote. ‘Some of my friends formed relay teams to pace the visitor. The official score showed seventeen cocktails for our guest without visible effect other than a slight letting down of British taciturnity. There were a few highballs during dinner and after and we sat in a respectful silence as the champion walked a straight path bedwards.’153
Work on the portrait sped along intermittently, and sometimes John would escort the old lady politely to the shops. One morning, as she was emerging from her dressmaker, Mrs Goodyear cracked a joke, fell down a flight of stairs and broke her ankle. ‘Just my luck!’ commented John.154 That afternoon he left for New York.
Over the next weeks a gradual disenchantment with American life may be traced in his letters. Like his brother Thornton, he had hoped to ride over the American West, he told a reporter from the New York Times, to set up camp along the prairies, push up the Mississippi, mix with the black workers on the cotton plantations. His plans were greeted with bewilderment. ‘The prairies had been ploughed; the backwoods levelled; the Indians mostly tamed or exterminated; the frontiersmen replaced by “regular fellows”.’155
In a letter to the ten-year-old Poppet (28 April 1923) he gives a child’s-eye view of New York.
‘This is a strange country. There are railways over your head in the streets and the houses are about a mile high… The policemen chew gum and hold clubs to knock people down. The people don’t say “yes”. They say instead Yep, yeah, yaw, yawp, yah and sometimes yump. Otherwise they simply say “you bet” or “bet your life”. They eat clams, fried chicken, chives, slaw soup and waffles with maple syrup. They drink soda-ices all the time. The rich people drink champagne and whisky for dinner and go about with bottles of gin in their pockets. When a policeman catches them they have to pay him about 1,000 dollars after which he drinks their gin and locks them up.’
John did not seek publicity in New York: the more publicity, the less freedom. So far as possible he kept his whereabouts secret from journalists.156 He put up initially at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, then at the Hotel des Artistes at sixty-seventh and Central Park, and finally moved to a studio owned by Harrington Mann. To this studio numbers of Americans trekked, convinced that they were discovering a new Sargent, the famous American portraitist. ‘It’s been a fearful grind,’ John wrote to Dorelia. Everyone wanted to give parties for him. ‘The telephone rings continuously.’ There was always something to do: a boxing match, a cocktail party, the theatre, a trip to Philadelphia, another party. His best hours were in the company of a decorative artist called ‘Sheriff’ Bob Chanler, ‘a Gargantuan creature, as simple as a babe’, with great flapping arms and hands, ‘indescribably improper but… as good as gold’ at whose house he met ‘easy-going ladies, eccentrics and hangers-on’. It was almost like home. But John was cautious. ‘I walked down Fifth Avenue,’ he told Dorelia,
‘there were a number of rather tarty-looking damsels walking about giving glad or at any rate significant eyes – of course one mustn’t respond, for if you as much as say “how do you do” to a woman, you are immediately clapped into gaol for assault or otherwise blackmailed for the rest of your life. The country is chiefly controlled by a villain named [Randolph] Hearst who owns most of the papers… This city at night is dominated by a stupendous scintillating sign advertising Wrigley’s chewing gum. The poor bewildered multitude seethe aimlessly below.’157
He saw the Americans as ‘inconceivably naif though ‘not unattractive’. But it is possible to see John himself as floundering naïvely within the bowl of this artificial society. Despite all the hectic enjoyment he was never quite at ease, except in Harlem. It was with great difficulty at first that he could persuade anyone to take him there. After that he went alone and sometimes stayed all night. ‘The dancing that took place in these Harlem clubs was brilliant beyond description… I was immensely pleased.’158
Harlem at that time was not known in polite society and when John spoke of his plans to paint New York’s black population there was some high-pitched embarrassment. ‘Do you like the mulattoes, or the brown or black Negroes?’ one incredulous journalist asked. ‘I like them all,’ he growled. He was questioned on Harlem as if it were some far-off planet. ‘They seem to be natural artists,’ he told the New York press. ‘It seems too bad that when any of them in this country show talent in the graphic and plastic arts, or in any line of artistic endeavour, they are denied an equal chance with other artists.’159
