NOTES

PREFACE

1  Stephen Spender World Within World (1951), p. 76.

2  Mary Taubman to the author, 6 March 1995. See also her introductions to the Gwen John exhibitions organized by Faerber and Maison Ltd (1964), the Arts Council of Great Britain (1968) and Anthony d’Offay (1976). Her Gwen John was published by the Scolar Press in 1985.

3  Now in the National Library of Wales. NLW MS 22802D.

4  Portraits by Augustus John: Family, Friends and the Famous (National Museum of Wales 1988), p. 11.

5  Romilly John to David Fraser Jenkins, 3 March 1979. National Museum of Wales.

6  ‘Photocopy and be damned: literature and the libraries’, Sunday Times (2 September 1984).

7  Philip Larkin Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (1983), p. 99.

8  Some John and Nettleship papers were purchased from Caspar John’s daughter Rebecca John in October 1988, and two small groups of correspondence and drafts of Augustus John’s autobiographical writings for the Sunday Times were bought at Sotheby’s in April and December 1989. All these were incorporated into the main archive, but other odds and ends of correspondence acquired since then have been catalogued separately.

9  NLW MS 22305C fols. 5–6.

10  Richard Shone Augustus John (1979), p. 3.

CHAPTER I: LITTLE ENGLAND BEYOND WALES

1  This lodging house was Corporation property owned by Ancient Grant. Its lease was assigned to William John on 23 October 1877. Two years later, on 17 December 1879, the lease was devised to William Willams.

2  After Augustus John’s death in 1961 a plaque commemorating the place where he spent his early years was fixed by the Haverfordwest Council at No. 5 Victoria Place. On neither his brother’s nor his sisters’ birth certificates had any number been given. Winifred, who was still alive in the United States, could not remember the number; Thornton, nearing ninety and living in Canada, appears to have copied down the number 5 from the address (5 Tower Hill) of the solicitor who wrote to him asking after his birthplace.

No. 7 Victoria Place is now part of Lloyds Bank. The John family leased it from a Mr Joseph Tombs, and the number is confirmed by several directories of the period. No. 7 Victoria Place is also given on the birth certificate of Augustus’s youngest uncle Frederick Charles John, born on 20 September 1856. In 1995 the Civic Society Guild of Freemen put up a plaque marking the birthplace of Gwen and Augustus on Lloyds Bank, a few yards from the rogue plaque on the Victoria Bookshop next door.

3  The dates of their births were: Thornton, 10 May 1875; Gwendolen Mary, 22 June 1876; Winifred Maud, 3 November 1879.

4  Until 1850 the abominable crime of ‘associating with gypsies’ was punishable by hanging.

5  Winifred John to Gwen John, 10 July 1910 (National Library of Wales MS 22307 fols. 119–23).

6  Horizon Volume III No. 14 (February 1941), pp. 98–9.

7  This house, though altered and precariously named ‘Rocks Drift’, still stands. It has a large entrance hall and stairwell, drawing-room, dining-room and six bedrooms. It was built using the stone from Settlands, the next bay.

8  Besides being a labourer, William John was a violin player. ‘I am hoping that the musician will turn out to have been a wandering minstrel,’ Augustus wrote to H. W. Williams on discovering this fact (16 May 1952). ‘…His musical gifts reappeared in one or two of my descendants.’ Perhaps the most celebrated musician among these descendants is the cello player Amaryllis Fleming. Augustus’s sister Winifred played the violin, and her daughter Muriel Matthews is a respected cellist in America. Augustus’s son David was for many years an oboist in the Sadler’s Wells orchestra, and another son, Edwin, played the flute.

9  His obituary in the Haverfordwest and Milford Haven Telegraph (9 July 1884) notes that ‘The funeral was largely attended by the principal professional men, as well as the leading tradesmen of the town and neighbourhood.’

10  Joanna (b. 1840), Emma (b. 1842), Alfred (b. 1844), Edwin, and Clara Sophia (b. 1849).

11  William John used to describe Alfred as a solicitor, though in fact he never passed the law exams, and probably acted as managing clerk, a position he could hold without legal qualifications.

12  Alfred John, with his haggard good looks and air of impoverished innocence, came to fulfil Augustus’s ideal of a Bohemian English gentleman. Visiting his nephew one hot summer day, he accidentally revealed by a spontaneous gesture that, underneath his mackintosh, he wore no clothes at all. With equal transparency, he added to his family name a ‘St’ and, as Alfred St John, was rewarded with a very fine funeral service, free of charge, by the clergy of St David’s Cathedral.

13  It was not until the removal of the Sex Disqualification Act in 1919 that women were permitted to qualify as solicitors. The first woman was admitted in 1922.

14  Benjamin died on 12 January 1856 of hydrocephalus and convulsions, aged two months; William had died six days earlier from the same cause, aged one year and eleven months; Sydney died after fourteen days of diarrhoea on 13 August 1861, aged five weeks; and Thornton died on 15 May 1861, aged eleven years, of congestion of the brain, fever and debility.

15  Now in the Tenby Museum. It is a copy of a David Cox. The picture of cattle is owned by Muriel Matthews, Augusta’s American granddaughter.

16  Alison Thomas Portraits of Women (1994), p. 71.

17  The death certificate inaccurately gives her age as thirty-four.

18  William John died of cerebral softerina on 6 July 1884.

19  Aunt Leah went straight to the United States, where she picked up a slight American accent and a large band of disciples. Aunt Rosina’s travels were more circuitous, and her destinations always preceded by a series of brown-paper parcels. Sustained by a diet of over-ripe fruit and protected by a dense fur muff, she set off for Switzerland from where she wrote a number of letters in purple ink testifying to her brief enthusiasm for Dr Coué, who believed that if people repeated ‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better’ many thousands of times, the world might become a more cheerful place. From here she went to Japan, where she collected a miniature Japanese maid, and later, improbably passing through Mason, Nevada, married Owen H. Bott, a druggist with two sons. Under the pitiless blue of the Californian skies, she caught up with Winifred, terrifying her children with her cottonwool hair, her humped back and restless scuttling from place to place.

20  Gwen, Augustus and Winifred were baptized at St Mary’s Church, Tenby, on 21 January 1886.

21  William John’s will is dated 14 June 1881, a little over three years before his death from a disease that would have made him legally incompetent.

22  NLW MS 22782D fols. 115–16.

23  Chiaroscuro p. 28. All page numbers are taken from the first Jonathan Cape editions of Chiaroscuro and Finishing Touches (1952 and 1964). The two books were republished, with an additional chapter, under the title Autobiography in 1975.

24  Letter to the author, 18 October 1968.

25  Chiaroscuro p. 25.

26  Later the Sea Beach Hotel, Tenby.

27  This building (the original house of which was built by Edward Morgan in the 1830s) was later converted into a public library. In the cemented grounds two trees were planted, an oak in memory of Augustus, and a birch in memory of Gwen. Greenhill School later moved to the outskirts of Tenby.

28  Chiaroscuro p. 36.

29  At the junction with South Cliff Street. Later the property became the Hallsville Hotel.

30  Letter to the author, 18 October 1968.

31  Chiaroscuro p. 37.

32  Ibid. p. 19.

33  Ibid. pp. 31–2.

34  Thornton John to Augustus John, 3 February 1959. NLW MS 22782D fols. 115–16.

35  Augustus John to Caspar John, 16 August 1952. NLW 22775C fol. 7.

36  Augustus John to John Davenport n.d. (late 1940s). NLW MS 21585E.

37  Winifred John to Augustus John, 8 January 1906. NLW MS 22782D fol. 124.

38  Winifred John to Augustus John, 3 March 1956. NLW MS 22782D fol. 125.

39  Cecily Langdale Gwen John (1987) p. 115.

40  Anthony d’Offay Gwen John: 1876–1939 (1982).

41  Thornton John to Augustus John, 3 March 1948. NLW MS 22782D fol. 111.

42  Thornton John to Gwen John, 7 September 1935. NLW MS 22307C fol. 88.

43  Winifred John to Gwen John, 10 July 1910. NLW MS 22307C fols. 122–3.

44  Thornton John to Gwen John, 14 July 1920. NLW MS 22307C fols. 71–2.

45  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, summer 1910. NLW MS 21368D fol. 46.

46  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 1908. NLW MS 21468D fol. 25.

47  Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan Gwen John. Papers at the National Library of Wales (1988), p. 11.

48  Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (July 1908). NLW MS 22776D fols. 89–90.

49  Letter to the author from Darsie Japp, 13 December 1968.

50  Chiaroscuro p. 12.

51  Augustus John to Bill Duncalf, 22 May 1959 (privately owned).

52  Augustus John to John Sampson, n.d. (c. 1912). NLW MS 21459E fol. 46.

53  Augustus John to John Sampson, 13 March 1912. NLW MS 21459E, fol.44.

54  Entry for 22 June 1919 in The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner (ed. Claire Harman 1994), p. 37.

55  Augustus John to Ada Nettleship n.d. NLW MS 22775C fol. 81.

56  The word petulengro means horseshoe-maker or smith. It was T. W. Thompson who first identified Borrow’s Jaspar Petulengro with a certain Ambrose Smith.

57  William Rothenstein to Max Beerbohm, 24 July 1941. Quoted in Robert Speaight’s William Rothenstein (1962), p. 402.

58  Evening Standard (19 January 1929).

59  Horizon Volume XIX No. 112 (April 1949), p. 295.

60  Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan Gwen John. Papers at the National Library of Wales, p. 9.

61  Letter to the author, 18 October 1968.

62  Chiaroscuro p. 35.

63  Evening Standard (19 January 1929).

CHAPTER II: ‘SLADE SCHOOL INGENIOUS’

1  BBC talk first transmitted on 17 November 1967. Augustus’s eyes were actually blue.

2  George Charlton ‘The Slade School of Fine Art’ The Studio (October 1946).

3  In his inaugural lecture, Systems of Art Education, Poynter had attacked the current methods of English art teaching in which ‘a trivial minuteness of detail [was] considered of more importance than a sound and thorough grounding in the knowledge of form’, and only at the end of the course was the student allowed to do what he should ‘have been set to do the first day he entered the school, that is to make studies from the living model’. He himself intended to ‘impress but one lesson upon the students, that constant study from the life-model is the only means they have of arriving at a comprehension of the beauty in nature...’ See Edward Poynter Lectures on Art (1879) and also Andrew Forge The Slade 1871–1960.

4  Men and Memories Volume I (1931), pp. 22–5.

5  George Charlton ‘The Slade School of Fine Art’ The Studio (October 1946).

6  Horizon Volume III No. 18 (June 1941), p. 394.

7  Chiaroscuro p. 41.

8  Some of John’s music hall sketches made at the Alhambra were exhibited at the Mercury Gallery, London (15 January–10 February 1968). John also made a portrait of Arthur Roberts dated, almost certainly inaccurately, 1895, now in the National Portrait Gallery. ‘I consider him [Arthur Roberts] about the most important buffoon England has ever produced – a born comedian and a most accomplished artist,’ he wrote to the National Portrait Gallery (14 May 1929). In Henry Savage’s autobiography, The Receding Shore, there is a brief mention of John doing a portrait of Arthur Roberts in about 1922.

9  Chiaroscuro p. 42.

10  Ibid. p. 44.

11  Finishing Touches p. 29.

12  Letter to the author, 1969.

13  Letter to Ursula Tyrwhitt. Augustus’s letters to Ursula Tyrwhitt are at the National Library of Wales, NLW MS 19645C; and so are Gwen John’s letters to Ursula Tyrwhitt, NLW MS 21468D.

14  Famous People, No. 31 of a series of 50. Illustrated by Angus McBride and described by Virginia Shankland. A secondary John legend involved Augustus’s son Caspar who dived on to a rock in 1930 and emerged from the waves a potential admiral.

15  Daily Telegraph (1 November 1961).

16  Augustus John: Studies for Compositions. Centenary Exhibition National Museum of Wales 1978.

17  Spencer Gore to Doman Turner, 25 January 1909. See John Rothenstein Modern English Painters Volume I Sickert to Smith (1976 edn), p. 177.

18  Evening Standard (19 January 1929).

19  This portrait is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Many years after it was painted John described it in Finishing Touches as ‘most regrettable’. Orpen had painted it in imitation of Whistler’s ‘Carlyle’, and at the time John wrote of it to Michel Salaman: ‘Orpen’s portrait of me extracts much critical admiration. It is described in one notice as a clever portrait of Mr John in the character of a French Romantic.

‘One far-seeing gentleman hopes that I will emerge from my Rembrandtine chrysalis with a character of my own! I have just been to the Guildhall and return exalted with the profound beauty of Whistler’s Carlyle.’

20  Finishing Touches p. 30.

21                    ‘Augustus Caesar,’ so the poet said,

‘Shall be regarded as a present god

By Britain, made to kiss the Roman’s rod.’

Augustus Caesar long ago is dead,

But still the good work’s being carried on:

We lick the brushes of Augustus John.

Punch 27 February 1929

22  Rude Assignment (1950), pp. 118–19.

23  This letter was written to John Rothenstein (14 May 1952) after having read Rothenstein’s essay on Gwen John in Modern English Painters. Gwen ‘was never “unnoticed” by those who had access to her’, he corrected Rothenstein.

24  Chiaroscuro p. 49.

25  Augustus John to Robert Gregory n.d. (1909). NLW MS 21482D.

26  Augustus John to Michel Salaman, August 1902. NLW MS 14928D fols. 59–60.

27  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. NLW MS 21468D.

28  Quoted in Susan Chitty Gwen John (1981), p. 142.

29  Possibly Grace Westray, a Slade student who lived with Gwen, Augustus and Winifred at 21 Fitzroy Street for a time and whom Gwen painted as ‘Young Woman with a Violin’ (Cecily Langdale Gwen John [1987] pl.5 cat. no. 4) and Augustus drew (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge PD 942). Her addresses up to 1914 are remarkably similar to those of Ambrose McEvoy and his wife. After the war she appears to have married a Mr Reardon and by 1930 was widowed and living in Wiltshire. ‘She and Mary McEvoy have both visited,’ Louise Bishop wrote to Gwen (22 October 1930). NLW MS 22304C fol. 50.

30  Chiaroscuro p. 249.

31  See Gwen John Retrospective Exhibition Catalogue, Arts Council, 1968. Introduction by Mary Taubman.

32  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 22 July 1936. NLW MS 21468D fol. 179.

33  Letter from Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. NLW MS 21468D.

34  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 23 July 1927. NLW MS 21468D fol. 160.

35  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 6 June 1936. NLW MS 21468D fols. 140–2.

36  NLW MS 14928D. The picture was bought by Frederick Brown at the Slade, and, a year after his death in 1941, was purchased by the Tate Gallery.

37  Table-Talk of G.B.S. (ed. Archibald Henderson 1925), pp. 90–1.

38  Modern English Painters (1976 edn) Volume I, ‘Gwen John’, pp. 160–1.

39  In his obituary notice (The Times, 1 February 1958) of Lady Smith, Augustus wrote: ‘The death of Lady (Matthew) Smith has removed one of the last survivors of what might be called the Grand Epoch of the Slade School. Gwen Salmond, as she then was, cut a commanding figure among a remarkably brilliant group of women students, consisting of such arresting personalities as Edna Waugh, Ursula Tyrwhitt, my sister Gwen John, and Ida Nettleship.

‘Gwen Salmond’s early compositions were distinguished by a force and temerity for which even her natural liveliness of temperament had not prepared us. I well remember a Deposition in our Sketch Club which would not have been out of place among the ébauches [sketch, rough draft] of, dare I say it, Tintoretto!

‘…“Marriage and Death and Division make barren our lives”. Gwen Smith had reason to know this but she also had the pluck to face it bravely, which is what made all the difference.’

40  See Alison Thomas Portraits of Women (1994), pp. 24–9.

41  Quoted by Alison Thomas in Edna Clarke Hall. Milne & Moller, Max Rutherston, catalogue (1989).

42  Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 55.

43  Bruce Arnold Orpen. Mirror to an Age (1981), p. 237.

44  Ibid. p. 234.

45  Modern English Painters Volume I, ‘William Orpen’, p. 227.

46  Men and Memories Volume I p. 334.

47  See The Listener (23 November 1967).

48  Unpublished reminiscences. But see ‘Edna Clarke Hall: Drawings and Water-colours 1895–1947’ in the catalogue of the Slade Centenary Exhibition at the d’Offay Couper Gallery, October 1971.

49  ‘The Slade Animal Land’, a notebook of caricatures of staff and students at the Slade in 1898, shows the BEARDGION, a cartoon of Augustus John by Logic Whiteway with the explanatory caption: ‘This simple creature is so accomplished that, according to the Tonk, Michael Angelo isn’t in it.’ See National Library of Scotland Acc. 3969 1965.

50  Gwen also won a certificate for figure drawing, while Augustus after his second year was awarded a second certificate for advanced antique drawing, a £3 prize for the study of a standing male nude, a certificate for head painting, and a £6 prize for figure painting.

51  Men and Memories Volume I p. 333.

52  Mary Taubman Gwen John (1985), p. 15.

53  See John’s Introduction to the Catalogue of Drawings by Ulrica Forbes, Walker’s Galleries, 118 New Bond Street, London, 17 October 1952.

54  ‘A Note on Drawing’, from Augustus John: Drawings (ed. Lillian Browse 1941), p. 10.

55  Chiaroscuro p. 46.

56  Augustus John: Studies for Compositions (National Museum of Wales 1978) pls. 1–3. The text for ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’ came from Numbers 21:9. ‘And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.’ The painting is owned by the Slade School.

57  Chiaroscuro p. 48.

58  Rude Assignment p. 119.

59  Men and Memories Volume I p. 333.

60  Chiaroscuro p. 36.

61  Ibid. p. 27.

62  Jack Nettleship wrote a biography of Browning. One of his brothers, Henry, was Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford; another, Richard, was a Fellow and Tutor at Balliol, and a friend of Benjamin Jowett; and the third, Edward, a prominent oculist. Jack regretted not having done the lions in Trafalgar Square, of which, he believed, he could have made a far better job than Sir Edwin Landseer.

63  Ethel Nettleship to Caspar John, 27 June 1951. NLW MS 22790D fols. 34–9·

64  W. B. Yeats Autobiographies (1955), p. 271.

65  See NLW MS 22798B fols. 11–15, 55–71.

66  Ada Nettleship’s maiden name was Hinton, and she was the sister of James Hinton who wrote an enormous philosophical work and then, according to David John, went off his head. ‘I had an idea of “discovering” him,’ Romilly John records (1 August 1972), ‘but have always been completely baffled after reading two sentences and had to start again, and so on indefinitely. James Hinton’s son was the author of a book on the fourth dimension, involving the construction by the reader of hundreds of cubes with differently coloured surfaces and edges.’

67  Ethel Nettleship to Caspar John, 27 June 1951. NLW MS 22790D fols. 34–5·

68  W. B. Yeats Autobiographies p. 193.

69  Ibid.

70  Chiaroscuro p. 48.

71  This synopsis was done for Hubert Alexander, who had got to know Augustus through Dorelia McNeill. In the 1920s Alexander had turned publisher and approached John for his memoirs. ‘I’ve been thinking of the book and will send you shortly a provisional synopsis,’ John wrote to him on 21 February 1923. Alexander believes he may have got the synopsis about 1927, but since there is a holograph synopsis among Augustus’s papers, it may never have been sent. Certainly by 1932 negotiations were still continuing and Sir Charles Reilly remembered that year ‘a publisher came down [to Fryern Court] and offered him great sums for his autobiography, finally reaching £13,000 [equivalent to well over £400,000 in 1996] the sum I heard him say Lady Oxford got for hers, but he nobly turned it down.’

72  Chiaroscuro p. 48.

73  Finishing Touches p. 40.

74  Chiaroscuro p. 147. In 1941 Sir John Rothenstein came across this picture at the Leger Galleries, bought it for the Tate Gallery, and showed it to John for identification. At first he failed to recognize it, but later did acknowledge it to be his. In his Modern English Painters, Rothenstein described it as a rather fumbling and pedestrian essay and, though probably a fair example of his painting at this time, laboured, niggling in form, hardly modelled at all. But John himself, on reading this, objected: ‘The “Old Lady’s” head is very well modelled: the hands unfinished yet expressive. She couldn’t move them easily.’

75  Ida Nettleship to Ada Nettleship, 18 September 1898. NLW MS 22798B fols. 18–19.

76  Letter from Ida Nettleship to her mother n.d. NLW MS 22798B fols. 16–17.

77  Ida Nettleship to Ada Nettleship, 20 September 1898. NLW MS 22798B fols. 20–1.

78  Ida Nettleship to Ada Nettleship, December 1898. NLW MS 22798B fols. 30–1.

79  Chiaroscuro p. 250.

80  Ida Nettleship to Ada Nettleship n.d. (late September 1898). NLW MS 227988 fols. 22–4.

81  Gwen John to Michel Salaman n.d. (spring 1899). NLW MS 14930C.

82  Fothergill’s inn was the Spread Eagle at Thame in which, for a time, Augustus’s son Romilly worked, and for which Dora Carrington painted an inn sign (now gone). He was the author of Confessions of an Innkeeper, John Fothergill’s Cookery Book, The Art of James Dickson Innes, My Three Inns, etc.

83  Rothenstein had first heard of Ibsen through Conder, and in his Men and Memories (Volume I p. 56) writes: ‘We were all mesmerised by Ibsen in those days.’ The picture, now in the Tate Gallery, expresses the tension of Act III of The Doll’s House when Mrs Linden and Krogstad are listening for the end of the dance upstairs. Subsequently it became famous as a ‘problem picture’ mainly perhaps on account of its dark colour. ‘I am portrayed standing at the foot of a staircase upon which Alice has unaccountably seated herself,’ John wrote in his Introduction to the Catalogue of the Sir William Rothenstein Memorial Exhibition at the Tate Gallery (5 May–4 June 1950). ‘I appear to be ready for the road, for I am carrying a mackintosh on my arm and am shod and hatted. But Alice seems to hesitate. Can she have changed her mind at the last moment?… Perhaps the weather had changed for the worse...’ The picture, painted between June and October 1899, was exhibited in the British section of the Paris Exhibition in 1900, where it won a silver medal.

84  Introduction to the William Rothenstein Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Gallery (May–June 1950).

85  Men and Memories Volume I p. 352.

86  Horizon Volume III No. 18 (June 1941), p. 400.

87  Oscar Wilde to William Rothenstein, 4 October 1899. See The Letters of Oscar Wilde (ed. Rupert Hart-Davis 1962), p. 811.

88  John Rothenstein Modern English Painters, Volume I p. 179. Rothenstein instances ‘The Rustic Idyll’ of about 1903 as having been done under the immediate impact of Daumier. This work – possibly watercolour on dampened cartridge – is now in the Tate Gallery, and is called ‘Rustic Scene’. It has an unusual texture – soft, blurred contours – and is more dramatic than most of John’s work. ‘“The Rustic Idyll” I remember well,’ John wrote to the Tate Gallery (16 March 1956). ‘It is one of several pastels I did soon after leaving the Slade. Though hardly an Idyll, it has dramatic character… I don’t consider it has merit as a pastel.’

89  Everett, who had been baptized Herbert, registered at the Slade as Henry Everett, but he always called himself John Everett. He added to the confusion by marrying his cousin – Mrs Everett’s niece – Kathleen, who altered her Christian name fractionally to Katherine. A dedicated marine painter, John Everett never sold a marine painting during his life, but bequeathed them all (1,700 oils and a larger number of drawings and engravings) to the National Maritime Museum, which held a memorial exhibition of his work in 1964.

90  Men and Memories Volume I p. 352.

91  Ibid.

92  Rothenstein’s portrait of Augustus is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

93  Augustus John to Michel Salaman, February 1900. NLW MS 14928D.

94  Gwen John seems to have been living at 122 Gower Street illegally and without furniture. The house was officially inhabited by a woman called Annie Machew, who since October 1898 had paid no rates. The rating authorities who attempted to collect the money owing to them throughout 1900 reported that there were ‘no effects’ there. For this reason the house does not appear in Kelly’s Post Office Directory until three years later, when it had been taken over by the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks.

95  Three of Conder’s paintings of Swanage are in the Tate Gallery.

96  What became of the large decoration is not known, though a number of small versions of the subject exist, showing the influence of Goya and Delacroix. One is an oil which belonged to Humphrey Brooke, Secretary of the Royal Academy (1952–68); another, a wash drawing in the Quinn Collection in New York, was sold by the Fine Art Society at the Slade Centenary Show (autumn 1971); a third, a pen and wash drawing, is in the Tate Gallery (reproduced in Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture Volume I 1964, pl. 51).

97  Horizon Volume III No. 18 (June 1941), p. 401.

98  Letter from Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. NLW MS 14928D.

99  Horizon Volume III No. 18 (June 1941), p. 401.

100  Chiaroscuro p. 38.

101  NLW MS 19645C.

102  John’s drawing of the Château de Polignac, done with black crayon on white paper and very Flemish in its atmosphere, is now in the Manchester Art Galleries. It is reproduced in Augustus John. Fifty-two drawings (1957), pl. 5.

103  Men and Memories Volume I p. 358.

104  Some pages from his sketchbook at this time were exhibited at the Mercury Gallery, London, 15 June 1967–10 February 1968.

105  Chiaroscuro p. 49.

106  E. Fox-Pitt ‘From Stomacher to Stomach’ (unpublished autobiography).

107  Men and Memories Volume II p. I.

CHAPTER III: LOVE FOR ART’S SAKE

1  From an essay Osbert Sitwell did not include in A Free House. It will be found in André Theuriet Jules Bastien-Lepage & his Art (1892), pp. 139–40. See also Malcolm Easton Augustus John (1970).

2  Alfred Thornton Fifty Years of the New English Art Club (1935).

3  Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (spring 1900). NLW MS 14928D.

4  Cambridge Review (March 1922).

5  Quentin Bell Victorian Artists (1967), p. 91.

6  The English Review (January 1912).

7  The Burlington Magazine (February 1916).

8  New Age (28 May 1914).

9  Letter from Augustus John to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 5 August 1910. This correspondence is at the University of Texas, Austin.

10  This and other unpublished Orpen letters were owned by Miriam Benkovitz, the biographer of Ronald Firbank.

11  Herbert Jackson was Professor Walter Raleigh’s brother-in-law, while D. S. MacColl was connected by marriage to Oliver Elton, who succeeded Raleigh as Professor of Modern Literature at Liverpool.

12  Dora E. Yates My Gypsy Days (1953), p. 74.

13  Anthony Sampson ‘Scholar Gipsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ (unpublished), Chapter 2.

14  Lytton Strachey by Himself (ed. Michael Holroyd, 1994 edn), p. 104.

15  Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (April 1900). NLW MS 14928D fol. 39·

16  This portrait, which hung in Liverpool University Dining Club, was later the cause of a historic decision. First exhibited at the NEAC in the Winter Show of 1903, it was to have been awarded the Gold Medal for Painting at the International Exhibition at St Louis, Missouri, in the following year. Learning that this prize was to go to so young and relatively obscure an artist, the President of the Royal Academy and the English members of the international jury took the astonishing step of withdrawing, without explanation, the entire British section.

17  Chiaroscuro p. 60.

18  Augustus John to Will Rothenstein, 9 March 1902. He continues: ‘I felt inclined to add my patch of homemade sienna in reference to the past.’

19  Anthony Sampson ‘Scholar Gipsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ Chapter 2.

20  The Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh 1879–1922 (ed. Lady Raleigh 1926), Volume II p. 333.

21  Geoffrey Keynes The Gates of Memory (1981), p. 112.

22  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (c. 1914). NLW MS 21459E fol. 50.

23  Augustus John to John Sampson, 22 October 1902. NLW MS 21459E fols. 2–3.

24  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (1907). NLW MS 21459E fols. 21–2.

25  Augustus John to John Sampson, 23 February 1911. NLW MS 21459E fol. 32.

26  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (December 1904). NLW MS 21459E fol. 13.

27  John Sampson to Augustus John, 22 November 1930. NLW MS 22785D fols. 42–3.

28  Augustus John to John Sampson, September 1911. NLW MS 21459E fol. 33.

29  Geoffrey Keynes The Gates of Memory p. 379.

30  John Sampson to Augustus John, 2 February 1924. NLW MS 22785D fols. 29–30. Sampson had finished the letter R in 1911 and started S. ‘Scanning this new sea anxiously from the mast-head,’ he wrote to Augustus (30 August 1911), ‘I see it simply bristles with rocks not indicated on the charts.’ He sent the completed work to the Clarendon Press in July 1917, and though ‘a little wearied by the severity of Indian phonology’ was confident that the great work should prove ‘a complete guide to sorcery, fortune-telling, love and courtship, kichimas [inns], fiddling, harping, poaching and the life of the road’. NLW MS 22785D fol. 22.

31  W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, 4 October 1907. Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

32  Anthony Sampson ‘Scholar Gipsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ Chapter 3.

33  Ethel Nettleship was a cellist who, in the First World War, became an ambulance driver and nurse in Italy and Malta and who had such a bad time there that, on her return, she took to lacemaking for her nerves. ‘Untidy and gay,’ Sir Caspar John remembered,’ – always hard up – accessible and directly interested in all our lives.’ Ursula, the third sister, was rather stern and aloof compared with Ethel. An adventurous mountaineer and skier, she became a singer and teacher of singing. She was for a long time closely connected with the Aldeburgh Festival, at which Benjamin Britten dedicated his A Ceremony of Carols to her. ‘Her energy, her eagerness, her determination to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, forced those she taught to give of their best, and produced remarkable results,’ wrote Ann Bridge (The Times, 7 May 1968). ‘Moving about, gesticulating, her greying hair wild, Ursula Nettleship conducting her choir was in fact an inspiring sight – lost in the music, utterly unselfconscious, dragging the sounds she wanted out of, often, very unpromising material.’

34  This building, which has now been destroyed, was between No. 2 Rodney Street and the hospital at the corner of Mount Pleasant.

35  Augustus John to Will Rothenstein. See Men and Memories Volume II p. 9.

36  The Sandon Studios Society, of which John was elected an honorary member, was later set up in opposition to the University School of Art, to encourage freer and more vigorous draughtsmanship and a less restrictive attitude to painting. It was officially opened at 9 Sandon Terrace on 5 December 1905, but ‘any formality intended’, records R. H. Bisson in The Sandon Studios Society and the Arts (1965, p. 18), ‘was dissipated by Augustus John, who got very cheerful and fell headlong down the stairs’.

37  Saturday Review (7 December 1904), p. 695.

38  William Rothenstein Men and Memories Volume II (1932), p. 3.

39  Two Liverpool models who later went ‘to breed in the colonies. May they raise many a stalwart son to our Empire!’ John wrote to the Rani.

40  Campbell Dodgson A Catalogue of Etchings by Augustus John 1901–1914 (1920), pl. 14. (Hereafter referred to as CD, with the number.)

41  One of his subjects, for instance, was ‘A Rabbi Studying’, from a drawing by Rembrandt. CD 73.

42  Some of the plates would have been better if they had been left in the pure etched state, without being carried to a finish by lavish use of drypoint, which sacrificed their original crispness, leaving them soft and veiled. A number of the best ones are incomplete studies or sheets of studies, where the needle has been used like a pencil and the emphasis is on line; where, with a minimum of cross-hatching, the face has been left free from the rubberized pockmarks of dots and dashes intended to suggest variations of surface and of tone. These studies are often less self-conscious than the finished products, picked out more precisely in order to stress a curve or a fold. Some of the series of heads form a natural design on the page, and some of the studies give the impression of a fine watercolour wash. But John is at his best with single figures, and to his Liverpool period belong several good portraits including ‘The Mulatto’; ‘The Old Haberdasher’; ‘The Jewess’ with her shrewd suspicious gaze; and ‘Old Arthy’, where the effect of strong light behind the head creates a silhouette which the dense cross-hatching emphasizes without negating the figure, since the lines become part of the creases of the face and the shadows cast by it.

43  Introduction to Augustus John: Fifty-two drawings, Lord David Cecil (1957), p. 12.

44  The Walker Gallery was soon to return this compliment. When, in 1902, a group of subscribers gave William Rothenstein’s portrait of John to the gallery, it was catalogued anonymously as ‘Portrait of a Young Man’. When offered John’s official portrait of Chaloner Dowdall as Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1918, the gallery refused it. The first example of his work it bought was ‘Two Jamaican Girls’, in 1938.

45  To Will Rothenstein, 9 March 1902.

46  To Will Rothenstein n.d.

47  Ida John to Ada Nettleship, 16 October 1901. NLW MS 22798B fols. 38–9.

48  Ida John to John Trivett Nettleship, 24 December 1901. NLW MS 22798B fols. 72–4.

49  These included a rather military portrait of Oliver Elton, the English Literature don; a curious King Lear impression of Edmund Muspratt, Pro-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, emerging from the shadows of a dark background; a sombre Victorian impression of Sir John Brunner, the radical plutocrat, with mother-of-pearl flesh tones, a white beard and a moustache slightly ginger on one side; a likeness of Sir John Sherrington, the scientist and a special friend of Ida’s, a timid, gauche figure, his eyes distrustfully peering through weak spectacles; and a comfortable spongy portrait of the architect Charles Reilly, rather sadly wrapped in a black-and-white scarf. ‘I took great pride & pleasure in painting Elton & shall look forward to documenting you with equal zest,’ Augustus wrote to Sir Charles Reilly on 15 May 1931, recording his wish to ‘keep up my old Liverpool associations’. Twenty-six years earlier he had written to Reilly, ‘I don’t remember Mr Muskpratt [sic] but crossed eyes are always good to paint as Raphael knew.’

The portrait of Chaloner Dowdall (1909) is now at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; of Kuno Meyer (1911) at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; those of Mackay, Elton, Muspratt, Brunner and Sherrington at the University College Dining Club, Liverpool; and that of Reilly at the School of Architecture in Abercrombie Square, Liverpool.

50  Ida John to Michel Salaman n.d. (July 1902). NLW MS 22788C fols. 69–70.

51  In his preliminary synopsis for an autobiography, 1923.

52  One impression, at least, is dated 1902. CD 47.

53  ‘I would subscribe to make Augustus John Director of a Public House Trust,’ Walter Raleigh wrote to D. S. MacColl (27 May 1905). John’s time at Liverpool was later commemorated by a new public house, The Augustus John, which was erected next to the postgraduate club.

54  Augustus John to Michel Salaman, July 1902. NLW MS 14928D fol. 57.

55  Unpublished diaries of Arthur Symons.

56  Ethel Nettleship to Sir Caspar John, 27 June 1951. NLW MS 22790D fols. 34–9.

57  Unpublished diary of L. A. G. Strong, in the possession of B. L. Reid, biographer of John Quinn.

58  Augustus John to Michel Salaman, 1902. NLW MS 14928 fols. 52–3, 67–8.

59  Osbert Sitwell Laughter in the Next Room (1975 edn), p. 29.

60  Men and Memories Volume II p. 4.

61  ‘I Speak for Myself’, recording for BBC Far Eastern Service, 10 September 1949.

62  Ibid.

63  Chiaroscuro p. 100.

64  Walter Pater Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).

65  In January 1903 John did two etchings of Lewis, and in the same year an excellent drawing and one of his very best oil portraits ‘full of Castilian dignity’, as John Russell described it, ‘ – displayed in a moment of repose’. Lewis did a drawing of John that is reproduced in the former’s volume of memoirs, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937).

66  Wyndham Lewis to Augustus John n.d. (April 1910). NLW MS 22783D fols. 28–31.

67  ‘I called you poltroon for not daring to let me know before in what contempt you held me – when I had admitted you – fondly – almost to my secret places, for not honouring me so far as to be frank in this,’ John wrote (June 1907) in a letter that gives the flavour of their explosive friendship. ‘I called you mesquin [shabby] for jesting at my discomfiture, for playing with words over the stricken corpse of our friendship, ever sickly and now treacherously murdered at a blow from you, poor thing! And I called you bête for so estimating me as to treat me thus – cavalierly – for though my value as a friend has not proved great, it is neither nil nor negligible. And I say this from the very abysm of humility. Nor am I one to be dismissed with a comic wave of the hand...

‘The wall you think fit to surround yourself with at times might be a good rampart against enemies, but its canvas bricks cannot be considered insurmountable to friends, and indeed (imagining them detachable) it would be an impertinence to level them in all seriousness at one’s devoted head. I am as little inquisitive by habit as secretive by nature… I have never committed the indecency of trespassing on the privacy of your consciousness, of which you are rightly jealous. But in a friendly relationship I expect, yes, I expect, a frankness of word and deed as touching that relationship – an honest traffic – within its limits – a plainness of dealing, which is the politeness of friends. That we have never practised – you have never – it seems to me – given the Index of friendship a chance. It would appear that you live in fear of intrusion and can but dally with your fellows momentarily as Robinson Crusoe with his savages before running back to his castle...’

68  ‘Now, as for your recent drawings of which you sent me photostats, I must at once admit my inability to discover their merits, qua drawings,’ John wrote to Lewis (undated). ‘They lack charm, my dear fellow (from my point of view that is).’ In Blast, No 2 (1915), Lewis wrote an article called ‘History of the Largest Independent Society in England’, in which he called John ‘a great artist’, adding that he was lacking in control and prematurely exhausted – ‘an institution like Madame Tussaud’s’. He also credits John with bringing some exotic subject matter into English painting, before going on to describe his gypsy cult as hothouse and fin de siècle. Shortly after this article appeared the two painters met one night at a restaurant. John, all smiles at first and with a ‘woman-companion’, invited Lewis to join them, but later in the evening, when the talk turned to Blast, he lost his temper.

Next day John wrote to apologize. ‘I must have been positively drunk to assume so ridiculously truculent an attitude upon such slender grounds. Your thrusts at me in “Blast” were salutary and well-deserved, as to the question of exact justice – any stick will do to rouse a lazy horse or whore and the heavier the better. I liked many of your observations in Blast if I don’t feel the particular charm of those designs which last night I characterized as “pokey”. Probably “charm” is quite the last thing you intend. I think pokiness is an excellent and necessary element of design and I understand and admire your insistence on it. But I deplore your exclusion of all the other concomitants provided by an all too lavish creation – and with which I imagine none is better able to deal than you.’

69  Rebecca John Caspar John (1987), p. 17.

70  Finishing Touches p. 26.

71  The painting was bought by Charles Rutherston and now belongs to the Manchester City Art Gallery.

72  Modern English Painters (1976 edn) Volume I p. 179. The picture is in the Manchester City Art Gallery.

73  Called simply ‘Esther’. CD 1903.

74  Tate Gallery, London, Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Catalogue no. 3171.

75  The Burlington Magazine (May 1909).

76  They were married on 31 August 1870 at the Register Office in Camberwell when he was twenty-two and she eighteen.

77  Ida John to Michel Salaman n.d. (September–October 1902). NLW MS 22788C fols. 79–80.

78  Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society Volume XLIX 3rd Series parts 1–2.

79  ‘Miss McNeill’, Manchester City Art Gallery.

80  Now in the Manchester City Art Gallery.

81  Malcolm Easton Augustus John (1970), p. 43.

82  Arthur Ransome Bohemia in London (1907; 2nd edn, 1912), p. 89. See also Malcolm Easton Augustus John.

83  Charles McEvoy (1879–1929), the brother of Ambrose McEvoy, a village playwright and gifted clown.

84  The Burlington Magazine No. 475 (October 1942), p. 237.

85  Gwen John, Exhibition Catalogue, Arts Council, 1968. Introduction by Mary Taubman.

86  Ida John to Gwen John n.d. (1903). NLW MS 22307C.

87  Ida John to Gwen John (August 1903). NLW MS 22307C fols. 8–16.

88  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 3 September 1903. NLW MS 21468D fols. 2–6.

89  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. (late 1903). NLW MS 21468D fols. 7–8.

90  Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (October 1903). NLW MS 22776D fol. 19.

91  In an undated letter to Mrs Hugh Hammersley.

92  Edna Clarke Hall’s unpublished diary for 1898. Quoted in Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 62.

93  Ida John to Mary Dowdall (the Rani), March 1903.

94  Edna Clarke Hall to Ida John. Quoted in Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 85.

95  Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (late 1902). NLW MS 14928D fol. 67.

96  Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 86.

97  Augustus John to Gwen John n.d. (autumn 1903). NLW MS 22311D fol. 135.

98  Ida John to Gwen John n.d. (late December 1903). NLW MS 22397C fols. 19–20.

99  Ida John to Winifred John n.d. (spring 1904). NLW MS 22311D fols. 138–9.

100  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (late 1904). NLW MS 21459E fol. 12.

101  Ida John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (autumn 1903). NLW MS 22311D fols. 136–7.

102  Ida John to Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill n.d. (spring 1904). NLW MS 22207C fols. 21–2.

103  Ida and Augustus John to Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill, December 1903. NLW MS 22307C fols. 17–18.

104  In May 1904 Lady Gregory sent Augustus a copy of her Poets and Dreamers, an ‘astonishing book’, he called it. In a letter to Lady Gregory (25 May 1904) he wrote: ‘Mr John Sampson of Liverpool know[s] more than any man about the Tinkers. He has collected a considerable vocabulary of their words besides tales and rhymes, and was the first to solve the mystery of their language and its origins. I have only known some English Tinkers whose language is but a debased and impoverished derivative of the Irish Tinkers‘…If you would care I would willingly send you the hundred words or so I know of English Shelta but I feel it is the richer Irish dialect you ought to come across and Mr Sampson is its custodian.’ Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

105  Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols. 96–8.

106  Ida and Augustus to Gwen and Dorelia, December 1903. NLW MS 22307C fol. 18. Essex County Council has placed a commemorative plaque on Elm House.

107  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (1903). NLW MS 21459E fol. 7.

108  Dorelia to John Rothenstein (19 January 1951). See Modern English Painters (1976 edn), ‘Sickert to Grant’, p. 187.

109  ‘Dorelia by Lamplight at Toulouse’ (privately owned); ‘The Student’ (City of Manchester Art Gallery); and ‘Dorelia in a Black Dress’ (Tate Gallery, 5910).

110  Ida John to Gwen John n.d. and 24 August 1903. NLW MS 22307C fols. 8–16.

111  Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols.96–8.

112  Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904. NLW MS 22305D. fols. 96–8.

113  Dorelia’s words, spoken to the author, while describing this time.

114  Ida John to Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill n.d. (spring 1904). NLW MS 22397C fols. 21–2.

115  Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904 and 16 May 1904. NLW MS 22395D fols. 96–101.

116  Dorelia to the author, 3 July 1969.

117  Ida John to Gwen John n.d. (May/June 1904). NLW MS 22307C fol. 23.

118  Ibid.

119  Gwen to Dorelia n.d. (May/June 1904). NLW MS 22789D fols. 58–9.

120  Dorelia McNeill to Gwen John n.d. (May/June 1904). NLW MS 22308C fols. 9–10.

121  Ibid.

122  Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (May/June 1904). NLW MS 22789D fols. 60–1.

123  Leonard to Gwen John n.d. (June/July 1904). NLW MS 22305C.

124                    ‘Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.’

So sang a little Clod of Clay,

Trodden with the cattle’s feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

‘Love seeketh only Self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another’s loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.’

125  Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (July 1904). NLW MS 22799D fol. 35.