John’s other area of criticism was Prohibition. ‘There’s a new rich class springing up,’ he told Dorelia, ‘ – the bootleggers. They are the strongest advocates of Prohibition and extremely powerful.’ In public he aimed his protest at what appeared to him the most appropriate point. The Secretary of the Independent Society of Artists in New York had been convicted for hanging a picture by Francois Kaufman that showed Christ being prevented by some Prohibitionist politicians from changing water into wine, a joke that appealed to John. ‘The conviction was an outrage on liberty and art,’ he thundered. ‘Your prohibitionists seem the richest subjects for satire… Prohibition is more than a farce – it is a tragedy. I agree with those who say it breeds disrespect for all laws. It is unjust to the poor, because one doesn’t have to be in this country long before discovering that anyone with money can get all the liquor he wants, while it’s beyond the reach of those with little money.’160
These were scarcely the tones of a new Sargent. Nevertheless, New Yorkers liked him. He was wild but, like the Indians, he could be tamed. ‘I could get any number of portraits to do if I liked,’ he informed Dorelia. The idea of having done them, swiftly, painlessly, profitably, was attractive; but the work itself was ‘sweat and travail’. Letters from Dorelia arrived, describing the flowers in her garden, the girls’ new pony, the dogs, cats and vegetables. Amid the canyons of New York, all this seemed infinitely green and desirable, and he longed to be back.
Before leaving, he saw for the last time his old patron John Quinn. Quinn had been dreading this encounter. Having largely lost interest in John’s painting, he was then arranging to sell off most of his pictures on the open market. To his relief John ‘was very pleasant and did not allude to the episode of my selling the paintings at all’, he confided to Percy Moore Turner. ‘I took him out riding with a lady...’ By admiring his new pictures and his special friend, the beautiful Jeanne Foster (to whom he made amiable advances), John charmed Quinn. But the following year, Quinn was dead. The doctors had given him up months before, but once again he knew better than any of them, and simply would not die. They told him he was suffering from a hardening of the liver; he shook his head. Barely alive, hardly able to move, his body skeletal though swollen with fluid and yellow all over, he admitted to a small glandular disorder. He was ‘run down’, he believed, and must be careful not to catch a cold. He was to die on 28 July 1924. ‘He had cancer of the liver but never knew it and so had hope to the end and made plans for the future,’ Jeanne Foster wrote to Gwen John. For three months she had scarcely left him. ‘He suffered greatly… He was so thin I could lift him.’161 No longer did he want to look at Picasso’s work, or Braque’s, Rousseau’s or anything by Augustus. But he kept a few of Gwen’s pictures near him, as well as some by Matisse, Arthur Davies and Nathaniel Hone, and some sculpture by Brancusi and Gaudier-Brzeska. Towards the end he grew strangely fond of flowers, having never much cared for them during his life. But he had been frightened of his emotions, and perhaps it was this which had made Jeanne Foster afraid of declaring her love for him. ‘He was a strange man,’ Mitchell Kennerley wrote to John; ‘led a strange life; died a strange death. Properly handled his Collections will ensure his fame.’162
In the last week of June, John sailed back on the Berengaria. ‘The first few days he seemed quite low,’ noted Conger Goodyear, who was with him on the boat. ‘He said he thought he had rather overdone it in New York and he was glad to be getting back from American Prohibition to England and temperance.’
By April the next year he was back in New York in a big bare studio in the Beaux Arts Building at 80 West Fortieth Street. ‘It is a very beautiful high building on Bryant Park – near our Public Library and not far from Fifth Avenue – quite fashionable in fact,’ Jeanne Foster wrote to Gwen. This second coming, which has been described as ‘an electric event… that enriched the great saga of John’s career’,163 was largely indistinguishable from the first. ‘All the newspapers reproduced photographs of him,’ Jeanne Foster wrote.164 The Mellons and the Wideners queued up for the society portraits; Harlem, all aglow at night, again bewitched him. But he was less cautious. He began painting black girls ‘semi-nude’; and he began quarrelling with American dealers from whose ‘unctuous greetings’ he protected himself with a ‘cold zone’. There was something about New York, he discovered, that for all its speed and activity deprived him of initiative. All around throbbed an air of industry: yet it was impossible to work.