126  ‘Miss Dorelia Ardor, Pirini, I must keep writing,’ he wrote from La Place Verte in Antwerp. ‘You have not written to me yet. Do you not believe you are precious to me, invaluable one! I am alone and what can I do but think, and thoughts of all sorts come to me. I know if I don’t hear from you tomorrow I will come to find you again. I can always claim you; I will have you for myself… I have tears of love for you and yet I am not drunk. Sweet I have met you on the high-way and I have recognised you and kissed you and you have fled into the woods and I have followed you at last and found you again. My girl, my sweet friend whom I love so much can you withhold your lips your eyes and your heart and your mind from me your lover – he who will take no denial – no denial. No denial is valid with him henceforth. It is useless – my lady, Sibyl, Dryad, form without circumference, incomprehensible simplicity, earth and air –

‘Ardor McNeill, it is you I love – Gustavus.’ NLW MS 22776D fols. 29–30.

127  Ibid.

128  Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (July 1904). NLW MS 22776D fols. 32–3.

129  Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (July 1904). NLW MS 22776D fol. 34.

130  Dorelia McNeill to Gwen John, 1 August 1904. NLW MS 22308C fol. 11.

131  Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (September 1904). NLW MS 22789D fol. 62.

132  Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols. 96–8.

133  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. NLW MS 21468D fol. 15.

134  Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904; September 1904. NLW MS 22305 fols. 96–8, 106.

135  Augustus John to Gwen John, 29 August 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols. 104–5.

136  Augustus John to Gwen John, September 1904; 24 October 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols. 106, 109.

137  Gwen John to Auguste Rodin n.d. Musée Rodin, Paris. See Cecily Langdale Gwen John (1987), p. 28.

138  NLW MS 22393C fols. 4–5. See Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan Gwen John. Papers at the National Library of Wales p. 9. The passage has been translated from the French by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan.

139  Winifred John to Gwen John n.d. (1903/4). NLW MS 22307C fols. 116–17.

140  Winifred John to Gwen John n.d. (1905). NLW MS 22307C fol. 118.

141  Winifred John to Gwen John, 10 July 1910. NLW MS 22307C fols. 119–23.

142  Auguste Rodin to Gwen John, 14 September 1907. Quoted in Cecile Langdale Gwen John p. 33.

143  Quoted in Susan Chitty Gwen John p. 70.

144  Ibid. p. 121.

145  Gwen John Memorial Exhibition, Catalogue, Matthieson Ltd, 1946, p. 4.

146  Gwen John to Michel Salaman, 17 January 1926. NLW MS 14930C.

147  Mary Taubman Gwen John p. 25.

148  Augustus John to Gwen John, 29 August 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols. 104–5.

149  Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill, August 1904. NLW MS 22155B fols. 1–2.

150  Augustus John to Gwen John n.d. (autumn 1903). NLW MS 22311D fol. 135.

151  Augustus John to Gwen John, September 1904. NLW MS 22305D fol. 106.

152  Ida John to Gwen John n.d. (summer 1904). NLW MS 22207C fol. 24.

153  Augustus John to Gwen John, 29 August 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols. 104–5.

154  Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill, August 1904. NLW MS 22155B fols. 1–2.

155  Augustus John to Gwen John, 29 August 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols. 104–5.

156  Ida John to Gwen John n.d. (summer 1904). NLW MS 22207C fol. 24.

157  Ida John to Gwen John, 21 September 1904. NLW MS 22207C fol. 28.

158  Ibid.

159  Ibid.

160  Ida John to Gwen John, 29 September 1904. NLW MS 22207C fols. 29–31.

161  Augustus John to Will Rothenstein n.d. (September 1904).

162  Ibid.

163  Entry for 26 February 1968 in The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner (ed. Claire Harman) p. 318.

164  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 21 December 1910. NLW MS 21468D fol. 15.

CHAPTER IV: MEN MUST PLAY AND WOMEN WEEP

1  Ida John to Winifred John n.d. (October-November 1904). NLW MS 22311D fols. 143–6.

2  Ida John to Gwen John, 2 November 1904. NLW MS 22207C fols. 32–4.

3  Ida John to Margaret Hinton n.d. (spring 1905). NLW MS 22788C fol. IR.

4  Augustus John to Ottoline Morrell, 30 November 1908.

5  William Rothenstein to Gwen John, 30 May 1926. NLW MS 22311C fols. 1–2.

6  Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (c. 1909). NLW MS 22115B fols. 7–8.

7  See Mary Lago Imperfect Encounter (1972), p. 207.

8  An article Rothenstein wrote about the Slade celebrated Augustus for many of those buccaneering qualities that fed the John legend. But Augustus objected to this. ‘Your all too picturesque treatment of me, leaves me in any posture but that of the penitent. Tho’ you have been good enough to clothe me in “Bravest green”, I find myself much more comfortable in my own less operatic habiliments and much more likely to face with fortitude and detachment the kind of music you bring to bear on me; – I have heard such strains before – but never! oh never! did I expect to find you in the position of band master – you my dear Will, whose flair and vision have been among the conditions which make life tolerable in this island… Differing with you, I think that the artist may not without shame join with his fellow men. His isolation indeed grows more complete as his art becomes more pure, nor is it the “ultimate usefulness” of the art which ever inspires him. His goal lies within himself – nor in his audacity is he deterred or terrified or bewildered for more than one sickly moment by the clamour and bustle and siren voices that come to him from without.’

9  Men and Memories Volume II p. 166.

10  Athenaeum (19 November 1904), p. 700.

11  ‘Sickert is certainly an amusing and curious character – amiable withal. But it offended me to hear him cast off his old master so lightly and perfunctorily the other day – after all, Whistler wasn’t a bad artist. Sickert probably never saw his real merits, but he is singularly inept at times, for instance having once and for all disposed of poor Whistler he goes on to discover Robert Fowler Esq! But anybody who has served on a Jury with him must know he is quite futile...’

12  Sir William Rothenstein Memorial Exhibition, Tate Gallery, 5 May–4 June 1950.

13  Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (early 1905). NLW MS 22789D fol. 63.

14  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (end of 1904). NLW MS 21459E fol. 13.

15  Ida John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. NLW MS 22789D fols. 66–70.

16  Ida John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (March/April 1905). NLW MS 22789D fols. 73–6.

17  Ibid.

18  Ida John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (1905). NLW MS 22789D fols. 71–2.

19  Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (1905). NLW MS 14928D fol. 73.

20  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (December 1904). NLW MS 21459E fol. 13.

21  Augustus John to Michel Salaman, 9 February 1905. NLW MS 14928D fol. 69.

22  Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill, May 1905. NLW MS 22155B fol. 3.

23  Dorelia disliked certificates, and the birth was never registered. In a letter that would make a biographer’s heart sink, Augustus advised her: ‘There is no need to register Pyramus at all – or anybody else – you may register him for nothing within 6 weeks but after that you pay so much to do so. But you are not bound to register him. Sampson told me this. He has not registered Honor. So you can write to the registrar and tell him you have decided not to.’

24  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (December 1904). NLW MS 21459E fol. 13.

25  Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (summer 1905). NLW MS 14928D fols. 73–5.

26  Ida John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (March/April 1905). NLW MS 22789D fols. 77–8.

27  A number of Augustus’s etchings of Ida call her Anne; for example, ‘Anne with a Feathered Hat’ (CD 59) and ‘Anne with a Lace Shawl’ (CD 46). Ida also began renaming her friends – the Rani, for example, who became Lady Polly. ‘Lady Polly is such a much more suitable name for you than Rani,’ she explained. ‘You are quite like lots of Lady Pollies in cheap novels… of course you will think it atrocious.’

28  Ida John to Augustus John n.d. (late summer 1905). NLW MS 22782D fols. 65–6.

29  Ida John to Augustus John n.d. (late summer 1905). NLW MS 22782D fols. 67–8.

30  Ida John to Ada Nettleship n.d. (late September 1905). NLW MS 22789B fols. 40–1.

31  Ida John to Ursula Nettleship, 6 December 1905. NLW MS 22788C fols. 12–16.

32  In an undated letter to the Rani. Ida John’s correspondence with both the Dowdalls is in the Liverpool City Libraries.

33  Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (September/October 1905). NLW MS 21459E fol. 19.

34  Ida John to Margaret Sampson n.d. (July 1906). NLW MS 22798B fols. 77–8.

35  Letter to the author, 23 November 1968.

36  Undated letter from Ida John to the Rani.

37  In an undated letter to Margaret Sampson.

38  Extract from an undated letter from Ida John to Augustus John.

39  In a letter to his mother, Wyndham Lewis primly reported John’s move ‘with his families’ to this new home. ‘He [John] has an apartment, garden and studio all together, parterre. The elder of his children, that I hadn’t seen for some time, are becoming excessively interesting personalities: but their conversation, although sparkling, is slightly disgusting to a person of pure mind… They call me a “smutty thing” and a “booby” because I insisted that a lion could climb up a beanstalk, nay, had done so, in my presence! – and one of the first wife’s children has contracted the indelicate habit of spitting at one of the second wife’s children while having his bath: – by the way, Miss MacNeill is producing another infant.’ The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (ed. W. K. Rose 1963), p. 31.

40  Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (summer 1905). NLW MS 14928D fols. 73–5.

41  Bruce Arnold Orpen. Mirror to an Age (1981), pp. 192–3.

42  Campbell Dodgson (1867–1948) had entered the Print Room of the British Museum in 1893, and in 1912 he succeeded Sir Sidney Colvin as Keeper of Prints and Drawings. He became particularly well known as an expert on early German art and a collector of nineteenth-century prints and drawings. His catalogue of Augustus’s etchings appeared in 1920. He married in 1913 the artist Frances Catharine Spooner, daughter of Canon W. A. Spooner, of Spoonerism fame.

43  The Chenil exhibition catalogue lists eighty-two etchings, the number of prints varying but never exceeding twenty-four. A significant quantity of these plates, Dodgson noted, mostly nudes, were etched ‘somewhat hurriedly and in several cases without genuine inspiration’, in order to be ready for the show. About fifteen were produced in the early months of this year, sometimes more than one plate being etched on the same day. It seems possible, too, that several numbers were added to the exhibition after the catalogue was printed: about seven are dated precisely (thought possibly without accuracy) as having been done in the last week of May; while three excellent portraits of Stephen Grainger which Augustus appears to have completed that spring are not listed. Among those shown, some of the portraits, and a few of the groups in a landscape setting, are striking. Many of the numbers in the exhibition were a frank act of homage to Rembrandt, one of them being a translation on to copper of a Rembrandt pen-and-ink drawing.

44  Augustus’s claim that Evans became a sanitary engineer seems to have been a metaphorical way of expressing his disappointment (‘I held him in the highest regard and perhaps on insufficient grounds considered him immensely gifted’). Evans was briefly employed in the food industry and in about 1911 emigrated to British Columbia and lived on a ranch. After the First World War (in which he was wounded), he went on painting but did not show his work, little of which apears to have survived his death in 1958.

45  Augustus John to Ulick O’Connor. See the Spectator (10 November 1961).

46  The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (ed. W. K. Rose 1963), p. 39, where this letter is wrongly guessed as c. 1908.

47  Augustus John to Alick Schepeler n.d. (1907).

48  Now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, No. 4119.

49  Evening Standard and St James’s Gazette (19 June 1908).

50  For example, he wrote to the poet Arthur Symons: ‘Perhaps you may not have seen or heard of the sculptured figures on a new building in the Strand by a man called Jacob Epstein, which are in imminent danger of being pulled down or mutilated at the instigation of the “National Vigilance Society” of sexual maniacs, supported by tradesmen in the vicinity – and the police. These decorations seem to me to be the only decent attempt at monumental sculpture of which the streets of London can boast. A few of the nude male figures however have been provided by the artist with the indispensable apparatus of generation, without any attempt having been made to disguise, conceal, or minimise the features in question. This flagrant indelicacy has naturally infuriated our susceptible citizens to such an extent that without the most sturdy exertions of the intelligent lovers of Art and truth, the figures will be demolished.

‘…If you would view the works, or those which are visible, for the hoardings are not yet all down, I feel sure you will share some of my feelings and will do something in defence of Epstein and Art itself – Yrs Augustus E. John.’

To Dorelia, Augustus wrote: ‘Epstein wrote to me in despair, his figures are being threatened by the police! It is a monstrous thing… I sent him a fiver on account of Rom[illy]’s portrait and have written to a few people. On comparing his figures… with the squalid horde that pullulate beneath, leering and vituperative, one is in no doubt which merit condemnation, sequestration and dismemberment...’

51  But he was always a good subject for anecdotes. ‘I don’t believe in the modern ideal of living in a cow-shed and puddling clay with somebody else’s wife concealed in a soap-box, like our friend Epstein,’ Augustus wrote to Alick Schepeler (summer 1906). A few days later he amended this to an explanatory passage: ‘The soap-box or packing-can is well known in Bohemia as a substitute for a bed – and if turned over might very well be used to conceal somebody else’s wife, provided she were not too fat – I was wrong however to provide Epstein with this piece of furniture. I forgot that he used to keep somebody else’s wife in his dustbin – I hear recently that he has married her – so it’s all right.’ Epstein and Margaret Dunlop (known as ‘Peggy’) were not married until 13 November 1913 at the Chelsea Register Office.

52  The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume II 1920–1924 (ed. Anne Olivier Bell 1978), p. 54.

53  Bernard Leach Beyond East and West (1978), pp. 31–2.

54  Nina Hamnett Laughing Torso. Reminiscences (1932), pp. 26–7.

55  Letter to Alick Schepeler n.d. (c. autumn 1906).

56  Chiaroscuro p. 68.

57  Letter to Alick Schepeler n.d.

58  Chiaroscuro p. 26.

59  For example: ‘An English fool, whom I had observed eyeing me in Rouen Cathedral to-day, rushed up to me outside, and started addressing me with extreme nervousness in lamentable French. He asked me if I were a Russian. I said “Mais non monsieur”. He then began excusing himself so painfully that I invited him to speak English. He was thunderstruck and asked if I were a socialist. “No, are you?” “Er, no, I’m a Christian – first of all etc.” He explained he was so struck by my appearance, the ass! He was a pitiable sight. His deplorable condition when I left him made me almost feel Christlike. Indeed I was about to make him the repository of the newest Beatitude. “Blessed are the ridiculous, for they shall entertain the Lord,” when he oscillated confusedly and disappeared in a pink mist.’ John to Alick Schepeler n.d.

60  At the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, there is ‘Study of an Undine’ (PD 155), dated 1907, and ‘Portrait of Alexandra’, 1906 (PD 154–1961). At the Manchester City Art Gallery there is ‘Study for Undine’ (1182) and ‘Miss Schepeler’. ‘Alick Schepeler’, a black-pencil portrait on grey paper owned by Mrs H. Alexander, is reproduced as pl. 18 in Augustus John: Fifty-two drawings. A full-length drawing (5 ? × 13 inches) described as ‘A lady with left hand raised to her cheek’ – a very deliberately enigmatic pose – is probably a study for the burnt oil painting ‘La Seraphita’. It was owned by Mrs Charles Hunter and later bought by Vita Sackville-West, who left it to her son Benedict Nicolson. ‘I have a certain tenderness for this drawing,’ Augustus wrote on 9 June 1938. ‘It is of Miss Alick Schepeler.’

61  Horizon Volume V No. 26 (February 1942), p. 125.

62  Anne Stuart Lewis, his mother. See The Letters of Wyndham Lewis p. 12.

63  A large charcoal drawing he did of these gypsies, ‘Wandering Sinnte’, is now in the Manchester City Art Gallery. Though the figures are unrelated psychologically, they have a compositional unity and a community of feeling that makes it one of the best of Augustus’s groups.

64  Letter from Ida John to Margaret Sampson n.d.

65  Letter from Ida John to Alice Rothenstein n.d.

66  Dorelia McNeill to Gwen John n.d. (June/July 1906). NLW MS 22308C fol. 12.

67  ‘The poet astonished the beach by appearing in a Rugby blazer and a cholera belt,’ Augustus reported to Alick Schepeler. ‘…He came back full of the beauties of sea-bathing – that is to say: he had been viewing the girls frolicking in the water from a prominent position on the beach. He assures me there were at least 10 exquisite young creatures with fat legs, and insists on my accompanying him tomorrow… He wants me to go to Munich in January for the Carnival – he assures me I will dance with the Crown Princess.’

Lewis’s more laconic description of this long vacation was: ‘I wrote verse, when not asleep in the sun.’ See Rude Assignment p. 120.

68  Susan Chitty Gwen John p. 88.

69  Frederick V. Grunfeld Rodin. A Biography (1987), pp. 479, 481.

70  Susan Chitty Gwen John p. 82.

71  Ibid. p. 83.

72  Quoted in Frederick V. Grunfeld Rodin. A Biography p. 482.

73  Letter to Alick Schepeler n.d.

74  The Letters of Wyndham Lewis p. 31.

75  Dorelia to the author, July 1969.

76  To Alick Schepeler.

77  Letter to Alick Schepeler n.d.

78  Ida John to Augustus John, 10 November 1906. NLW MS 22782D fols. 86–7.

79  Letter from Ida John to the Rani, December 1906.

80  ‘Clara is enceinte and will have to leave end of January,’ Ida had written to Augustus. ‘It is so disappointing. She is such a good nurse. Félice is going to snort over needles and thread and be a dressmaker – I bravely gave her notice and had to bear a scene of tearful reproach – but within the week she found a genteel place as mender to a school… Poor old Clara is cheerful over her affair but she would much rather not have it, and says had she been in Paris when she found out she would have gone and had it destroyed.’ NLW MS 22782D fols. 90–1.

81  Ada Nettleship to Ursula and Ethel Nettleship n.d. (10 March 1907). NLW MS 22799D fols. 36–7.

82  Finishing Touches p. 45.

83  Letter from Augustus John to the Rani, March 1907.

84  Finishing Touches p. 46.

85  Letter from Augustus John to Margaret Sampson, March 1907.

86  The Letters of Wyndham Lewis p. 36.

87  Five years later Augustus abruptly gave Mrs Nettleship notice that he was coming to fetch Ida’s urn ‘but not the half-ton of lead with which it appears to be ballasted’. NLW MS 22775C fol. 89. Early in April 1912 Henry Lamb came across Augustus on the platform of Waterloo station. He said ‘he was travelling 1st because he had an urn with him,’ Lamb wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell (6 April 1912). ‘…At Poole we found each other & went to a pub… then we came back to the station & got our luggage on board. J. flabbergasted me when they bumped a dull looking wooden box beside the coachman by suddenly announcing that it contained Ida’s ashes.’ See Keith Clements Henry Lamb. The Artist and his Friends (1985), p. 54.

88  See Men and Memories Volume II p. 90.

89  Letter from Augustus John to William Rothenstein, 20 March 1907.

90  Letter from Augustus John to the Rani, March 1907.

91  The Letters of Wyndham Lewis p. 36.

92  Information from ‘Augustus John’, an unpublished typescript by Alan Moorehead, whose source was Henry Lamb.

93  Unpublished diaries of Arthur Symons: ‘Gwen and Doulia’ (sic).

CHAPTER V: BUFFETED BY FATE

1  Ada Nettleship to Ursula Nettleship, 15 March 1907. Written from the Hotel Regina. NLW MS 22799D fols. 46–8.

2  John to Alice Rothenstein.

3  John to Chaloner Dowdall.

4  John to Trevor Haddon, 4 February 1907. NLW MS 21570. See also letter of 12 July 1907: ‘I wonder if it has occurred to you to think of replacing Knewstub as manager of the shop; as a shareholder I should be in favour of that step, tho’ no doubt it would be difficult to find a suitable man.’

5  ‘Drawings by Augustus E. John’ at the Carfax Gallery, December 1907. ‘Knewstub’s peculiarities have ended by tiring me out,’ he had written to Trevor Haddon (11 February 1907), ‘and I have arranged for my next show to be elsewhere.’

6  John to Will Rothenstein.

7  Delacroix to Félix Guillemardet, 1 December 1893.

8  John to Will Rothenstein, April 1907.

9  John to Alick Schepeler from Equihen.

10  Now in the Manchester City Art Gallery. An unfinished study, one of several, is in the Tate Gallery (5298).

11  One of these, in pencil and wash on tinted paper, is at the National Portrait Gallery, London. It has what appear to be spots of Beaujolais on it. Yeats is wearing a mackintosh.

12  W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, 4 October 1907.

13  John to Henry Lamb, 24 August 1907.

14  John to Henry Lamb.

15  Keith Clements Henry Lamb. The Artist and his Friends (1985), p. 49.

16  Ibid. p. 35.

17  The Flight of the Mind. The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume I 1888–1912 (ed. Nigel Nicolson 1975), p. 215.

18  The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume II 1920–1924 (ed. Anne Olivier Bell 1978), p· 54.

19  Ida John to Augustus John n.d. (November 1906). NLW MS 22782D fols. 84–5.

20  Frances Partridge Everything to Lose. Diaries 1945–1960 (1985), p. 192.

21  John to Henry Lamb, 25 June 1907.

22  Rebecca John Caspar John (1987), pp. 21–2.

23  John to Ursula Nettleship n.d. (September 1907). NLW MS 22775C fols. 84–7.

24  Edward Nettleship to Ursula Nettleship July 1907. NLW MS 22790D fols. 66–8.

25  Letter (undated, but probably September 1907) from Dorelia to Augustus. NLW MS 22783D fols. 112–13.

26  Ibid.

27  Dorelia to Augustus n.d. (September 1907). NLW MS 22783D fols. 110–11.

28  Augustus to Dorelia. NLW MS 22776D fols. 55–6.

29  Chiaroscuro p. 69.

30  ‘French Fisher-boy’ was owned for many years by Judge Stephen Tumim, and is now in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

31  See Malcolm Easton and Michael Holroyd The Art of Augustus John (1974), pls.7 and 42.

32  Originally called ‘Woman Smiling’, it reversed its title in 1910 when it was shown at the Manchester City Art Gallery in a loan exhibition of John’s work. It was the first picture bought (for £225 [equivalent to £10,600 in 1996] at Manchester) by the Contemporary Art Society, founded that year to acquire works by living artists for loan or gift to public galleries. It was also the first picture presented by the Society to the Tate Gallery (3171).

33  Miranda Seymour Ottoline Morrell. Life on the Grand Scale (1992), p. 71.

34  Ibid. p. 74.

35  Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell (ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy), p. 141.

36  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (May 1908). NLW MS 22776D fol. 79.

37  Truth (6 March 1920), Everyman (13 March 1920), the Star (11 March 1920), Daily News (2 March 1920). See also Manchester Guardian (1 March 1920: ‘it makes life more exciting and fantastic and unlikely’), and Spectator (6 March 1920): ‘a brilliant performance… one of those pictures we recognise at once as a new thing, with a distinct life of its own, come into the world’).

38  ‘I am delighted you snubbed those stupid and impertinent journalists,’ Augustus wrote to her (14 March 1920). ‘I have kept them at bay as far as possible but they are very persistent. Even if one is induced to express an opinion it is sure to appear in a distorted form and minus the points.’ Two years later, on 1 February 1922, he wrote in answer to a letter from Ottoline about the picture: ‘I still have your portrait. People don’t often buy other people’s portraits. It’s rather a cruel predicament as you know and yet I like it. I think I had priced it at £500 at the show but you can have it for much less. Would £200 be too much?’ Ten days later he is hedging: ‘In the meanwhile I have collected some pictures for a show at Pittsburgh U.S.A. and I thought of including your portrait among them as I think with all its deficiencies (and tooth-powder) it is one of my best in some ways. Would you mind letting it go for the show, and then we could decide later if you really wanted it, or try another.’ On 9 January 1925 he informs her: ‘The price I have put on your portrait is £400 [equivalent to £10,000 in 1996]. Is that too much?’ Eight months later (2 September 1925) he writes: ‘I am delighted that on seeing the portrait again you still think well of it. It isn’t good enough but I think it has distinction. I am sorry the price I put on it is too much – but I would not part with it to anyone else for less than twice that sum – and I know I shall be able to get it or more one day.’ The following month, some seventeen years after he had begun this portrait, their transactions were at an end – and at once he suggested beginning another picture. ‘Oh yes – your portrait is full of faults and I know I should love to do another.’ By now Ottoline was middle-aged, and feeling perhaps that there was not enough time left for another portrait, she did not accept this offer.

39  Quentin Bell Virginia Wool/Volume I (1972), p. 145.

40  Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell p. 157.

41  Ibid.

42  Ibid. p. 158.

43  Quentin Bell Virginia Woolf Volume I p. 124.

44  Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell p. 159.

45  ‘How good of you to get the Duke of Portland to buy my drawings,’ Augustus to Ottoline Morrell (7 July 1908). The 6th Duke of Portland was Ottoline’s half-brother.

46  ‘My friend Lamb has just 40 francs left to carry him through the summer… Epstein is slowly being killed in London. It seems to be a general superstition that artists can live on air – whereas the truth is their appetites, like their other capacities, are exceptionally good,’ Augustus wrote to Ottoline (20 September 1908). Later that month he wrote: ‘You were good sending that cheque to my friend Lamb… Epstein is I think still very hard put to it… It would be grand if Portland or anyone else gave him a commission.’ With characteristic generosity Ottoline gave Epstein an order for a garden statue and took likely clients to visit him, including W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, who commissioned him to do a bust of herself.

47  Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell p. 163.

48  Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell p. 158. See also Sandra Jobson Darroch Ottoline. The Life of Ottoline Morrell (1975), p. 66.

49  Ibid. p. 155; ibid. p. 67.

50  Sandra Jobson Darroch Ottoline. The Life of Ottoline Morrell p. 65.

51  Miranda Seymour Ottoline Morrell. Life on the Grand Scale p. 84.

52  John to Ottoline Morrell, 30 May 1908.

53  Henry Lamb to Ottoline Morrell n.d. Quoted in Sandra Jobson Darroch Ottoline. The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell p. 76.

54  Ottoline Morrell’s diary May 1910. Quoted in Miranda Seymour Ottoline Morrell. Life on the Grand Scale p. 98.

55  Keith Clements Henry Lamb. The Artist and his Friends (1985), p. 147.

56  Ibid. pp. 146–7.

57  Quoted in Miranda Seymour Ottoline Morrell. Life on the Grand Scale p. 97.

58  Royall Tyler was the author of Spain: A Study of Her Life and Arts, ‘a capital straightforward business-like book… My only objection is to the title, as I think Spain is a neuter noun,’ A. E. Housman wrote to the publisher Grant Richards (6 July 1909). Richards himself had more to object to, since Tyler then ran off with his wife.

59  ‘Charlie McEvoy nearly killed me in the evening by his drolleries,’ Augustus wrote to Lamb (24 August 1907) after an early visit to Westcot. ‘He has recently had a play put on by the Stage Society which was a great success, the most enlightened critics combining in a chorus of praise. He sketched me the plot of his next play which also endangered my life. It is regrettable I am at the mercy of these comedians.’ In 1907, McEvoy had written ‘David Ballard’ and he was also the author of ‘The Village Wedding’, which was performed by the village players at Aldbourne. In 1908 Augustus had done an etching of him (CD 20) described by Campbell Dodgson as ‘a wonderful example of direct and unprejudiced portraiture, a perfect likeness and a masterly, though by no means beautiful, etching, which ranks by general consent as one of the best of Mr John’s plates’. It was first shown at the fourth exhibition of the Society of Twelve in 1908.

60  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (April 1908). NLW MS 227760 fols. 75–6.

61  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (May 1908). NLW MS 22775C fol. 73.

62  John to Wyndham Lewis, 28 June 1908.

63  Ethel Nettleship to Caspar John, 27 June 1951. NLW MS 22790D fols. 34–7.

64  John to Ottoline Morrell, 7 July 1908.

65  Alison Thomas Portraits of Women (1994), pp. 96, 97.

66  Edna Clarke Hall to Rosa Waugh, 15 March 1907. Quoted in Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 105.

67  Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 110.

68  Ibid. p. 111.

69  Ibid. p. 112.

70  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (September-October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fol. 90.

71  Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 111.

72  A pencil-and-watercolour study for this picture is in the Tate Gallery (3198).

73  John to Ottoline Morrell, 11 November 1908.

74  Letter to the author, 25 November 1968.

75  John to Lamb, September 1908.

76  Ibid.

77  From ‘The Wanderers’ by Arthur Symons in Amoris Victima (1897).

78  The Swagger Portrait. Grand Manner Portraiture in Britain from Van Dyck to Augustus John (Tate Gallery 1992), pl. 76, p. 214.

79  Helen Fry suffered from an incurable thickening of the bone of her skull and in 1910 was consigned to a mental home until her death in 1937.

80  Malcolm Easton Augustus John: Portraits of the Artist’s Family (1970).

81  Christopher Hassall Edward Marsh (1959), pp. 145, 148.

82  Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley (ed. R. George Thomas 1968), p. 144.

83  ‘Time, You Old Gipsy Man’ by Ralph Hodgson.

84  John’s contributions to the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society are: New Series, Vol. 2, ‘Wandering Sinnte’ (frontispiece), pp. 197–9; Russian Gypsy Songs, Vol. 3, pp. 251–2; French Romani Vocabulary, Vol. 4, pp. 217–35; Russian Gypsies at Marseilles and Milan, Vol. 5, pp. 135–8; The Songs of Fabian de Castro, pp. 204–18; O Bovedantuna, ‘Calderari Gypsies from the Caucasus’ (frontispiece). Third Series, Vol. 7, ‘Portrait of Dr. Sampson’ (opp. p. 97); Vol. 17, ‘Self-Portrait’ (frontispiece), p. 136; Le Chateau de Lourmarin, Vol. 23, pp. 120–22; Portrait of a Russian Gypsy, Vol. 27, pp. 155–6; Keyserling on Hungarian Gypsy Music, Vol. 36, pp. 81–2; Miss Jo Jones’s Frontispiece, Vol. 39, ‘Les Saintes–Maries de la Mer, with Sainte Sara, l’Egyptienne, and a Child’ (opp. p. 3), pp. 3–4, ‘Dora E. Yates’.

85  John to Ottoline Morrell, 8 April 1909.

86  Ottoline’s daughter.

87  John to Ottoline Morrell, 9 July 1909.

88  John to Ottoline Morrell, 22 July 1909.

89  Augustus John – the pattern of the painter’s career, BBC Third Programme (15 April 1954).

90  Jessie G. Stewart Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters (1959), pp. 129–30. The portrait was hung in Newnham College, Cambridge. See also Sandra J. Harrison Jane Harrison. The Mask and the Self (1988), pp. 162–3. The painting is still at Newnham College. It greatly shocked the Provost of Eton, M. R. James, this being ‘one of the rare occasions when I saw him in a temper,’ Sir Gerald Kelly wrote to the Principal of Newnham, Dame Myra Curtis (21 January 1954). ‘We regard it as one of our treasures,’ she replied. ‘…The cause of the shock to Montague James remains mysterious.’ (25 January, 5 June 1954). This correspondence is in the archives of the Royal Academy in London.

91  Jane Harrison to D. S. MacColl, 15 August 1909.

92  John to Jessie G. Stewart, October 1957.

93  Chiaroscuro pp. 64–5.

94  Song of Love. The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noël Olivier (ed. Pippa Harris 1991), pp. 14–15.

95  John to Ottoline Morrell, 22 July 1909.

96  Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell pp. 181–2.

97  Augustus John to Ada Nettleship, n.d. (July 1909). NLW MS 22775C fols. 78–9.

98  Chaloner Dowdall to Vere Egerton Cotton, 6 November 1945.

99  Ibid.

100  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (August 1909). NLW MS 22776D fols. 93–4.

101  Chiaroscuro, p. 154.

102  Dora E. Yates My Gypsy Days p. 71.

103  John to the Rani n.d.

104  He later reversed this opinion. In 1911, when he had an opportunity to add to the head, he decided against doing so. ‘I sent your portrait to the N[ew] E[nglish],’ he wrote to Dowdall. ‘I couldn’t decide to touch it, merely gave it a thin coat of varnish. I think it looks well.’

105  Daily Dispatch (4 October 1909).

106  Scotsman (September 1909).

107  Albert Fleming in a letter to Dowdall, 16 December 1911 (Liverpool Public Library).

108  In July 1911 Augustus painted another Liverpool portrait that, amid much controversy, was exiled overseas. This was of the Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer. It shows him lolling in a chair, his waistcoat thrown open and also part of his trousers (‘this I really must get him to change’, Meyer ineffectually wrote) to display a large expanse of shirt and a claret-coloured tie. It is a weighty and effective piece of portraiture, highly praised by the art critic Sir Claude Phillipps, and ‘all agree that it is a masterpiece’, wrote Meyer rather dubiously. Presented, through subscription, by some two hundred Liverpool friends, and shown at the NEAC (winter 1911) and the National Portrait Society (spring 1915), it was much admired by Sir Hugh Lane who, Lady Gregory told Quinn (16 March 1912), ‘hopes to buy John’s picture of Kuno Meyer for the [Irish National] Gallery. The Liverpool people don’t like it, and he could sit to someone else for them. It is a fine thing.’ But once again, though Liverpool did not like it, the city did not especially want others to enjoy it elsewhere. Then, at the beginning of the Great War, Kuno Meyer came out on the side of the Germans, and left Britain for the United States. The portrait continued to hang at the Liverpool University Club, greatly to the embarrassment of the authorities who, by way of compromise, turned its face to the wall. Though it still belonged to the absent professor, Liverpool in its anxiety now to be rid of the traitorous object tried to remove it to the care of the Public Trustee as the property of an alien enemy. As the war continued, Ireland, England, America and Germany fought for the right not to have it, and it remained in a state of suspended ownership. ‘I have been thinking that I ought to sell John’s portrait of me,’ Kuno Meyer innocently wrote to Quinn on 3 November 1915, ‘although this is not the best time to do so. Besides, John wouldn’t like it, and I should be very sorry to hurt his feelings. For, unlike most of my English friends, he is one who will not put politics – and such dirty politics – above friendship… the portrait (which my English friends no longer care for) is unsuited to my small flat and – entre nous – not liked by my family as a portrait, while it is one of John’s masterpieces, as everybody admits.’

The portrait which Augustus had begun at Dingle Bank, a ‘Rotten’ place, and finished in two sittings at Gethin’s studio in the Apothecaries Hall at the corner of Bold Street and Colquitt Street, went after the war to where Lane had originally wanted to send it: the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. See Seàn Ó Lúing Kuno Meyer (1991), pp. 98–9, 113, 203.

109  Charlie Slade, whose brother Loben had married Dorelia’s sister Jessie, was known as ‘the half-a-potato man’ on account of his curious mysticism which,Romilly John explains, ‘originated in an experience of his own nothingness in the ruins of Pompeii, and the revelation that came to him that the cut surfaces of a potato sliced in half, however asymmetrical in shape the potato, were exactly similar. He was subsequently promoted to station master at Cambridge, where I became deeply involved in his ideas and was urged (in vain) to produce a book on the subject.’ Romilly John to the author, 28 July 1972. Felix Slade, Charles Slade’s son, objects that ‘the half-a-potato man exists only in Romilly’s imagination. My father did, however, often propound informal theories, which were put to us for study and topics of conversation… I remember the potato theory but was only slightly intrigued by it… My father was the District Engineer, Cambridge (1924–27), and not the Station Master.’

110  See Malcolm Easton Augustus John: Portraits of the Artist’s Family p. 52.

111  Arthur Symons The Fool of the World (1906), p. 69.

112  Arthur Symons to Rhoda Bowser, 6 May 1900. See Roger Lhombreaud Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography (1963), p. 175.

113  Arthur Symons to John Quinn, 29 June 1914 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).

114  Augustus to Gwen, 23 June 1920. NLW MS 22305D fol. 133.

115  See Agnes Tobin: Letters, Translations, Poems. With some account of her life (Grabhorn Press for John Howell, San Francisco 1958), p. xii.

116  Quinn to Joseph Conrad, 12 April 1916.

117  Alice B. Saarinen The Proud Possessors (1959), p. 206.

118  Quinn to Josephine Huneker, 10 April 1909 and 14 July 1909.

119  ‘[Augustus John] has painted Symons with the relentless truth we all desire in a portrait,’ Harris wrote: ‘the sparse grey hair, the high bony forehead, the sharp ridge of Roman nose. The fleshless cheeks; the triangular wedge of thin face shocks one like the stringy turkey neck and the dreadful claw-like fingers of the outstretched hand. A terrible face – ravaged like a battlefield; the eyes dark pools, mysterious, enigmatic; the lid hangs across the left eyeball like a broken curtain. I see the likeness, and yet, staring at this picture, I can hardly recall my friend of twenty-six years ago.’

120  John’s portrait of Quinn now hangs in the New York Public Library. In a letter to his wife (25 August 1909) Symons gives rather a different account to Miss Tobin’s. ‘We went to John’s studio at 3. The Quinn was finished: a very fine portrait: 5 days!’

121  Quinn to John, 31 January 1910.

122  A fair example may be taken from a letter Quinn wrote to James Huneker, the American art critic (4 February 1913): ‘In my cable to Fry I expressly said that I bought the picture on your recommendation only so that if you have any fish to fry or bones to pick with Roger of the same name, then why not fry Fry. Personally, I never take fries; I always go in for roasts or broils...’

123  B. L. Reid The Man from New York. John Quinn and His Friends (1968), p. 73.

124  Ibid. p. 76.

125  Ibid. p. 77.

126  Horizon Volume IV No. 20 (August 1941), p. 125. This descripton and comment were omitted from Chiaroscuro twelve years later.

127  This letter is not in the Quinn Collection at the New York Public Library, but belongs to the author.

128  In a letter sent the previous day (31 January 1910) Quinn had written: ‘Syphilis is the national disease of Italy. Before a white man has intercourse with an Italian woman or a white woman with a “dago” (our word for an Italian) male or female should be examined by a physician, a non-Italian of course, to see there is no gonorrhoea or syphilis… and even then there is danger. For Heaven’s sake, if you do go to the rotten place look out for this. Whisky and syphilis are two of the greatest enemies of the human race and the latter often follows indulgence in the former… Youth is a precious thing.’

129  Wyndham Lewis to John n.d. NLW MS 22783D fol. 32.

130  John to Quinn, 18 December 1909.

131  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. NLW MS 22777D fols. 12–14.

132  From, in fact, Lord Grimthorpe’s villa at Ravello.

133  Chiaroscuro pp. 104–5.

134  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Hôtel Olympia, Place de l’Horloge. NLW MS 22776D fol. 104.

135  Augustus to Dorelia, 27 January 1910 from Restaurant Gelet, Aux Lices, Aries. NLW MS 22776D fol. 111.

136  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Café Gilles Roux, Paradou, Bouches-du-Rhône. NLW MS 22776D fols. 107–8.

137  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Grand Bar des Glaces, Avignon. NLW MS 22776D fols. 109–10.

138  Interview with Marie Mauron, September 1971.

139  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910) from Grand Bars des Cinq Parties du Monde, Marseilles. NLW MS 22776D fol. 117.

140  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910). NLW MS 22776D fols. 118–19.

141  John to Ottoline Morrell, 11 February 1910.

142  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910). NLW MS 22776D fols. 125–6.

143  Horizon Volume VI No. 36 (December 1942), p. 422.

144  Helen Maitland to Henry Lamb, 23 February 1910.

145  Like Augustus, Boris Anrep had landed himself with two wives in the same house – number two being useful, it was said, for selecting books from the public library for Helen on the principle of their not being the sort she would choose for herself. But Boris disappointed Helen ‘by his literary Philistinism and preference for legshows to those concerned more with the head’, Romilly John remembered (29 July 1972). ‘…It was rumoured that she came from California which might account for her devotion to Culture and her eventual rejection of Boris and Hampstead in favour of Roger Fry and Bloomsbury.’

146  In the first draft of his autobiography, Augustus referred to Helen as ‘censorious’, adding: ‘I have always disappointed her, being somewhat earth-bound and unable to rise to the lofty stratosphere, where, without oxygen, she seems most at home… For, feeling myself accursed, her strictures left me subdued but with an inkling at least of higher things beyond my grasp.’ Dorelia, however, considered these observations too sarcastic and they do not appear in Chiaroscuro.

147  Dorelia to Ottoline Morrell, February 1910.

148  Romilly John The Seventh Child (1932), p. 8.

149  Rebecca John Caspar John pp. 26–8. After Augustus’s death, Caspar made arrangements for the correspondence between his father and Bazin to be given to the Musée Aéronautique in Paris.

150  John to Scott Macfie, 2 May 1910.

151  John to Arthur Symons n.d.

152  John to Scott Macfie n.d.

153  Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell p. 199.

154  Ibid. p. 200.

155  John to Chaloner Dowdall n.d.

156  Horizon Volume VI No. 32 (August 1942), pp. 135–8.

157  Frank Harris Contemporary Portraits: Third Series (1920), pp. 181–9.

158  Chiaroscuro p. 128.

159  Hesketh Pearson Extraordinary People (1962), p. 212. Also private information.

160  ‘I WENT TO NEECE TO STAY WITH SOME PEOPLE BUT I FOUND THEY WERE SO HORRIBLE I RAN AWAY ONE MORNING EARLY, BEFORE THEY WERE UP NEECE IS A LOVELY PLACE FULL OF HORRIBLE PEOPLE.’ Augustus to David John, March 1910.

161  The Gertz papers are in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

162  ‘I wired to a young woman to come and assist,’ he gruffly explained to Wyndham Lewis (July 1910), ‘Lamb accompanied the young woman and spent 2 or 3 days in this town; possibly with the object of making himself useful or perhaps with some purely sentimental motif or both.’ In fact Lamb seems to have spent about ten days there. ‘John’s alarm was naturally exaggerated by past experience,’ he explained to Ottoline Morrell.

163  ‘One evening Helen experimentally served up an untried Greek vegetable which I rashly pronounced delicious. A deathly silence ensued. It was as if I had praised Alma Tadema. Such are the pitfalls of associating with the aesthetes!’ Romilly John wrote (29 July 1972).

164  John to Quinn, 25 May 1910.

165  John to Quinn, 25 August 1910.

166  John to Quinn n.d.

167  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

168  John to Quinn, 25 May 1910.

CHAPTER VI: REVOLUTION 1910

1  In her lecture ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ delivered on 18 May 1924 at Cambridge.

2  The Times (7 November 1910), p. 12.

3  Morning Post (1 November 1910), p. 3.

4  Ibid. (16 November 1910), p. 3.

5  Michael Holroyd Lytton Strachey (1994 edn), p. 271.

6  Frances Spalding Vanessa Bell (1983), p. 91.

7  Ibid. p. 92.

8  Diary entry 14 December 1910. See Richard Shone Bloomsbury Portraits (1993 edn), p. 61.

9  James Bone ‘The Tendencies of Modern Art’ Edinburgh Review (April 1913), pp. 420–34. Collected in Post-Impressionists in England – The Critical Reception (ed. J. B. Bullen 1988), pp. 433–47·

10  Frances Spalding Vanessa Bell p. 109.

11  Vanessa Bell to Margery Snowden, 21 October 1908. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (ed. Regina Marler 1993), p. 75.

12  Laurence Binyon ‘Post-Impressionists’ Saturday Review (12 November 1910), pp. 609–10.

13  ‘The Autumn Salon’ The Times (2 October 1908), p. 8.