‘Life’, he warned Homer Saint Gaudens, ‘is full of pitfalls (and gin).’ At the end of one dinner he broke his silence and, to everyone’s amazement, apologized in booming tones for having ‘monopolized the conversation’. At a lunch he was seated next to a lady who pressed him about young artists: whose pictures could she buy that would multiply in value ten times within five years? ‘But is there no one?’ she finally asked, ‘is there no one whom you are watching?’ His reply ended their conversation: ‘I am watching myself, madam, with considerable anxiety.’
John’s reputation in the United States was built largely on hearsay. The Carroll Gallery and the Photo-Secession Gallery in New York; the Boston Art Club, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and numerous other galleries had been endeavouring over several years to hold John exhibitions. The Carnegie Institute itself had offered to set up a one-man show that would tour the country. All these establishments had the burden of John’s active co-operation. He was, as one gallery director put it, always ‘cordial… but persistently indefinite’.165 When his first one-man show in New York was held early in 1928 at the Anderson Gallery, John inadvertently was in Martigues and never saw it. Stevenson Scott, who had brought him over in 1924 to ‘secure commissions for the paintings that commemorate his American period’, and had undertaken to show the fruit of this period at Scott and Fowles, did not live to see the exhibition take place. It opened, a quarter of a century later, in the spring of 1949.
Perhaps John’s best portraits of Americans were done in Europe: of Tom Mix, the movie actor, who visited Mallord Street with a camera team to film the event; and of the McLanahans from Philadelphia, at their aptly named house in the Côte d’Or, Château de Missery. His portrait of Frances McLanahan,166 a large-eyed oval-faced beauty, is a Swedish study, blue and yellow, of peach-fed innocence. It was eventually completed in London where, about the same time, he was failing to finish a portrait of Governor Fuller of Massachusetts.
It was in pursuit of Fuller that he made his last voyage to the United States in 1928 – a journey he never failed to regret. ‘Come over and rescue me!’ he appealed to Carrington. He had been carried off to the Fullers’ country house, some fifty miles from Boston, and presented with the task of painting the Governor and his problematic children. ‘This sort of work is very ageing,’ he grieved. ‘I have practically no hair left.’ One difficulty was that the Fullers ‘do not yet grasp the difference between a hired photographer and an artist. As I am their guest I cannot point out the difference as forcibly as I should like.’167 The children were impossible – in John’s picture the son (‘who blacked his sister’s eye’) has no feet because ‘that boy drives me crazy, swinging his legs about all the time’; and one of the daughters (‘a nice young bitch… if one could catch her on the hop’) he dismissed altogether because ‘neither she nor I could concentrate’. Mrs Fuller, a good soul brimming over with cheerfulness, had ‘designs on my virtue’, making his position in the house tricky. ‘I can’t stick this,’ he wrote darkly to Dorelia. ‘I can’t tell you all.’ The Governor himself, John decided, ‘is the best of the lot… I could make Fuller the most ridiculous figure in two hemi-spheres if I wanted to.’
As the weeks flowed by, his lamentations reached a comic intensity. ‘It’s hell and damnation here!’ he cried. ‘Everybody I meet seems half-witted.’ The prolonged meals with sweet food and iced-water; the gramophone gabbling all day its muddled melodies; the political guests with their recreational tales of golf and fish; the ‘advice’ on painting; the labour-saving devices including a ‘ridiculous old ass of a butler’ with a pseudo-cockney accent who, John believed, ‘was suffering from a disease of the spine till I realized his attitude was merely one of deference’; all these conspired to make the months of August and September ‘the most hideous ordeal of my life’.
In the second week of October they moved, en masse, to Boston. The Fullers expected John to stay at their official residence in Beacon Street, but he had been lent a studio in the Fenway by Charles Woodbury, the marine artist, ‘a perfect old dear… I could have embraced him’. Though the walls were covered with alarming pictures of sharks leaping from the Caribbean Sea, ‘I think I shall recover here,’ he assured Dorelia. ‘That stay with the Fullers pulled me down terribly. The darkest passage of my life undoubtedly.’ He had, he added, devised a ‘good method of doing portraits with much use of toilet-paper’.