14  Frances Spalding Vanessa Bell p. 93.

15  Frank Rutter ‘An Art Causerie’ Sunday Times (10 November 1912), p. 19.

16  Roger Fry ‘A Postscript on Post-Impressionism’ Nation (24 December 1910).

17  Grey Gowrie ‘The Twentieth Century’ The Genius of British Painting (ed. David Piper 1975), p. 302.

18  Pall Mall Gazette (25 November 1912).

19  In a letter dated March 1909 to Florence Beerbohm. David Cecil Transcripts, Merton College, Oxford.

‘Max has done a very funny caricature of me – dozens of awful art students in the background,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia. Besides ‘Insecurity’ (now owned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), Sir Rupert Hart-Davis has ‘run to earth’ another five Beerbohm caricatures.

20  Max Beerbohm to Florence Beerbohm, 22 May 1909.

21  ‘In the Fair Women Show, by the way, John has a portrait in oils – a full length – of “A Smiling Woman” – which seems to me really great – quite apart from and above anything else there; and you behold in me a convert.’ Max to Florence Beerbohm, March 1909.

22  Paul Nash Outline (1949), p. 7.

23  C. R. W. Nevinson Paint and Prejudice (1937), p. 189.

24  Saturday Review (7 December 1907), pp. 694–5.

25  Magazine of Fine Arts (May-August 1906).

26  Quoted by David Piper in Augustus John – the pattern of the painter’s career, BBC Third Programme (15 April 1954).

27  Richard Shone Bloomsbury Portraits (1993 edn), p. 61.

28  See Sunday Times (1 December 1912), Daily Chronicle (26 November 1912), Spectator (30 November 1912), Manchester Guardian (25 November 1912), Daily Mail (23 November 1912), Observer (24 November 1912), The Times (23 November 1912).

29  See John Woodeson ‘Mark Gertler. A Survey’ (1971).

30  Simon Watney English Post-Impressionism (1980), p. 21.

31  ‘The Academy in Totalitaria’ Art News Annual (1967).

32  Burlington Magazine Volume XV No. 73 (April 1909), p. 17.

33  John Rothenstein Modern English Painters Volume I, Sickert to Grant (rev. edn 1962), p. 207.

34  Augustus John – the pattern of the painter’s career, BBC Third Programme (15 April 1954).

35  Saturday Review (10 December 1910), p. 747.

36  Pall Mall Gazette (11 December 1910).

37  The Queen (10 December 1910).

38  Daily Graphic (10 December 1910).

39  Burlington Magazine (February 1910), p. 267.

40  It is this shared discovery, as well as his own independence, that Augustus signified in a letter to Quinn (10 February 1911): ‘I don’t think we need Fry’s lead: he’s a gifted obscurantist and no doubt has his uses in the world. He is at any rate alive to unrecognised possibilities and guesses at all sorts of wonderful things.’ Elsewhere in this letter he writes: ‘If you sent him [Fry] a gilded turd in a glass case he would probably discover some strange poignant rhythm in it and hail you as a cataclysmic genius and persuade the Contemporary Art Society to buy the production for the Nation.’

41  He had also recommended Mark Gertler’s early work – which hung alongside his own at the Chenil Gallery – but by 16 February 1916 he is telling Quinn that ‘Gertler’s work has gone to buggery and I can’t stand it. Not that he hasn’t ability of a sort and all the cheek of a Yid, but the spirit of the work is false and affected.’

With Eric Gill it was the other way about. On 10 February 1911, he is advising Quinn against buying his work. ‘Personally I don’t admire the things and feel pretty certain that you wouldn’t neither. I admit that Gill is an enterprising young man and not without ability. He has been a carver of inscriptions till quite recently when he started doing figures. His knowledge of human form is, you may be sure, of the slightest and I feel strongly that his experience of human beings is anything but profound. I know him personally. He carves well and succeeds in expressing one or two cut-and-dried philosophical ideas. He is much impressed by the importance of copulation possibly because he has had so little to do with that subject in practice, and apparently considers himself obliged to announce the gospel of the flesh, to a world that doesn’t need it. Innes calls him “the naughty schoolmaster”, Gore calls him the “precious cockney” and I call him the “artist of the Urinal”… I’ll let you know when I see a thing of Gill’s which I can really respect and desire. His present things are taking at first glance as they look so simple and unsophisticated – but, to me at least, only art at first glance.’ As Fiona MacCarthy remarks in her biography of Gill (1989), ‘For Augustus John to claim crassly that Gill was impressed by the importance of copulation because he had so little to do with it in practice was to misread Gill’s whole outlook.’ But three years later his opinion of Gill’s work had risen. ‘I also ordered you one of Gill’s things, a dancing figure in stone,’ he wrote to Quinn (26 January 1914). ‘…Gill has made good progress and his things are admirable now, both in workmanship and idea.’

42  Gwen John to Augustus n.d. (c. 1909–10). NLW MS 22782D fols. 29–30.

43  John Currie, who appears as ‘Logan’ in Gilbert Cannan’s novel Mendel (1916), shot himself and his mistress in a fit of jealousy. ‘You remember Currie, some of whose works you bought?’ Augustus asked Quinn (10 October 1914). ‘He shot his mistress dead yesterday and then himself. He has since died of four bullet wounds in the chest. The girl [Dolly Henry] was staying here [Alderney Manor] lately carrying on a futile love affair with another young man. We all got sick of her. She was an attractive girl or used to be when I knew her first, but seemed to have deteriorated into a deceitful little bitch.

‘It is a terrible affair and it’s a good thing I suppose that Currie died. He was an able fellow and would have had a successful career.’ Augustus’s portrait of Dolly Henry (sometimes called O’Henry) is in the South African National Gallery at Cape Town, entitled ‘The Woman in Green’. The gallery also owns his portrait of Wilson Steer’s most celebrated sitter, Rose Pettigrew.

44  Spencer Gore, whose work Augustus recommended to Quinn as ‘good and promising’. In 1928 (Vogue, 25 July) he wrote: ‘The work of Spencer F. Gore, although [attracting] the admiration of a small body of genuine picture-lovers, undoubtedly failed to reach its deserved favour with the general public on account of the war following so soon after his death, which befell when he might be said to have arrived at the prime of his accomplishment. But this unconscious injustice was repaired by the April [1928] exhibition [at the Leicester Galleries], when it was realised that Gore was one of the most notable landscape painters of his time.’ And again in 1942 (Horizon Volume VI No. 36, December 1942, p. 426) he wrote: ‘The industrious apprentice is a type to be admired rather than loved. In Spencer Gore’s case, however, immense industry was coupled not only with a rare and ever-ripening talent; he possessed in addition an amiable, modest and upright nature which elicited the deep affection and respect of all those who knew him.’

45  ‘He [Greaves] is a real artist-kid, with Chelsea in his brain. I shall never cease to appreciate his work – so unlike Whistler’s at bottom.’ John to Quinn, 17 May 1912.

46  On 19 December 1913, Augustus had written to Quinn urging him to buy a Bomberg drawing, ‘extremely good and dramatic representing a man dead with mourning family, very simplified and severe. I’ld like you to have it.’ Quinn bought it for fifteen pounds (equivalent to £670 in 1996).

47  Vogue, 11 January 1928, ‘The Paintings of Evan Walters’; 7 March, ‘The Unknown Artist’; 18 April, ‘The Woman Artist’; 27 June, ‘Paris and the Painter’; 25 July, ‘Three English Artists’; 22 August, ‘Some Contemporary French Painters’; 3 September, ‘Five Modern Artists’; 31 October, ‘Interior Decoration’. The series was originally intended to comprise twelve articles but, even with the help of T. W. Earp, Augustus did not get beyond eight.

48  Arnold Bennett The Pretty Lady (1918).

49  Frank Rutter Since I Was Twenty-five (1927), pp. 191–2.

50  He was, however, elected with Oscar Kokoschka and Jack Yeats as an honorary member of the London Group in the Second World War.

51  Roger Fry to Will Rothenstein, 28 March 1911. The Letters of Roger Fry (ed. Denys Sutton) Volume I (1972), p. 344.

52  27 July 1920. See The Letters of Roger Fry Volume II (1972), p. 486.

53  See Mary Lago Imperfect Encounter pp. 10–13.

54  The Library, King’s College, Cambridge.

55  ‘Seriousness’ by Clive Bell, New Statesman and Nation, 4 June 1938, pp. 952–3. ‘If only Augustus John had been serious what a fine painter he might have been… in my opinion “the latest paintings of Augustus John” at Tooth’s gallery in Bond Street are almost worthless.

‘They are not serious: in the strict sense of the word they are superficial. The painter accepts a commonplace view and renders it with a thoughtless gesture. And even that gesture is not sustained… the picture crumbles into nothingness. Nothingness: at least I can find nothing beneath the general effect… there is less talent than trick; and there is no thought at all… the master has preferred carelessly to dash on the canvas a brushful of colour which at most indicates a fact of no aesthetic importance...’

Elsewhere in the article, which refers to John’s talent, charm, personal beauty, detestation of humbug and, perhaps optimistically, his sense of decency and magnanimity, and calls him ‘a national monument’, his work is unfavourably compared to that of Paul Nash, Xavier Roussel and Claire Bertrand.

56  Roger Fry to Jean Marchand, 19 December 1921. The Letters of Roger Fry Volume II p. 519. ‘I do not exactly find him [Clive Bell] spiteful. He hasn’t much personal judgement and he’s a terrible snob… it is not by personal antipathy that he castigates a painter but rather by his over-preoccupation to show himself in the forefront of the trend. And since he is an admirable journalist and expresses himself forcefully he inflicts much distress without exactly meaning to.’ Later in this letter, Fry suggests that Bell was not fundamentally a ‘serious’ art critic – ‘he does not make a serious effort to understand it but collects hearsay and remarks from other artists etc.’

57  S. K. Tillyard The Impact of Modernism (1988), pp. 182–3.

58  ‘J. Dickson Innes’, an unpublished essay by Augustus John (formerly owned by William Gaunt).

59  Information from Charles Hampton, to whom I am indebted for many facts concerning Innes’s career.

60  Augustus John ‘Fragment of an Autobiography’, Horizon Volume XI No. 64 (April 1945), p. 25.

61  Randolph Schwabe ‘Reminiscences of Fellow Students’ Burlington Magazine (January 1943), p. 6.

62  Modern English Painters Volume II Innes to Moore (1962), p. 25.

63  Introduction to Catalogue of ‘J. D. Innes Exhibition’, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1961.

64  Augustus John to John Quinn, 10 February 1911. Quinn bought four of Innes’s watercolours.

65  Rough draft for his Introduction to the Catalogue of the Innes exhibition of 1923 at the Chenil Gallery.

66  The cairn was destroyed by a USAAF Flying Fortress bomber that crashed on the peak of Arenig Fawr in 1946.

67  Horizon Volume XV No. 64 (April 1945), p. 255.

68  William Gaunt holograph loc. cit.

69  ‘Some Miraculous Promised Land. J. D. Innes, Augustus John and Derwent Lees in North Wales 1910–13’. Mostyn Art Gallery, Llandudno, 1982.

70  ‘The Late J. D. Innes. A Short Appreciation’ by Augustus John, ARA.

71  For a Derwent Lees ‘John’ see ‘The Round Tree’ at the Aberdeen Art Gallery, which may be compared with John’s own ‘Gypsy in the Sandpit’ at the same gallery.

72  ‘My immense picture of Ottoline is to begin: so my respiration may be audible in Dorset.’ Henry Lamb to Lytton Strachey, 10 April 1910.

73  Boris Anrep recorded this first encounter with Augustus (in a letter to Henry Lamb) thus: ‘If you could creep in my heart and memory which you honoured by some particulars of your relation to John’s – you would feel sike and poisoned by the byle which turns round in me when I first saw John. That was a night-mare, with all appreciation of his powerful and mighty dreadedness, and some ghotic beaty, I could not keep down my heat to some beastly and cruel and vulgar look of brightness which I perceived in his face and demeanour...’ Augustus relished Anrep’s personality and admired his work. In 1913 he persuaded Knewstub to arrange an exhibition of Anrep’s drawings at the Chenil Gallery, and in later years put him in the way of several commissions, from Lady Tredegar and others, for his mosaics.

74  Augustus to Dorelia, from the Hôtel Camille. Probably December 1910. NLW MS 22776D fols. 128–9.

75  John to Quinn, 5 January 1911.

76  John to Quinn, 11 January 1911.

77  Katherine Everett Bricks and Flowers (1949), p. 232.

78  Ibid. pp. 232–3.

79  15 June 1911. ‘It’s an excellent place for the boys and I think we are pretty lucky to have got it. The towns near are perfectly awful, being horrible conglomerations of red brick hutches.’

80  Katherine Everett Bricks and Flowers (1949), p. 232.

81  Augustus to Dorelia from Dingle Bank, July 1911. NLW MS 22776D fols. 143–4.

82  Henry Lamb to Lytton Strachey, 18 October 1911.

CHAPTER VII: BEFORE THE DELUGE

1  Romilly John The Seventh Child (1932), p. 21.

2  Gilbert Spencer to the author, 3 November 1968.

3  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 25.

4  Ibid. p. 109.

5  Rebecca John Caspar John (1987), p. 31.

6  Romilly John The Seventh Child pp. 116–18.

7  Gerald Brenan A Life of One’s Own (1962), pp. 241–2.

8  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 134.

9  Ibid. p. 58.

10  Tate Gallery (3730).

11  Aberdeen Art Gallery.

12  National Gallery of Ireland.

13  Pittsburgh Art Gallery.

14  This composition, bought in advance by Quinn, ‘after undergoing continual alterations became gradually unrecognizable and finally disappeared altogether.’ Horizon Volume VI No. 36 (December 1942), p. 430.

15  Detroit Art Gallery. ‘So that’s what became of “the Mumpers”,’ John wrote to Homer Saint Gaudens. ‘They will feel more than ever out of place in that hot bed of Ford’s.’ The picture had been bought at the Quinn sale of 10 February 1927 by René Gimpel. See his Journal d’un Collectionneur (1966), p. 327.

16  Bequeathed by Hugo Pitman to the Tate Gallery. See Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers (1966), pp. 103–7.

17  Rebecca John Caspar John p. 31.

18  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 54.

19  Oliver St John Gogarty. See his It Isn’t This Time of Year at All (1954), p. 181.

20  John to Alick Schepeler n.d.

21  Michaela Pooley to the author, 1969.

22  Chiaroscuro p. 103.

23  The source for this is Quinn’s diary – John having told him. In John’s published account he relates that ‘my caller, though uninvited, entered the house and with great good-nature made herself at home.’

24  Horizon Volume V No. 26 (Februry 1942), p. 127.

25  John Stewart Collis Marriage and Genius (1963), pp. 117–18.

26  Ibid. p. 64.

27  Chiaroscuro p. 116.

28  Frida Strindberg Marriage with Genius (1937), p. 20.

29  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (September 1911). NLW MS 22776D fols. 155–6, 158.

30  John Quinn to Jacob Epstein, 7 August 1915. Quinn Collection, New York Public Library.

31  Quinn’s unpublished diary, p. 16.

32  Horizon Volume VI No. 32 (August 1942), p. 131.

33  Ibid., loc. cit.

34  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (September 1911). NLW MS 22776D fol. 162.

35  B. L. Reid The Man from New York (1968), p. 105.

36  John to Ottoline Morrell, 27 September 1911. University of Texas.

37  Augustus to Dorelia (September 1911). NLW MS 22776D fols. 160–1.

38  Quinn to James Gibbons Huneker, 15 November 1911.

39  In a letter to Huneker (15 November 1911) Quinn gave the inventory of this tour. ‘We did Chartres, Tours, Amboise, Blois, Montélimar, Le Puy (a wonderful old place), Orange, Avignon, Aix en Provence (where we saw some of the most wonderful tapestries in the world), Marseilles, Martigues (where John spent over a year), Aiguemortes, Arles and Nîmes; back by way of Le Puy, St Étienne, Moulins, Bourges and into Paris by way of Fontainebleau. John knew interesting people at Avignon, Aix, Marseilles, Martigues, Arles and Nîmes… We careered through the heart of the Cévennes twice...’

40  Quinn to Huneker, 15 November 1911.

41  Quinn to Conrad, 17 November 1911.

42  Chiaroscuro p. 122.

43  Horizon Volume VI No. 32 (August 1942), p. 133.

44  The motto comes from line 12 in the 106th letter of Seneca to Lucilius, ‘Non Scholae sed vitae discimas’ (‘Not for school but for life we learn’).

45  Wyndham Lewis to John n.d. (April 1910). NLW MS 22783D fols. 28–31.

46  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (c. September 1913). NLW MS 22777D fols. 25–6.

47  John to Quinn, 23 May 1910.

48  On 27 September 1911.

49  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 62.

50  Gerald Brenan A Life of One’s Own p. 147. See also Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January-February 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 63–4.

51  Augustus to Dorelia, 20 May 1922. NLW MS 22778D fols. 33–4.

52  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (August 1912). NLW MS 22777D fol. 11.

53  Romilly John to the author, 9 December 1972.

54  In a letter to the author, January 1969.

55  Rebecca John Caspar John p. 36.

56  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 62.

57  Tom Pocock ‘A Name to live Up to’ Evening Standard (5 June 1967).

58  Rebecca John Caspar John pp. 41, 42.

59  Poppet John ‘The Fire and the Fountain’ Listener (20 March 1975), p. 361.

60  Ibid. p. 360.

61  Vivien White to the author, 1971.

62  John to Ottoline Morrell, 28 February 1912.

63  John to Quinn, 9 May 1912. Meningitis was afterwards treated with streptomycin and penicillin. ‘It’s maddening to think that Pyramus could have been cured of meningitis a few years later,’ John wrote to his son-in-law Bill Bergne in 1941. NLW MS 22022C.

64  John to Sampson, March 1912. NLW MS 14928D fol. 99.

65  John to Sampson, 13 March 1912. NLW MS 21459E fol. 44.

66  John to Ottoline Morrell, 10 March 1912.

67  John to Quinn, 9 May 1912.

68  John to Quinn, 8 May 1913.

69  Oliver St John Gogarty It Isn’t This Time of Year at All p. 180.

70  ‘To Augustus John’ by Oliver St John Gogarty in The Collected Poems of Oliver St John Gogarty (1951), pp. 27–30.

71  Horizon Volume IV No. 22 (October 1941), p. 289.

72  Oliver St John Gogarty It Isn’t This Time of Year at All pp. 178, 181.

73  Ulick O’Connor Oliver St John Gogarty (1964 edn), p. 149. See also Ulick O’Connor ‘Blue Eyes and Yellow Beard’ Spectator (10 November 1961).

74  Augustus to Dorelia 1912, 1915. NLW MS 22777D fols. 10, 86, 97–8, 99–100.

75  Oliver St John Gogarty As I was Going Down Sackville Street (1954 edn), p. 247.

76  Oliver St John Gogarty It Isn’t This Time of Year at All p. 183.

77  Painted in August 1917, one portrait depicts Gogarty as a rather flagging dandy lit up with what Ulick O’Connor called ‘elfin vitality’ – though to Gogarty himself this image looked

like Caesar late returned

Exhausted from a long campaign.

In his poem ‘To My Portrait, By Augustus John’, he reveals that the painting provoked some deep questions.

Is it a warning? And, to me

Your criticism upon Life?

If this be caused by Poetry

What should a Poet tell his wife?

78  Horizon Volume I No. 22 (October 1941), p. 286.

79  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 99–100.

80  Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers p. 21. There is a reproduction of this portrait, which is in the National Gallery of Ireland, facing p. 32.

81  Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers p. 28.

82  Ibid. p. 25.

83  Horizon Volume IV No. 22 (October 1941), p. 287.

84  John to Quinn, 6 August 1912.

85  Chiaroscuro p. 93.

86  John had painted a full-length portrait of Ida when she was pregnant. It is now in the National Gallery of Wales, Cardiff. ‘It is a picture of a pregnant woman, painted with the assured brushwork of Hals or Manet, and a tenderness reminiscent of Rembrandt’s,’ wrote R. L. Charles, the Keeper of Art: ‘mastery, depth and intimacy combined in a way hardly paralleled in British painting of its time.’ Amgueddfa: Bulletin of the National Museum of Wales No. 12 (Winter 1972), p. 29.

87  John’s portraits of Lord Howard de Walden and Lady Howard de Walden are now in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. The latter is dated 1912–22. In her autobiography, Pages from my Life (1965), Lady Howard de Walden wrote that after innumerable sittings over ten years, John ended up with ‘a horrible picture’ which he painted over. ‘I’m very sorry Margot takes so pessimistic a view of her portrait and that her nerve has gone,’ John wrote to Howard de Walden on 22 September 1923. ‘I’m quite sure I can hit her off now and am anxious to retrieve my character and incidentally earn my hire (paid).’ To make amends he offered to give Lady Howard de Walden another picture, a canvas 12 feet by 15 feet showing two Welsh gypsies, a mother and daughter, in a mountainous landscape ‘talking to a life-sized obviously German professor in a bowler hat!’ But it was too big to get out of the house. See Portraits by Augustus John: Family, Friends and the Famous (National Museum of Wales 1988).

88  John to Quinn, 11 October 1911. It is an impression of Holbrooke quite different from Beatrice Dunsany’s description of ‘a pathetic, good-natured deaf child’ who played the piano beautifully. See Mark Amory Lord Dunsany: A Biography (1972), pp. 104–6.

89  John to Mrs Nettleship, 8 January 1913.

90  Epstein to Quinn, 11 January 1913.

91  John to Dorelia n.d. (January 1913). Written from Hôtel du Nord, Cours Belsance, Marseilles. NLW MS 22777D fol. 16.

92  ‘For days afterward I found myself under the hallucination of meeting people on the street who might have posed for them.’ John remembered the studio as being ‘covered with statues’, and Modigliani as ‘a naive and modest boy when not on the hashish’. These were the first sculptures Modigliani had sold and he was much encouraged. According to one source, ‘he was found unconscious in an abandoned shack in Montparnasse, and was rescued and cared for by Epstein and the painter Augustus John.’ See Pierre Sichel Modigliani (1967), pp. 213–16. After the war John painted ‘In Memoriam Amedeo Modigliani’, an arrangement of book, cactus, guitar, tapestry and one of the two heads he had bought. ‘The book represents his Bible – Les Chants de Maldoror,’ John explained to the art critic D. S. MacColl; ‘the cactus, Les Fleurs du Mal; the guitar, the deep chords he sometimes struck; the fallen tapestry, the ruins of time.’

93  In the summer of 1912, Gertler wrote that John ‘proceeded to give me some very useful “tips” on tempera,’ and by September he was writing: ‘Just think, I have actually done a painting in that wonderful medium tempera, the medium of our old Great friends!… I love tempera.’ See John Woodeson Mark Gertler (1972), pp. 81, 100.

94  This cartoon, measuring 92 ½ by 232 inches, depicting a family group resting and cooking at their camp fire, was drawn in charcoal on paper laid on linen, but not squared for transfer or pricked through for tracing. It was shown as a single-work exhibition from 29 July to 4 August 1994 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Mercury Gallery in Cork Street, London.

95  This picture had originally been promised to Quinn in 1910. Quinn’s inquiries about it met with little response until 19 February 1914, when John announced that he was now able to ‘simplify the problem by confessing that I have painted it out some time back. I had it down here [Alderney] to work on, and after reflection decided I could not finish it to my satisfaction (without the original models) and thought I would paint you another picture which would be a great deal better. The cartoon lately at the N. English [The Flute of Pan] was started with that object. In course of doing it I added the right portion of the design, consisting of landscape which makes it about a third larger than “Forza e Amore”. As to Lane’s claim to this last – it originally formed part of a much larger scheme which on my break with him I did not carry out… I am damn sorry you were so set on the “F. e A”. I was merely conscientious in painting it out as I did. But you will like The Flute of Pan better and the price of course will be the same.’

Quinn was horrified at this news, and John assured him (16 March 1914) he was not alone. ‘I was at Lane’s lately and told him I had painted out “Forza e Amore”. Words failed him to express his horror… He implored me to send it up to him and let him have the coat of white I gave it taken off. Shall I? I suppose I was a bloody fool to do it.’ Three months later (24 June 1914) he confirmed that Quinn had ‘the only real claim to the picture’ – adding that he was now certain the white coat could not be removed successfully.

96  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (spring 1913). NLW MS 22777D fol. 20.

97  John to Hope-Johnstone n.d.

98  Augustus to Dorelia January–February 1914. NLW MS 22777D fols. 34, 36, 39.

99  John to Ottoline Morrell, July 1914.

100  In a letter to his brother James Strachey. British Library.

101  Augustus to Dorelia (summer 1912). NLW MS 22777D fols. 9, 11.

102  Augustus to Dorelia (1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 87–8, 89.

103  Augustus to Dorelia (June 1916). NLW 22777D fols. 120–1.

104  Augustus to Dorelia (summer 1916). NLW MS 22777D fol. 130.

105  John to Hope-Johnstone, 1916.

106  Horizon Volume VIII No. 44 (August 1943), p. 140.

107  Llwynythyl was later taken by the composer Granville Bantock. His daughter remembers that John ‘had drawn an enormous mural in white chalk of angel figures covering the entire end wall of the sitting-room… We discovered a whole pile of discarded oil paints and brushes, together with many crumpled sketches. We salvaged and smoothed out two of these sketches and I still have one of them… an amusing cartoon of a woman sitting at a table and trying to work; around her pots and pans are flying through the air, a tradesman presents bills and a half-naked baby screams on the floor.’

108  See Mark Amory Lord Dunsany: A Biography (1972), pp. 73–4.

109  John to Hope-Johnstone, 20 February 1914.

110  John to Quinn, 19 February 1914.

111  John went out sketching with Munnings, listening carefully to Munnings’s theory that a horse’s coat reflects the light of day, and then, after silent reflection, gruffly demanding: ‘If you see a brown horse, why not paint it brown?’ Many years later John told E. J. Rousuck that Munnings’s horses had ‘better picture quality, better groupings’ than Stubbs’s. See Reginald Pound The Englishman (1962), pp. 59, 61, 201.

112  Interview with the author, 1969. See also Margaret Laing ‘Dame Laura Knight’ Evening Standard (5 November 1968), p. 12.

113  Dame Laura Knight to the author. She recalled that they were living in three cottages knocked into one, which made a room thirty feet in length. A panel of Dorelia at Falmouth that winter is called ‘The Mauve Jersey’.

114  Horizon Volume XI No. 64 (April 1945), p. 258. In Chiaroscuro, p. 205, ‘our excitement’ has been changed to ‘the general excitement’.

115  Augustus to Gwen John n.d. NLW MS 22305C fols. 114–16.

116  Augustus to Dorelia, 6 August 1914. NLW MS 22777D fols. 52–3.

CHAPTER VIII: HOW HE GOT ON

1  Augustus to Dorelia, from Mallord Street n.d. (5 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fols. 59–1.

2  John to Quinn, 12 October 1914.

3  John to , 13 August 1915.

4  John to Dorelia n.d. (summer 1917). NLW MS 22777D fol. 138.

5  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. (September 1914). NLW MS 21468 fols. 76–8.

6  Susan Chitty Gwen John (1981), p. 136.

7  Augustus to Gwen John, 24 October 1914. NLW MS 22305D fols. 118–19.

8  Ibid.

9  Augustus to Gwen John, 25 December 1914. NLW MS 22305D fols. 120–21.

10  Winifred John to Gwen John n.d. (c. 1904). NLW MS 22307C fols. 116–17.

11  Winifred John to Augustus John, 8 January 1906. NLW MS 22782D fols. 121–4.

12  Thornton John to Gwen John, 7 February 1917. NLW MS 22307C fols. 51–3. Thornton came back twice to Europe. The first time was in the autumn of 1910 (when he was thinking of getting work in Ireland and brought back one of Gwen’s pictures of Fenella Lovell). The second time was at the beginning of 1915. ‘Factory work is an abomination,’ he wrote to Gwen, ‘but there is nothing to do but hold on grimly.’

13  Ibid.

14  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (31 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fol. 56.

15  John to Ottoline Morrell, 1 January 1915.

16  John to Quinn, 15 February 1915.

17  Irish Times (21 November 1964).

18  Augustus to Dorelia, from the Railway Hotel in Galway City n.d. (13 October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 103–4.

19  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (17 October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 105–6.

20  John to Quinn, 15 November 1915.

21  John to Shaw, from Mallord Street, 18 December 1915. BL Add. MS 59539.

22  John to Quinn, 19 October 1914.

23  John to Quinn, 12 October 1914.

24  This commission to paint Lord Fisher had come through Epstein, who had recently done a bust of Fisher for the Duchess of Hamilton. His three-quarter length portrait of Fisher, which was shown at the Alpine Club in 1917–18 and priced at seven hundred guineas (equivalent to £18,500 in 1996), is owned by the National Gallery of Scotland at Edinburgh, and a half-length portrait is in the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.

25  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (c. June 1916). NLW MS 22777D fol. 119.

26  Albert Rutherston to William Rothenstein, 8 December 1916.

27  The Times (3 March 1920).

28  Jan Morris Fisher’s Face (1995), pp. 132–3; see also p. 221.

29  John to Quinn, 19 January 1916.

30  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

31  Frances Lloyd George The Years That Are Past (1967), p. 84.

32  Frances Stevenson Lloyd George. A Diary (ed. A. J. P. Taylor 1971), pp. 83, 103–4; entry for 12 March 1916.

33  It is now in the Aberdeen Art Gallery.

34  At the Villa la Chaumière in September 1919.

35  Quinn to Kuno Meyer, 10 May 1916.

36  See W. H. Davies Later Days (1925), pp. 177–84.

37  Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

38  John to Dorelia, from Coole Park n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 80–85.

39  Bernard Shaw to Francis Chesterton, 5 May 1915. Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters Volume 3 1911–1925 (ed. Dan H. Laurence 1985), pp. 294–5.

40  Lady Gregory remembered this rather differently. In Coole (1971) she wrote: ‘John asked while he was here if he might paint Richard, and I, delighted, reading a story to the child, kept him still for the sitting. I longed to possess the picture but did not know how I could do so without stinting the comforts of the household, and said no word. But I think he must have seen my astonished delight when he gave it to me, said it was for me he had painted it. That was one of the happy moments of my life.’ She also added: ‘I had from the time of his birth dreamed he might one day be painted by that great Master, Augustus John, yet it had seemed but a dream.’

41  Anne Gregory Me and Nu: Childhood at Coole (1970), p. 47.

42  ‘Augustus John had been very annoyed at being thwarted, and had given Richard that funny look to pay Grandma out! The picture of Richard was hung in the drawing-room, on the left of the big fireplace.’ Anne Gregory also remembered that John ‘was large and rather frightening to look at, and we felt he might step on us, as he seemed to stride about not ever looking where he was going.’ Me and Nu, Chapter VII.

43  Lady Gregory to W. B. Yeats n.d.

44  S. Winsten Days with Bernard Shaw (1948), p. 164.

45  Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence (ed. Alan Dent 1952), p. 175.

46  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 82–3.

47  Chiaroscuro pp. 96–9.

48  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 84–5.

49  John to Quinn, 15 November 1915.

50  To his secretary, Ann Elder, Shaw described John (30 April 1915) as ‘a painter of intense reputation among advanced people’. Of the three portraits Shaw temporarily owned two. In 1922 he presented one of these to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. ‘I note that you are keeping the best – with the blue background – which I suppose still adorns one of the top corners of your rooms at Adelphi Terrace,’ John wrote to him (24 March 1922). This portrait is now at Ayot St Lawrence and belongs to the National Trust.

51  Wyndham Lewis to John, from 19 rue Mouton Duvernet, avenue d’Orléans (Paris) n.d. NLW MS 22783D fols. 19–20.

52  Shaw to John, 6 August 1915.

53  He attributed the expression to Shaw’s midday intake of vegetables, though admitted (16 May 1915) that ‘the one in which you have apparently reached a state of philosophic oblivion is perhaps liable to misinterpretation’. It was originally credited with the title ‘The Philosopher in Contemplation’ or ‘When Homer Nods’. It was bought by an Australian who later sold it in London where it was purchased by the Queen. It now (1995) hangs in Clarence House as part of the Queen Mother’s collection.

54  Shaw to John, from the Hydro, Torquay, 6 August 1915.

55  Between John’s portrait and Rodin’s bust, which had been done a few years earlier, Shaw differentiated. ‘With an affectation of colossal vanity, Shaw gestured and genuflected before the Rodin bust of himself when I once visited him,’ Archibald Henderson wrote (George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century, 1956, p. 789); ‘but during a later visit delightedly rushed me into the dining-room to see the Augustus John poster-portrait, in primary colours – flying locks and breezy moustaches, rectangular head, and a caricaturishly flouting underlip. To the John portrait he pointed with a delicious chuckle: “There’s the portrait of my great reputation”; then pointing to the Rodin bust, he breathed: “Just as I am, without one plea”.’ But it is arguable that, by 1915, Shaw’s protective covering, which he called ‘G.B.S.’, was complete.

56  It was at this exhibition that the famous ‘ladies of Gregynog’, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, acting on the advice of Hugh Blaker, Curator of the Holburne Museum at Bath, bought their first Augustus John pictures – ten oils (including the self-portrait on the jacket of the Chatto & Windus hardback edition of this book) and a drawing – for £2,350 (equivalent to £84,500 in 1996). In 1918 Margaret Davies bought another oil (‘Study of a Boy’ [Edwin]), and in 1919 added John’s portrait of W. H. Davies (whose Selected Poems and The Lover’s Song Book were published by the Gregynog Press) as well as a portfolio of ten drawings to their joint collection. This collection was eventually given to the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff.

In October 1920 John dispatched a complete set of his etchings to the National Museum of Wales, the only other public collections having this suite of etchings being Cambridge and Berlin (and in 1949 the British Museum, to which Campbell Dodgson bequeathed his collection). Though the National Museum of Wales was given two John pictures by the Contemporary Art Society in 1936 and 1942, it was not until the end of the 1940s that it bought its first John work (a flower painting, ‘Cineraria’, in 1948 and a nude design in 1949). In 1962 the museum bought the full-length painting ‘Dorelia in the Garden at Alderney Manor’ at the Christie’s sale of John’s work. It also bought portrait drawings of John Cowper Powys and Frank Brangwyn in the 1960s, and then the small oil paintings of Caitlin Macnamara and Ida John and the ‘French Fisher-boy’ of 1907 (owned by Judge Stephen Tumim), some studies for his Slade School ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’ and miscellaneous studies and sketchbooks that had been owned by Michel Salaman, all in the 1970s. From the estate of Dorelia in 1972 the museum purchased over one thousand drawings, one hundred and ten paintings and three bronzes, making it, in the words of the Assistant Keeper, Mark L. Evans, ‘the principal repository of John’s work and the main centre for research on his art’.

57  Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 16 March 1915. British Library.

58  Lytton Strachey to Carrington, 8 March 1917. ‘At first she [Vivien] completely ignored me. She then would say nothing but “Oh no!” whenever I addressed her. But eventually she gave me a chocolate – “Man! Have a chockle,” – which I consider a triumph.’

59  ‘Vivien John. Malaysia: its People and its Jungle’. Upper Grosvenor Galleries, 19 January-6 February 1971.

60  See Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers (1966), pp. 36–49.

61  John to Dorelia, April 1915. NLW MS 22777D fols. 74–5.

62  Some years later, when John was visiting the composer Jack Moeran in Norfolk, he called on Brownsword; and continued seeing her later still after she was widowed, ‘always on friendly terms’.

Gwyneth became a talented painter, and mixed with the Johns after she had grown up, but remained outside the family circle. She was always fond of Augustus, would frequently see him in London, and lent him her studio to work in occasionally. ‘He was a unique and wonderful man,’ she wrote after his death.

63  John to Quinn, 13 August 1915. In The Arms of Time. A Memoir (1979), pp. 63–72, her son Rupert Hart-Davis wrote, ‘the two people who most often advised her to give up alcohol altogether were John and her brother Duff, two of the most persistent drinkers of their time.’ John also introduced her to Wyndham Lewis with whom, ‘her heart as always too soon made glad’, she had an affair. John, too, was fascinated by her and ‘after his fashion, loved her. She thought him a genius.’ He drew several pencil heads of her and of her two children, Deirdre and Rupert, for whom he recommended John Hope-Johnstone as a holiday tutor. ‘He challenged all comers to box with him,’ Rupert Hart-Davis remembered, ‘and the milkman, who was a much better performer, repeatedly knocked him down, saying “Sorry, sir” each time.’

64  According to Ezra Pound, this verse sprang from ‘the Castalian fount of the Chenil’. In a letter to Wyndham Lewis (13 January 1918) Pound noted: ‘(Authorship unrecognised, I first heard it in 1909). It is emphatically NOT my own, I believe it to have come from an elder generation.’

65  In the last week of January 1915. Lamb had been in Guy’s Hospital for an operation. ‘I have written to Dodo to know if she can pick me up… It all depends on whether J[ohn] will be gone: his temper not being considered good enough to stand the strain of a visit from me,’ Lamb had explained to Lytton Strachey (15 January 1915). After his visit, he wrote (31 January 1915): ‘They have been discussing the moral effects of being in hospital, saying that one’s sensitiveness is apt to become magnified. I wonder if that is the reason why I was miserable at Parkstone.’

66  Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 13 September 1916.

67  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (31 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fols. 48–9.

68  Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 10 May 1916.

69  John to Quinn, 26 January 1914. See also John’s Foreword to Cecil Gray’s Peter Warlock, A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (1934), pp. 11–12.

70  John to Evan Morgan (Lord Tredegar) n.d.

71  Frida Strindberg to John n.d. NLW MS 22785D fols. 150–3.

In Chiaroscuro John records: ‘I received a letter from her, written on the ship. It was a noble epistle. In it I was absolved from all blame: all charges, all imputations were withdrawn: she alone had been at fault from the beginning: though this wasn’t true, I was invested with a kind of halo, quite unnecessarily. I wish I had kept this letter; it might serve me in an emergency.’ The letter, written from the RMS Campania, has since come to light. In it she writes: ‘The chief fault others had, who interfered with lies and mischief. The rest, I take it, was my fault – and therefore I stretch out my heart in farewell… You are the finest man I met in this world, dear John – and you’ll ever be to me what the Sun is, and the Sea around me, and the immortal beauty of nature. Therefore if ever you think of me, do it without bitterness and stripe [sic] me of all the ugliness that events have put on me and which is not in my heart… Goodbye John. I don’t know whether you know how awfully good at the bottom of your heart you are – I know. And that is why I write this to you – Frida Strindberg.’

72  See Finishing Touches, pp. 84–5.

73  ‘To the Eiffel Tower Restaurant’, in Sublunary, pp. 93–5.

74  Constantine FitzGibbon The Life of Dylan Thomas (1968), p. 163.

75  Ibid., loc. cit.

76  Charles Wheeler High Relief (1968), p. 31.

77  Letter from Dorothy Brett to the author, 7 August 1968.

78  See Carrington, Letters and Extracts from her Diaries (ed. David Garnett 1970), pp. 74–5, where this letter is incorrectly dated 25 July 1917.

79  And repeated on 29 July at the Lyric Theatre. It had been organized in conjunction with the Ladies Auxiliaries Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association. See the Enthoven Collection at the Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum, Covent Garden.

80  See Appendix Five.

81  Epstein to Quinn, 12 August 1914.

82  Epstein to Quinn, 4 September 1914.

83  Epstein. An Autobiography (1955), p. 89.

84  Epstein to Qµinn, 20 July 1917.

85  See, for example, Sunday Herald (10 June 1917).

86  Information from Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. Later in life, while not seeing much of each other, Epstein and John remained friendly. Kathleen Epstein remembered that they met once in a street and, in answer to a question, Epstein said he was doing good work but could not sell it and was very poor. John at once took out a chequebook and wrote him a cheque ‘which we will never refer to again’. This was in the 1930s.

87  Chiaroscuro p. 125.

88  Sir Herbert A. Barker Leaves from My Life (1927), pp. 263–5.

89  By way of payment John offered to ‘do a head’ of Barker. ‘If you will rattle my bones, I should be more than repaid!’ This portrait, the first of two painted during the war, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Barker, who often slept during the sittings, nevertheless observed: ‘It was a wonderful thing to watch John at work – to note his interest and utter absorption in what he was doing… The genius of the born craftsman was apparent in every look and movement. He had a habit when most wrapped up in some master-stroke or final touch of running backwards some feet from the canvas with his critical eyes bent upon the painting. Once when doing this he tripped and almost fell heavily over the stove near by.’ The portrait used to hang in Barker’s waiting-room to encourage the patients. Variously described as ‘Satanic’ or like ‘a Venetian Doge’, it was, Barker bravely maintained, one of John’s ‘best male portraits’: adding ‘I look upon John as one of the greatest portrait painters who has ever lived.’ John himself described the painting, in a letter to Hope-Johnstone, as ‘just like him, stuffy and good’. Early in March 1932 John saw Barker again, this time in Jersey. ‘You have always done me good, and I feel it is high time I put myself in your hands again,’ he had written (17 September 1931). During this visit he began a third portrait. See Reginald Pound Harley Street (1967), pp. 80, 123–4. Also unpublished correspondence at the Royal College of Surgeons.

90  The phrase is Malcolm Easton’s. See his The Art of Augustus John (1974).

91  The Times (27 November 1917).

92  Osbert Sitwell Great Morning! (1948), p. 248.

93  In the Burlington Magazine (April 1916). See also his article for February 1916 on the New English Art Club.

94  Burlington Magazine (December 1940), p. 28.

95  John to Evan Morgan, December 1914.

96  December 1914.

97  ‘You are too much like the popular idea of an angel!’ John wrote to her (5 October 1917), ‘(not my idea – which is of course the traditional one).’ This portrait (oil 34 by 25 inches) was bought in 1933 from Arthur Tooth and Sons for £1,400 (equivalent to £44,500 in 1996) by the Art Gallery of Ontario. ‘At the time of purchase we were requested to hang it as Portrait of a Lady in Black,’ the Curator wrote, ‘and not refer to the fact that it was a portrait of Lady Cynthia.’ In 1968 it was reproduced as the frontispiece to Cynthia Asquith’s Diaries.

98  In Chiaroscuro John reveals that Lawrence, despite his eagerness to have Cynthia Asquith portrayed disagreeably, protested that he himself was ‘too ugly’ to be painted. ‘I met D. H. Lawrence in the flesh only once,’ John wrote, and adds that Cynthia Asquith ‘treated us to a box at the Opera that evening’. In fact he and Lawrence met twice, the visit to Aida taking place twelve days later, on 13 November – a meeting Cynthia Asquith describes in Haply I May Remember and Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod.

Of John’s portrait Lawrence remarked that it had achieved a certain beauty and had ‘courage’. In 1929, when Lawrence’s pictures were seized from the Warren Gallery and a summons issued against him, John added his name to the petition in Lawrence’s support and stated that he was prepared, if it came to trial, to go into the witness box.

99  John’s letters to Grant Richards are in the University of Illinois Library, Urbana.

100  John to Campbell Dodgson, 11 September 1917. Imperial War Museum, London.

101  NLW MS 218180 fol. 125.

102  Arthur Symons to Quinn, 22 November 1917.

103  Lytton Strachey to Clive Bell, 4 December 1917.

104  William Orpen to William Rothenstein, 23 February 1918.

105  John to Tonks, 21 February 1918. The Library, the University of Texas at Austin.

106  John to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 5 October 1917.

107  John to Alick Schepeler, 2 February 1918.

108  D. H. Lawrence to Cynthia Asquith, 2 November 1917. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Volume III 1916–21 (ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson 1984), p. 176.