Offers for portraits still poured in – ‘there are millions to be made… but I would rather paint vegetables.’168 He took up his brushes and produced four cyclamen, two begonias and a chrysanthemum. It was a long way to have come for such work. Among his few exciting portraits was one of a black elevator girl who offered to return with him to England. Wherever he went he could see nothing but ‘masses of full-grown men dismally guzzling soda-ices’. ‘This city is a desert,’ he concluded. But no longer did he have to rely on charity for a glass of wine. A coffin-like object in his studio had been filled with drink. He began to suffer from terrible hangovers. Worse still, he had picked up ‘a little actress’ with whom he was seen in public. This was Harriet Calloway, the star of Blackbirds and famous for her ‘Diga Diga Do’. By December the Fullers were as eager as John himself for his departure. ‘They seem to think I’m a comic here,’ he grumbled. The last laugh was theirs. When the portrait was finished, an official telegram of congratulation was sent from the Governor’s residence to Augustus’s father in Tenby.
‘How happy I shall be to get on the Ocean,’ John had written to Dorelia on 28 November, ‘ – even if the ship sinks it will be better than staying here, where one sinks only less quickly.’ He sailed from New York on 14 December. ‘I am a complete wreck,’ he warned his family. ‘…Be ready to meet me at Southampton with a drink.’
John’s chief endowment to the United States was his unfinished work. Over the next thirty years, numbers of ageing Americans continued to throng the Atlantic in pursuit of their portraits. One was Mrs Vera Fearing, a niece of Whistler’s. John had begun to paint her in October 1928, but not having completed the portrait to his satisfaction by the time he left, he refused to sign it. She promised to come over. The first time she came, he was ill. Later she followed him to Connemara and then back to England. From August to December 1931 she stayed at Fryern, being painted in the tool shed. In the course of these sittings she changed her dress, he changed his studio. She learnt to drink, helped Dorelia with the housework, met Lytton Strachey, Carrington and Lawrence of Arabia, went for death-defying drives to London. Then, in 1935, she tried again – as Mrs Montgomery with a husband and two children. Everyone was extremely kind, John himself offering to give her a child of their own. But one day – ‘one of the worst days I’ve ever been through’ – John decided his studio was haunted and disappeared at midnight to London. So it went on. Telegrams and letters flowed between them, and ruses of all dimensions were engineered to lever the picture from John’s grasp. He worked on, sometimes using photographs and the clothes of other sitters, grappling with the abominable job of fitting someone else’s body on to her head. ‘I want to work some more on your extremities,’ he pleaded. She waited: was divorced, remarried, became a grandmother. Her father-in-law, who had originally commissioned the portrait, died without ever having seen it. War came. War went. ‘Augustus means you to have it,’ his friend Reine Pitman assured her on 13 July 1959, ‘but is already slightly baulking, and saying he wants to show it before sending it off.’ That autumn it had reached ‘an electric fire having its signature dried! So it won’t be long now...’ Then, in 1960, Vera Stubbs (as she had now become) was repossessed of her picture. But her new husband didn’t care for it and it was hung in a disused hut.
There was another aftermath to John’s American period. Ann and Joan from New York, Doris from Massachusetts, Karin in Runnin’ Wild, wrote giving times and addresses. Myrtle, a music student ‘particularly interested in art’, wondered ‘if you would like to see me’; Margaret and her friends wished to know whether he would ‘consent to stimulate our interest in art’; could he, another correspondent inquired, ‘spare a few moments to look at four paintings by my sister, who is in a lunatic asylum?’ Some letters, mentioning cocktails, are anonymous; others, providing names and ages of children, affectionate. Others again, containing financial calculations, were torn up. A ‘celebrated squawker’ offered her services as vocalist ‘at any social function’. Another Vera, who had stopped him in the street one day to demand his ‘opinion as to the future of art’ wrote to inform him that ‘I interrupted my artist’s career in order to find out the meaning of things’, adding: ‘It seems to me that a great figure in the art world like yourself ought to give your contribution to this problem.’