109  John to Evan Morgan, 27 October (1915).

110  Augustus to Dorelia n.d.

111  Augustus to Dorelia n.d.

112  The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield Volume I 1903–7 (ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott 1984), pp. 316–17.

113  From the Dorothy Brett Papers, Department of English, University of Cincinnati, Ohio.

114  John to Quinn, 13 December 1918.

115  John to Evan Morgan, 1 March 1918.

116  John to Arthur Symons, 22 February 1918.

117  Blasting and Bombardiering. An Autobiography 1914–26 (1927), p. 198.

118  Augustus to Dorelia, 3 February 1918.

119  ‘Lord Beaverbrook Entertains’ was intended to occupy pages 79–81 of Finishing Touches but, for reasons of libel, was dropped at proof stage and the chapter ‘Gwendolen John’ was substituted. This was done by Daniel George, of Jonathan Cape, after John’s death. It was subsequently published in the amalgamated Autobiography (1975), pp. 369–71.

120  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February-March 1918). NLW MS 22778D fols. 6–9.

121  John to Gogarty, 24 July 1918. This correspondence is at Bucknell University.

122  John to Cynthia Asquith, (April) 1918.

123  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

124  The Times, 4 January 1919, ‘War Story in Pictures – Canadian Exhibition at the Royal Academy’.

John Singer Sargent was less impressed. ‘I have just come from the Canadian Exhibition, where there is a hideous post-impressionist picture, of which mine [‘Gassed’] cannot be accused of being a crib,’ he wrote to Evan Charteris. ‘Augustus John has a canvas forty feet long done in his free and script style, but without beauty of composition. I was afraid I should be depressed by seeing something in it that would make me feel that my picture is conventional, academic and boring – whereas.’ But William Rothenstein thought it ‘superb’. See his Men and Memories Volume II p. 350.

125  P. G. Konody ‘The Canadian War Memorials’ Colour (September 1918). See also P. G. Konody Art and War (1919). John’s decoration, eventually called ‘The Canadians opposite Lens’, is now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, together with four compositional studies for the picture, numerous solid drawings of soldiers, and some oils done in thick juicy textures.

126  John to Cynthia Asquith, 24 July (1919).

127  ‘My dear Comrade,’ Beaverbrook wrote to John on 26 August 1959, ‘…I was quite willing to build a Gallery in Ottawa but the Canadians did not have a suitable site and also there seemed little enthusiasm for the project.

‘Now there is a beautiful Art Gallery by the River in Fredericton built by me and in it you will find two John drawings and two John paintings with a third on the way.

‘How I wish that big picture might be handed over to us for exhibition there.’

Among those pictures now at the Beaverbrook Gallery, New Brunswick, is a small version (oil on canvas 14½ by 48 inches) of his large war picture, entitled ‘Canadians at Lieven Castle’.

128  Now in the Imperial War Museum, London. Oil on canvas, 93½ by 57 inches.

129  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

130  Keith Clements Henry Lamb (1985), p. 50.

131  Richard Shone Bloomsbury Portraits (1993), p. 45.

132  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (December 1917). NLW MS 22777D fols. 148–9.

133  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 22 November 1917. NLW MS 21468 fols. 109–10.

134  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

135  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (mid-December 1917). NLW MS 22777D fols. 148–9.

136  Ibid.

137  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

138  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt (September-October 1918). NLW MS 21468D fols. 121–2.

139  Augustus to Gwen John, 20 August 1919, 17 September 1919. NLW MS 22305D fols. 126–7.

140  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

141  Augustus to Gwen John, 23 June 1920. NLW MS 22305D fol. 133.

142  Chiaroscuro pp. 254–5.

143  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

144  Beatrice, Lady Glenavy To-day We Will Only Gossip (1964), p. 111.

145  In a letter to Cynthia Asquith.

146  Lady Cynthia Asquith, Diaries 1915–18 (1968), p. 471.

147  John to John Sampson n.d. (February 1919). NLW MS 21459E fol. 58.

148  John to Frances Stevenson, 13 February 1919. NLW MS 21570E.

149  John to Cynthia Asquith n.d.

150  Horizon Volume VIII No. 48 (December 1943), p. 406.

151  John to Cynthia Asquith, I February 1919.

152  John to Cynthia Asquith n.d.

153  His secondment for duty with the War Office was terminated on 22 September 1919; and then, without delay (on 23 September) he was struck off the strength of the Canadian War Records – though with two medals: the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.

154  John to Cynthia Asquith, 17 September 1919.

155  John to Ottoline Morrell, 14 March 1920.

156  John to Eric Sutton, 6 April 1920. Written from the hospital, 12 Beaumont Street, London WI.

157  John to Cynthia Asquith, April 1920.

CHAPTER IX: ARTIST OF THE PORTRAITS

1  In Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, for example, where he appears as the forty-seven-year-old John Bidlake ‘at the height of his powers and reputation as a painter; handsome, huge, exuberant, careless; a great laugher, a great worker, a great eater, drinker, and taker of virginities’. Professor Grover Smith, editor of The Letters of Aldous Huxley, writes (22 February 1970) that ‘it is said that John was indeed the prototype of the artist John Bidlake in Point Counter Point. Aldous nowhere wrote that this was the case; but he was extremely cautious and tactful where his literary models were concerned.’

John is said to be the prototype of characters in several novels – the artist in Margery Allingham’s Death of a Ghost; Struthers in D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod; Tenby Jones, the ‘lion of Chelsea’, in Henry Williamson’s The Golden Virgin and The Innocent Moon; the sculptor Owen in Aleister Crowley’s The Diary of a Drug Fiend (Crowley noted this in his own copy of the novel); the musician Albert Sanger in Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph (though in part this may be based on Henry Lamb). Gulley Jimson in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, though popularly supposed to be based on Stanley Spencer, also contains some aspects of John – in particular the urge to paint large murals. Cary and John knew each other a little in Paris, when Cary was studying art there. Cary mentions John in his letters and diary of 1909–10; and in the autumn of 1956, writing to Ruari Maclean, he suggested John might do illustrations for the Rainbird edition of The Horse’s Mouth. Nothing came of this, though John admired the novel. Judy Johncock in Ronald Firbank’s Caprice (for which John designed a book jacket) also owed something to him.

Of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence John Quinn wrote (9 September 1919): ‘The description of the artist, red beard and all, and his words and manner and the first part of the book up to the time he leaves France, is obviously based upon a superficial study of Augustus John. The second part of the book, the Tahiti part, is obviously based upon the life of Gauguin.’

2  See ‘Cat’s Whiskers: Philip Oakes talks to Kathleen Hale’ Sunday Times (19 March 1972).

3  Kathleen Hale A Slender Reputation (1994), pp. 85–90.

4  Christopher Wood to his mother, September 1925.

5  Vivien John ‘Memories of Carrington and the John Family’ The Charleston Magazine (Spring/Summer 1995), p. 33·

6  John to Ottoline Morrell, 29 September 1911.

7  Romilly John The Seventh Child (1932), pp. 165–6.

8  Ibid. p. 167.

9  Cecil Gray Musical Chairs (1948), p. 228. It was because of such behaviour that Gerald Summers addressed his ‘Lines to Augustus John’s Car’.

Thou miscreant, who, forgetful of thy freight,

Leapt from the level stretches of the road,

Scaled the steep bank and met thy certain fate,

O’erturned and spilled thy all too precious load…

Let yokels leave their furrows on hot heels,

With anxious arms to place thee on thy wheels.

10  The Collected Poems of Oliver St John Gogarty (1951), p. 27.

11  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 167.

12  Lucy Norton to the author n.d.

13  Montgomery Hyde to the author, 17 November 1969.

14  Poppet Pol to the author, 27 February 1970.

15  Cecil Gray Musical Chairs pp. 228–9. Another description of this incident is given in Adrian Daintrey’s autobiography I Must Say (1983), p. 126.

16  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 168.

17  John to Quinn, 20 April 1917.

18  Augustus to Dorelia n.d.

19  Quoted in Anthony Sampson ‘Scholar Gypsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ (unpublished), Chapter 2.

20  Ibid. Chapter 8.

21  John to Sampson, 30 December 1930 and n.d. (Liverpool University Library).

22  ‘Scholar Gypsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ Chapter 6.

23  Sampson to John, 21 November 1918. NLW MS 22785D fols. 21–2.

24  John to Sampson, 6 January 1919. NLW MS 21459E fol. 56, and 7 September 1919 (Liverpool University Library).

25  Sampson to John, 26 August 1919. NLW MS 22785D fols. 27–8.

26  John to Sampson, 14 July 1920, 25 January 1924. NLW MS 21459E fols. 61–3.

27  John to Sampson, 29 January 1927. NLW MS 21459E fol. 64.

28  Kathleen Hale A Slender Reputation p. 92.

29  John to Conger Goodyear, 4 January 1928. See Conger Goodyear Augustus John (privately printed).

30  John to Ada Nettleship n.d. (1928).

31  John to William Rothenstein, 29 September 1921.

32  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 169. The portrait of Roy Campbell is in the collection of the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.

33  John’s essay on Firbank was written for Ifan Kyrle Fletcher’s Ronald Firbank (1930); see pp. 113–15. ‘In his life as in his books he left out the dull bits and concentrated on the irrelevant.’

34  See John’s tribute to A. R. Orage in the New English Weekly (15 November 1934).

35  T E. Lawrence to William Rothenstein, 25 April 1925.

36  Philippe Jullian DAnnunzio (1971), p. 182.

37  Originally called the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, it was begun in 1749 and intended as the grandest palazzo of them all, though stopping at ceiling level when the Venier family ran out of money. Along the entrance terrace are the heads of eight stone lions which gave the palazzo its name. In 1949 it was bought by another exaggerated figure devoted to the Pekinese dog, the American art collector Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979). The house still holds her art collection and is owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

38  Horizon Volume VIII No. 48 (December 1943), p. 413.

39  John’s half-length portrait (privately owned) was probably painted first and left unfinished. The more famous and flamboyant picture (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada), ‘originally full-length in pyjamas’, Sir Evan Charteris noted, ‘was cut in half by John himself. A laboratory examination showed a ‘single, bold brushstroke traversing the full width of the canvas which marked the new lower extremity’. In 1942 John painted a final portrait of Casati (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff), a less assured handling of a less dominating figure, seated in a chair, a black cat on her lap, done in his El Greco manner.

40  Of the two versions of this picture, one, which John presented to Casati, was bought by Lord Alington and passed into the collection of his daughter, the Hon. Mrs George Marten. The other, which is misdated April 1918, was first exhibited at the Alpine Club in London early in 1920. ‘It’s a most marvellous show,’ T. E. Lawrence wrote to John, adding the information that ‘the Birm[ingham] F[ine] A[rt] Gallery say it would be bad for the women of the town to hang [‘La Marchesa Casati’] there.’ The picture was acquired in 1934 by the Art Gallery of Ontario from Sir Evan Charteris, through Lord Duveen, for £1,500 (equivalent to £47,000 in 1996). In a letter (26 February 1934) to the gallery, Duveen wrote: ‘I consider it to be an outstanding masterpiece of our time. It is no exaggeration to say this will live forever, which is true of very few pictures of modern times. You have bought a masterpiece for practically nothing… Such painting of the head, for instance, I have never seen surpassed by any artist, and you can safely place it for comparison alongside the great Velasquez, Giorgione or even Titian! That is what I think about this picture.’ In 1987 it was voted the most popular painting in the gallery.

41  This portrait is in the National Museum of Wales.

42  John Pearson The Life of Ian Fleming (1966), p. 13.

43  Ibid. p. 15.

44  Fergus Fleming Amaryllis Fleming (1993), p. 20.

45  Chiquita to the author n.d.

46  Chiquita to the author n.d.

47  Mrs Val Fleming to Seymour Leslie, 16 May 1923.

48  Fergus Fleming Amaryllis Fleming p. 119.

49  John to Viva King n.d.

50  William Rothenstein Since Fifty: Men and Memories Volume III 1922–38 (1939), p. 19·

51  John to William Rothenstein, 6 May 1929.

52  The picture (73½ by 65 inches) now belongs to the Tate Gallery (4043) which also owns a charcoal study (4448).

53  Mme Suggia ‘Sitting for Augustus John’ Weekly Dispatch (8 April 1928).

54  Suggia continued: ‘Directly I heard his footsteps hush and his tread lighten I strained all my powers to keep at just the correct attitude. In a picture painted like this, a portrait not only of a musician but of her instrument – more of the very spirit of the music itself – the sitter must to a great extent share in its creation. John himself is kind enough to call it “our” picture.’

55  See Michael Holroyd Lytton Strachey (1994 edn), pp. 435–6.

56  Gerald Moore Am I too Loud? (1962), pp. 108–9.

57  Burlington Magazine CXX 909 (December 1978), p. 869.

58  Horizon Volume VIII No. 36 (December 1942), p. 424. See also Michael Millgate Thomas Hardy. A Biography (1982), p. 552. There was a curious aftermath in which John reappeared, his identity merged with that of George Meredith, author of Modern Love, in a dream where Hardy found himself carrying a heavy child up a ladder to safety, while the John-Meredith chimera looked on unconcernedly. Hardy, who must have known John’s prowess as a father, had no children – though always wished to have had them. See Times Literary Supplement (16 June 1972), p. 688.

59  In a letter to John, Florence Hardy wrote (8 February 1929): ‘He [Hardy] had the greatest respect and liking for you not only as an artist but as a man. I can think of few people he liked so much.’ NLW MS 22781D fols. 90–1. John last met Hardy at Dorchester ‘during a performance of “Tess”. He introduced me to the leading actress, a Miss Bugler… whom he greatly admired. He told me her husband, a respectable butcher at Bridport, “was quite inadequate” and pointed out that her figure was perfect if only she could be persuaded to remove her clothes’. John to Christabel McLaren (later Lady Aberconway), 5 February 1928. British Library Add. MS 52556 fol. 72.

60  See Cyril Clemens My Chat with Thomas Hardy (1944), Introduction by Carl J. Weber. The picture was formally presented by H. T. Riches to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, after J. M. Barrie had refused Sydney Cockerell’s petition to present it (‘I don’t think they ought to ask me to do these things.’ See Basil Dean Seven Ages [1970], pp. 212–13). See also Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (ed. Viola Meynell), p. 310. The Fitzwilliam also has a drawing of Hardy by John.

61  T E. Lawrence to his mother, 22 November 1923. The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (ed. Malcolm Brown 1988), p. 250.

62  John to Hardy, 20 November 1923. Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester.

63  Chiaroscuro pp. 148–9.

64  Andrew Boyle Montagu Norman (1967), pp. 218–20; see also p. 252.

65  Horizon Volume X No. 56 (August 1944), pp. 132–3.

66  Ibid. p. 132.

67  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (1 November 1928). NLW MS 22778D fols. 121–2.

68  Lord D’Abernon Papers, British Library 48932.

69  Ibid. 48936.

70  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (3 September 1928). NLW MS 22778D fols. 95–6.

71  Lord Leverhulme to A. Wilson Barrett, editor of Colour. Blumenfeld Papers, House of Lords Library.

72  Daily Express (15 October 1920). See also the editions of 8 and 9 October. Also the Literary Digest (27 November 1920) and American Art News (13 November 1920).

73  John to T. E. Lawrence n.d. NLW MS 22775C fol. 58.

74  Edward Morris Lord Leverhulme ‘Painting and Sculpture’ (Royal Academy of Arts, 1980). See also Nigel Nicolson Lord of the Isles (1960), p. 11, and W. P. Jolly Lord Leverhulme (1976), pp. 190–6.

75  Chiaroscuro pp. 150–1. See also Horizon Volume X No. 56 (August 1944), pp. 134–5.

76  Ibid.

77  Lord Conway of Allington to John from the Imperial War Museum, 5 May 1935. NLW MS 22779E fol. 173.

78  Sunday Dispatch (28 September 1930). See also News Chronicle (29 September 1930); Daily Mail (29 September 1930), and The Scotsman (30 September 1930).

79  Chiaroscuro p. 147. See also Horizon Volume X No. 56 (August 1944), p. 131.

80  Tallulah Bankhead Tallulah, My Autobiography (1952), p. 156.

81  Ibid. p. 154.

82  See Lee Israel Miss Tallulah Bankhead (1972), p. 127. Also Brendan Gill’s Tallulah (1973), in which a letter and photograph of John are reproduced on p. 130, and a drawing on p. 131. After Tallulah Bankhead’s death, both her John pictures were sold at the Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York. Her own portrait, appraised at $15,000, was sold for $19,500 and is now in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. The portrait of Gerald du Maurier, appraised between $9,000 and $12,000, fetched only $5,000 and later passed into the collection of Gerald du Maurier’s daughter, Jeanne du Maurier.

83  T. E. Lawrence to John, 19 April 1930. NLW MS 22783D fol. 12.

84  Interview on Face to Face, BBC Television, 15 May 1960.

85  John to Maud Cazalet, 3 March 1939.

86  John to Kassie, 23 November 1939. NLW MS 21570E.

87  John to Maud Cazalet, 23 September 1939.

88  Letter from A. Pernn, the Queen’s Private Secretary, to John, 1 November 1939. Clarence House.

89  John to HM Queen Elizabeth, 20 January 1940.

90  John to Gerald Kelly, 7 April 1954. Royal Academy.

91  HM Queen Elizabeth to John, 16 October 1942. NLW MS 22780E fols. 73–4·

92  HM Queen Elizabeth to John, 2 December 1948. NLW MS 22780E fols. 75–6.

93  Augustus to Caspar John, 30 July 1960. NLW MS 22775C fol. 45.

94  HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to John, 19 July 1961 from Clarence House. NLW MS 22780E fols. 77–8.

95  ‘Mr Augustus John and the Royal Academy’ The Times (31 March 1920).

96  Augustus to Gwen John, May 1920. NLW MS 22305D fols. 130–2.

97  Horizon Volume X No. 56 (August 1944), p. 146.

In a letter to his mother, Christopher Wood wrote (22 May 1922): ‘Augustus John has been admitted to the Academy this year. They wouldn’t have him before. I don’t think he takes this as an honour in the least, as it doesn’t matter much to him whether he is an A.R.A. or not. He is unquestionably the greatest painter in England to-day and if he hadn’t drunk so much would have been greater than Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo.’

98  Edwin William John to Gwen John, 1 May 1920. NLW MS 22306D fols. 28–9.

99  John to Sean O’Casey n.d. (1928–9). There are ten letters from John to O’Casey (1926–52) at the National Library of Wales. NLW MS 21980C.

100  John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 7 April 1958. NLW MS 19645C.

101  John to Bapsy Pavry, 8 October 1948. NLW MS 21622D.

102  T. E. Lawrence to John, 9 April 1930. NLW MS 22783D fol. 11.

103  Dorelia to Edwin John, 3 May 1938. NLW MS 22313D fols. 8–9.

104  John to Laura Knight, 9 April 1938. In another letter to Laura Knight (3 May 1938. NLW MS 21570E) John wrote: ‘Although I did so little directly to affect the general policy of the Academy, always feeling somewhat ill-at-ease within those sacred precincts, my views as to a more liberal though not less critical an attitude to outside activities must have been well known and, I felt sometimes, even regarded with grave suspicion… The President, I know, had the courage to advocate a more enlightened attitude towards modern painting & I can assure you it was a particularly painful experience for me to take so violent a step… What you say is quite true of the necessarily slow & belated movement towards reform in a body like the R.A. The fact is it will always be too slow...’

105  John to Philip Connard, 18 January 1944.

106  Augustus to Edwin John, 5 July 1944. NLW MS 22312C fol. 52.

107  See Daily Graphic (14 June 1924).

108  Christian Science Monitor, Boston (17 December 1923); Statesman, Calcutta (12 October 1924).

109  See, for example, Colour (November–December 1923 and January 1924).

110  Eugene Goossens ‘Culture in Music’ Daily Express (19 July 1924).

111  The Economist (15 March 1924), p. 592.

112  Manchester Guardian Weekly (3 October 1924).

113  John to Mitchell Kennerley, 22 November 1926. New York Public Library.

114  Knewstub to John from King’s Nursing Home, 22 December 1922. NLW MS 22782D fol. 167.

115  Quoted in Richard Shone Augustus John (1979), p. 10.

116  John to J. B. Manson, 2 July 1927.

117  John to J. B. Manson, 4 July 1927.

118  John to Wyndham Lewis, 9 December 1927.

119  Augustus to Dorelia n.d.

120  Poppet Pol to the author, March 1970.

121  Ibid.

122  John to Mitchell Kennerley, 22 November 1926.

123  John to Mitchell Kennerley, 22 November 1922.

124  John to Viva Booth, 14 May 1922.

125  Augustus to Dorelia, 13 May 1922. NLW 22778D fols. 31–2.

126  Horizon Volume VII No. 37 (January 1943), p. 60. Cf. Chiaroscuro p. 181.

127  Augustus to Dorelia, 13 June 1922. NLW MS 22778D fol. 35.

128  Horizon Volume VII No. 37 (January 1943), pp. 63–4.

129  John to Ottoline Morrell, 1 February 1922.

130  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (June 1924). NLW MS 22778D fol. 55.

131  Sir Compton Mackenzie My Life and Times Octave 6 (1963–71), pp. 39–40, and Ulick O’Connor Oliver St John Gogarty (1964), p. 212. But for an amended version of this story see Mark Amory Lord Dunsany: A Biography (1972).

132  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (April 1925). NLW MS 22778D fol. 68.