And it was true that, in some manner, John was still seen as ‘a great figure in the art world’, with all the clarity of a mirage. Whenever his name burst into their newspapers – on the cover of Time magazine and of Life, or as the first artist to wireless a drawing across the Atlantic – curiosity was quickly rekindled. But there was too little of his best work on public view to sustain interest, so there remained only a vague impression of his bloodshot personality, some memory of those powerful party manners, a rumour of exploits; then a vanishing trick.
*
On one of his voyages back from the United States, the ship touching at Cherbourg, John had disembarked. ‘I was unable to resist the urge to land first of all on the soil of France,’ he wrote.169 It was soothing after the glitter and turmoil of New York to find himself in the quiet of a Norman town such as Bayeux and taste again a dish of moules marinière with a litre of rouge. The gentle aspect of the country, the leisureliness of life, the detachment and intimacy mixed; these were virtues of the Old World that now appealed to him. In the past, he had speculated on the existence of a better land to the west. After 1928 he knew it did not exist. When asked whether he would return to the United States, perhaps to paint Franklin D. Roosevelt, he replied no: Goethe’s dictum ‘America is here’ was turning out to be literally true, and saved him the journey. It was the answer of someone who felt himself to be getting old.
The New World, once it invaded Europe, revealed itself as his enemy. Like a Canute, John held his hand up to halt the tide of history; and such was the force of his personality and the sphere of his influence in style and fashion that, for a time, he appeared to succeed. The waves held back, there was a frenzied pause – then the sea of modern life flooded past him and he was in retreat.
‘We have to give up Alderney Manor or buy it,’ he had written to Gwen. ‘We have been looking about in Dorset & elsewhere for another house without success.’170 In March 1927 they finally packed up and moved on. For a while the strange castellated bungalow, in which they had lived for more than fifteen years, stood empty, a shell behind its broken-down garden wall and the rising screen of rhododendrons. Then it vanished altogether, and in its place rose a brand-new housing estate. The old site, purged of its pagan associations, became consecrated ground, the site of Alderney Methodist Chapel.
By April the following year, ‘in submission to the march of progress as conceived by business men or crooks’, the Johns also left the Villa Ste-Anne. It was later converted into the Hostellerie Ste-Anne, credited with three knives and forks in the Guide Michelin, though still with its ‘vue exceptionelle’ over the blue Étang de Berre.
It was the same story in Mallord Street. The Chelsea fruit and flower market opposite their house was obliterated; blocks of flats and a telephone exchange blotted out the sun. In the early 1930s they sold the house to the singer Gracie Fields; the Anrep mosaics were covered up, the structure altered, the house and its surroundings becoming almost unrecognizable.
Everywhere the old world was vanishing, and John was part of it. Though he might blare his defiance, though he would heave out an announcement from time to time about ‘turning a corner’, there seemed only one direction for him to go. The retreat was sounded on all fronts, and everything would depend upon the subtlety with which he conducted it.
*1 The operation was performed by Dr Johann Hell after Kelly ‘laid the fire’ to which John and Leverhulme’s grandson ‘put the match’. ‘Sir Gerald Kelly has talked to me about the portrait of your grandfather,’ John wrote to Viscount Leverhulme in May 1953. ‘I had the lower part of it knocking about for years but I haven’t seen it lately… Kelly said he liked the head very much, and it would be very satisfactory if it could be restored to its proper position.’ At the beginning of April 1954 John sent Kelly a ‘rapturous letter’ saying that he had found the late Lord Leverhulme’s belly. The headless torso and the head were joined together ‘in hospital’ later that month. ‘It was a great pity that when the head alone was framed the edges were turned back around the panel thus destroying two strips, but the reconstruction of these two narrow pieces has been beautifully done by the ingenious Dr Hell. The picture is now very much more worth looking at than it was… [it is] the best possible solution to what was a very difficult problem.’ The complete picture was first shown at the ‘Exhibition of Works by Augustus John, OM, RA’ in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1954. The painting is privately owned.
*2 See Appendix Six.