133  Horizon Volume X No. 56 (August 1944), p. 129.

134  Lord D’Abernon’s diary, An Ambassador of Peace Volume III The Years of Recovery January 1924–October 1926 (1930), p. 15.

135  Ibid. p. 16.

136  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (April 1925). NLW MS 22778D fol. 68.

‘The sittings for this portrait took place mostly at 3 o’cl. p.m. and already at that time I have asked Sir Augustus to put below the portrait: The German Minister for Foreign Affairs at 3 o’cl in the afternoon, for I don’t think that I am really so sleepy and broken down as I am represented on this picture.’ Stresemann to Dr Ruppel, 12 June 1926. The portrait of Stresemann is now in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

137  Lord D’Abernon An Ambassador of Peace Volume III p. 152.

138  Publisher, and director of the Anderson Gallery, 489 Park Avenue, New York.

139  Horizon Volume XI No. 64 (April 1945), p. 242.

140  Romilly John The Seventh Child p. 218.

141  Chiaroscuro p. 190.

142  Horizon Volume XI No. 64 (April 1945), p. 244.

143  Ibid. p. 244.

144  John to Oliver St Gogarty, 22 May 1925. The two girls, Cleves and Pita, were the daughters of Countess Stead.

145  Richard Shone Augustus John p. 10.

146  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (April 1923). NLW MS 22778D fols. 39–40. But he came away ‘feeling considerably older & less wise than before, and certainly not much richer,’ he told Christabel McLaren. British Library Add. MS 52556 fol. 60.

147  For a list of John’s works shown at this exhibition, see Milton W. Brown The Story of the Armory Show (1963), pp. 253–5.

148  B. L. Reid The Man from New York (1968), p. 152.

149  Horizon Volume X No. 56 (August 1944), p. 141.

150  Chiaroscuro p. 160.

151  Conger Goodyear Augustus John p. 29.

152  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (April 1923). NLW MS 22778D fols. 41–2.

153  Conger Goodyear op. cit. p. 29.

154  Augustus to Dorelia, 17 April 1923. NLW MS 22778D fol. 43.

155  Horizon Volume X No. 56 (August 1944), pp. 141–2.

156  See, for example, his letter of 16 February 1923 to Homer Saint Gaudens (American Archives of Art). Most of the articles written about him show little evidence of his co-operation – see ‘A Much-Talked of Painter’ New York Times Magazine (24 June 1923).

157  Augustus to Dorelia, 17 April 1923. NLW MS 22778D fol. 43.

158  Horizon Volume XII No. 72 (December 1945), p. 418.

159  Art News, New York (16 June 1923), pp. 1, 4.

160  Ibid. p. 4.

161  Jeanne Foster to Gwen John, 14 August 1924. NLW MS 22305D fol. 66.

162  Mitchell Kennerley to John, 13 August 1924. NLW MS 22782D fols. 151–2.

163  Introduction by E. J. Rousuck to Catalogue for ‘Augustus John’, Scott & Fowles, 21 March–12 April 1949: ‘an electric event which produced not only a new group of paintings, but countless anecdotes, legends, friendships that enriched the great saga of John’s career.’

164  Jeanne Foster to Gwen John n.d. (April 1924). NLW MS 22305D fol. 63.

165  Homer Saint Gaudens to Martin Birnbaum, 23 June 1924. American Archives of Art.

166  Now in the National Gallery, Washington, DC.

167  John to Mitchell Kennerley n.d.

168  John to Christabel Aberconway, 29 September 1928. This correspondence is in the British Library. See also the correspondence with Nina Hamnett at the University of Texas.

169  Horizon Volume XII No. 72 (December 1945), pp. 419–20.

170  Augustus to Gwen John, May 1920. NLW MS 22305D fols. 130–2.

CHAPTER X: THE WAY THEY LIVED THEN

1  Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers (1966), p. 65.

2  John to Christabel Aberconway. British Library Add. MS 52556.

3  Cecil Beaton The Glass of Fashion (1954), p. 156.

4  For a full analysis of this studio, which was designed by Christopher Nicholson, see Architectural Review Volume LXXVII (February 1935), pp. 65–8.

5  Cecil Beaton The Glass of Fashion p. 158.

6  Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers p. 66.

7  Adrian Daintrey I Must Say (1963), p. 75.

8  BBC Home Service, 8 November 1963.

9  Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 4 December 1918.

10  Henry Lamb’s letters to Carrington are in the University of Texas Library, Austin, Texas.

11  Anthony Powell Journals 1982–1986 (1995), pp. 115–16, entry for 30 June 1984.

12  Keith Clements Henry Lamb. The Artist and his Friends (1985), p. 57.

13  Lamb to Carrington n.d.

14  Keith Clements Henry Lamb p. 60.

15  Diana Mosley to the author, 5 January 1970.

16  Cecil Gray Musical Chairs (1948), p. 278.

17  William Rothenstein to John, 25 March 1907. NLW MS 22784D fols. 135–6.

18  Rupert Hart-Davis Hugh Walpole: A Biography (1952), p. 272. John’s portrait of Walpole (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) is reproduced opposite this page, and a chalk drawing as frontispiece.

19  John to Christabel Aberconway, 3 November 1928. See also Christabel Aberconway A Wiser Woman? A Book of Memories (1966).

20  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

21  Leonard Woolf An Autobiography Volume 2 1911–1969 (1980 edn), pp. 114, 128. See also Volume I p. 64.

22  Lady Ottoline Morrell to Augustus John, 31 March 1930, 1 April 1930, from Gower Street. NLW MS 22783D fols. 162–5.

23  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

24  Eve Fleming to John, 8 April 1930. NLW MS 22780E fols. 95–6.

25  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

26  Sandra Jobson Darroch Ottoline. The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell (1975), p. 273.

27  Miranda Seymour Ottoline Morrell. Life on the Grand Scale (1992), p. 386.

28  Augustus to Dorelia, 16 April 1930. NLW MS 22778D fol. 133.

29  Eve Fleming to John, 8 April 1930. NLW MS 22780E fols. 95–6.

30  John to Ottoline Morrell, 20 July 1932.

31  John to Tallulah Bankhead, 12 May 1930.

32  T. E. Lawrence to G. W. M. Dunn, 9 November 1932. The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (ed. David Garnett 1938), p. 752.

33  John to Al Wright, 13 August 1946. Time magazine ‘morgue’ (8 June 1948).

34  Conger Goodyear Augustus John (privately printed), p. 35.

35  John to Viva King n.d.

36  W. B. Yeats ‘Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty’. The Cuala Press (September 1944).

37  W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 25 May 1930, from via Americhe, Rapallo.

38  W. B. Yeats to George Yeats n.d. (c. 25 July 1930).

39  W. B. Yeats to George Yeats (27 July 1930).

40  W. B. Yeats to George Yeats, 3 August 1930. This big picture, which Yeats used as frontispiece for his philosophical works A Vision, is at Glasgow City Art Gallery. ‘John has done a fine portrait – a large oil. I am sitting on a chair in the open air with my legs in a fur-bag,’ Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory (30 July 1930). ‘There is also an amusing smaller portrait but John no longer likes it so it may remain unfinished.’

41  Horizon Volume IV No. 22 (October 1941), p. 291. For a variant description see Chiaroscuro p. 101.

42  Horizon Volume IV No. 22 (October 1941), p. 291.

43  Oliver St John Gogarty It Isn’t This Time of Year at All (1954), p. 242.

44  Hope Scott to her mother n.d.

45  Hope Scott to the author, 29 November 1968.

46  Horizon Volume XII No. 72 (December 1945), p. 428.

47  Courage. The Story of Sir James Dunn pp. 247–8. See also The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lock hart 1915–38 (ed. Kenneth Young 1973), 25 January 1931, p. 149.

48  James Joyce to John, March 1933, from 42 rue Galilei, Paris. NLW MS 22782D fols. 132–3.

49  Daily Telegraph (1 December 1932).

50  Ibid. (20 December 1932).

51  Vivien White to the author, June 1973.

52  John to Bapsy Pavry, 1 December 1933. NLW MS 21622D.

53  Horizon Volume XIII No. 73 (January 1946), pp. 51–2.

54  John to Casati n.d.

55  John to Mavis de Vere Cole n.d. (January 1937).

56  Chiaroscuro pp. 264–74.

57  John to Mavis de Vere Cole, 22 February 1937.

58  New Statesman and Nation (4 June 1938), pp. 952–3.

59  Spectator (27 May 1938), p. 96.

60  Richard Shone Augustus John (1979) p. 3.

61  Listener (25 May 1938), pp. 1105–7.

62  ‘History of the Largest Independent Society in England’ Blast No. 2 (July 1915), pp. 80–1.

63  The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (ed. W. K. Rose 1963), pp. 70–2.

64  Wyndham Lewis Rude Assignment (1950), p. 128.

65  Wyndham Lewis The Demon of Progress in the Arts (1954), p. 3.

66  Listener (13 July 1972).

67  NLW MS 22780E fol. 139, 22787D fol. 43, 22780E fol. 100.

68  O’Casey to Gabriel Fallon, 13 May 1926. Quoted in Garry O’Connor Sean O’Casey. A Life (1988), pp. 213–14.

69  Garry O’Connor Sean O’Casey p. 213.

70  The other portrait is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The one which he gave to O’Casey as a wedding present is now at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. ‘Blue-green coat, silver-grey sweater, with a gayer note given by an orange handkerchief flowing from the breast-pocket of the coat,’ O’Casey described it; ‘the face set determinedly in contemplation of things seen and heard, the body shrinking back right to the back of the chair, as if to get further away to see and hear more clearly; a sensitive and severe countenance with incisive lines of humour braiding the tightly-closed mouth.’ ‘He [John] is evidently intensely interested in what he sees behind what is understood as my face,’ Sean O’Casey wrote on 16 May 1926.

71  Sean O’Casey to John, 15 January 1929. NLW MS 22784D fol. 12.

72  Eileen O’Casey Sean, edited with an Introduction by J. C. Trewin (Pan edition 1973), p. 77·

73  Raymond Massey A Hundred Different Lives (1979), pp. 90–91.

74  The set proved too heavy for the scene-shifters. It was designed, like an oil painting, on canvas stretchers. ‘John’s scene was an exterior with a derelict church, with a fine stained glass window,’ Alick Johnstone, the scene painter, remembered. ‘He designed this originally on cartridge paper… and I suggested he should do it on a linen panel in thin oils or aniline dye; which he did, and it was an enormous success, and, as it was in scale to the scene, was inserted in the church construction.’ Apollo (October 1965), p. 324 n.3.

75  Shaw to John, 31 October 1929.

76  Malcolm Easton ‘The Boy David: Augustus John and Ernst Stern’ Apollo (October 1965) pp. 318–25.

77  Finishing Touches p. 89.

78  Lady Cynthia Asquith Portrait of Barrie (1950), p. 206.

79  John to John Davenport n.d.

80  Later renamed ‘Mas de la Fé’, it was taken over by Alphonse Daudet’s granddaughter-in-law.

81  Chiaroscuro p. 257.

82  Marie Mauron to the author, 1969.

83  Vivien John to Edwin John, September 1939. NLW MS 22312C fol. 123.

84  Cyril Connolly The Modern Movement (1965), p. 67.

85  The Times (12 May 1938).

86  Horizon Volume VIII No. 44 (August 1943), p. 136.

87  A. R. Thomson to the author n.d.

88  Cole to John, 17 July 1930. See Roderic Owen with Tristan de Vere Cole Beautiful and Beloved (1974), p. 43.

89  He was born in the Parish of Woodstock St Hilary: John had suggested the names Iolo Gabriel Augustus Caesar Imperator while Mavis was pregnant.

90  John to Wyndham Lewis, 15 August 1954.

91  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (1936).

92  See Roderic Owen with Tristan de Vere Cole Beautiful and Beloved pp. 89–90.

93  He later attributed this procedure to a speech made by Shaw’s Captain Bluntschli: ‘…I’m in the artillery; and I have the choice of weapons. If I go, I shall take a machine gun...’ (Arms and the Man, Act III).

94  John to D. S. MacColl, 14 January 1945.

95  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (September–October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fol. 93.

96  John’s portrait of Brigit is at the Southampton Art Gallery.

97  Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers pp. 269–70.

98  Dorelia to Augustus n.d. (1938), from Mas de Galeron. NLW MS 22783D fols. 122–3.

99  Paul Ferris Caitlin. The Life of Caitlin Thomas (1993), p. 34.

100  This portrait, painted in 1937, is at the Glyn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, has four nude drawings of Caitlin, two unfinished oils, and a portrait of her wearing a striped cardigan dated c. 1930.

101  Paul Ferris to National Museum of Wales, 27 June 1992.

102  Kathleen Hale A Slender Reputation (1994), p. 91.

103  The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner (ed. Claire Harman 1994), p. 37.

104  Caitlin Thomas to the author, 16 September 1968. ‘It was merely a question of a brief dutiful performance for him to keep up his reputation as a Casanova ogre,’ Mrs Thomas hazarded. ‘…I may add that this lofty favour was not reserved for me alone, but one and all of his models, of whatever age and social category, suffered the identical treatment. I hope I have been able to add a drop of at least truthful spice, no doubt unprintable, to enliven your cleaned-up eminently respectable book, plodding in the heavy-going dark (God help you and your public).’

105  Finishing Touches p. 114.

106  Aquarius, ITV, 3 March 1972.

107  In an interview with the author.

108  Augustus to Vivien John, August 1938. In a letter to Dorelia (NLW MS 22778D fol. 138) he described Dylan and Caitlin as ‘living in frightful squalor and hideousness… The Dylans are impossible to stand for long.’

109  Listener (5 October 1972), pp. 433–4.

110  Dylan Thomas to Henry Treece, 1 September 1938. Dylan Thomas. The Collected Letters (ed. Paul Ferris 1985), p. 324.

111  Finishing Touches p. 111.

112  Museum Piece, or The Education of an Iconographer (1963), p. 95.

113  John to Amaryllis Fleming, 27 November 1953.

114  Amaryllis Fleming to the author, 25 July 1969.

115  Ralph Partridge to Gerald Brenan, 22 July 1929. Best of Friends. The Brenan-Partridge Letters (ed. Xan Fielding 1986), p. 84.

116  Vivien John ‘Memories of Carrington’ The Charleston Magazine (Spring/ Summer 1995), p. 35 col. 1.

117  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (August 1916). NLW MS 22777D fol. 130.

118  These were John’s usual tactics. In a letter to Frances Hughes (29 March 1939), Dylan Thomas wrote that Augustus is ‘out and more or less about now, although Mavis’s wedding put him back a few beds. We saw the newsfilm of the departure from the registry office, and Augustus, blowing clouds of smoke, hopped in the first car before bride and groom could get in...’

119  ‘I hope it will be their last visit,’ he wrote after Poppet and Bergne had gone to Fryern for the first time. But he made an exception of Wilhelm Pol, the Dutch painter who became Poppet’s third husband. ‘This time I favour the match,’ he told Caspar (1 March 1952). ‘…Poppet, a thorough bourgeoise, provided there is plenty to laugh at, reasonable access to food and drink, and of course the indispensable privileges of matrimony, will stay put.’ NLW MS 22775C fol. 5. To others he exclaimed, with an oblique slap at Edwin, Robin, Vivien and perhaps himself: ‘Thank God there is a painter in the family at last!’ In David Herbert’s autobiography, Second Son (1973), p. 61, Poppet is described as ‘extremely attractive, she had almost as many boy friends as her father had mistresses.’

120  Augustus to Caspar John, 13 November 1956. NLW MS 22775C fol. 26.

121  Augustus was pleased to accept compliments from others on behalf of Romilly John’s book. ‘It has been very well reviewed but badly advertised,’ he wrote to Charles Reilly (7 November 1932), ‘so do recommend it if you get a chance.’

122  Romilly John to Augustus n.d. (1936). NLW MS 22782D fols. 106–7.

123  Romilly John to Augustus n.d. (1936). NLW MS 22782D fol. 108.

124  Augustus to Edwin John n.d. (1940). NLW MS 22312C fols. 19–20.

125  Robin to the author, 13 January 1969. See also Horizon Volume VII No. 37 (January 1943), pp. 65–6: ‘Robin displayed also, or rather attempted to conceal, a remarkable talent for drawing; but in the course of his studies lost himself in abstraction, which he pushed finally to the point of invisibility. Thus his later efforts, hung on the walls of his studio, presented no clear image to the physical eye. Refinement carried to such a pitch ceases to amuse. Art, like life, perpetuates itself by contact.’

126  George Popoff to John, 5 February 1935. NLW MS 22784D fol. 62.

127  Robin John to the author, 13 January 1969.

128  John to Villiers Bergne, 15 February 1945. NLW MS 22022C.

129  Tom Burns The Use of Memory (1993), p. 17.

130  Henry John to Augustus n.d. (May-June 1926). NLW MS 22782D fol. 39.

131  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305 fols. 122–4.

132  Martin Cyril D’Arcy Laughter and the Love of Friends (ed. William S. Abell 1991), pp. 36–41.

133  Henry John to Augustus, 11 March 1926, from 67 via San Niccolò da Tolentino, Rome.

134  Henry John to Augustus n.d. (c. March 1926). NLW MS 22782D fol. 37.

135  See Selina Hastings Evelyn Waugh. A Biography (1994) p. 225.

136  Martin Cyril D’Arcy Laughter and the Love of Friends pp. 41–2.

137  Henry John to Augustus n.d. (April–June 1924). NLW MS 22782D fols. 35–6.

138  Henry John to Augustus n.d. (July 1926), from Chalet des Mélèzes. NLW MS 22782D fols. 43–4.

139  Tom Burns to Gwen John, 6 November 1927. NLW MS 22305D fol. 15.

140  Henry John to Augustus, 26 July 1926. NLW MS 22782D fol. 44.

141  More successful was John’s portrait of Martin D’Arcy painted in 1939, which is at Campion Hall, Oxford. ‘Genuinely alive and as enigmatic as he really is,’ D’Arcy’s friend Father B. C. Gurrin called it, though ‘it doesn’t seem to me to be very much like me’, Father D’Arcy wrote.

142  Henry John to Augustus n.d. (c. 1932). NLW MS 22782D fols. 50–4.

143  James Strachey Barnes to John n.d. (c. 1935). NLW MS 22779E fols. 50–2.

144  Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle Being Geniuses Together (revised edn 1970), p. 26.

145  John to Father D’Arcy n.d.

146  Chiaroscuro p. 212.

147  Julia Strachey’s diary, 3 November 1934. This version was given to me by Julia Strachey. But for a slightly different version, see Julia, A Portrait by Herself and Frances Partridge (1983), p. 143.

148  Harold Acton Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948), p. 146.

149  ‘The Private Diaries of Evelyn Waugh’ (ed. Michael Davie), Observer magazine (6 May 1973), p. 28.

150  John to Michel Salaman, 4 September 1935. NLW MS 14928D fol. 111.

151  Chiaroscuro p. 213.

152  Daily Mail (24 June 1935).

153  Tom Burns The Use of Memory p. 21.

154  The Rev. Canon K. J. Woolcombe to the author, 24 December 1968.

155  Father D’Arcy to John, 28 June 1935. NLW MS 22780E fol. 5.

156  Augustus to Dorelia n.d.

157  In an unrecorded BBC script.

158  ‘I’m a miserable old crock now, unlikely to live to be undertaker to any more pals, but quite content to toddle about a shamelessly unkempt garden and enjoy the sound of my living waterfall and the ever changing view of Wild Boar Fell.’ Scott Macfie to John, 8 October 1932, from Shaws, Lunds, Sedburgh, Yorkshire.

159  The words of this eulogium are given in Dora E. Yates My Gypsy Days (1953), pp. 119–20; also, in a slightly different form, in the Daily Mirror (23 November 1931).

160  Dora Yates My Gypsy Days p. 120.

161  Ibid. p. 121.

162  Dora Yates to John, 22 November 1931, from Class Office Libraries, The University, Liverpool. NLW MS 22782D fols. 51–2.

163  John to Dora Yates, 6 December 1936.

164  Chiaroscuro pp. 89–90.

165  Augustus to Gwen John, 23 June 1920. NLW MS 22305D fol. 133.

166  See Cecily Langdale Gwen John (1987), p. 220. Letter written in 1919.

167  Ibid.

168  Gwen John to Augustus, 1 and 8 September 1924. NLW MS 22782D fols. 31–2.

169  Dorelia to Gwen John, May 1927. NLW MS 22308C fol. 21.

170  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 23 July 1927. NLW MS 21468D fols. 160–1.

171  Augustus to Gwen John, 29 December 1924. NLW MS 22305D fol. 136.

172  Gwen John to Augustus, 22 March (1925). NLW MS 22782D fol. 33.

173  Gwen John to Augustus n.d. (1925). NLW MS 22782D fol. 34.

174  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 10 November 1925. NLW MS 21468D fols. 146–7. See also fols. 148–9.

175  Susan Chitty Gwen John (1981), p. 173.

176  Obituary of Gwen Smith, The Times (1 February 1958).

177  Alison Thomas Portraits of Women (1994), p. 128.

178  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 23 July 1927. NLW MS 21468D fols. 160–1.

179  Ibid.

180  Susan Chitty Gwen John p. 179.

181  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 15 September 1927. NLW MS 21468D fol. 164.

182  Dorelia to Gwen John, 28 June 1928, 14 September 1928. NLW MS 22308C fols. 29–30.

183  Dorelia to Gwen John, 11 January 1933. NLW MS 22308C fols. 47–8.

184  Augustus to Gwen John, 16 April 1939. NLW MS 22305C fol. 147.

185  Augustus to Gwen John, 21 June 1928. NLW MS 22305C fols. 144–5.

186  Dorelia to Gwen John, 28 June 1928. NLW MS 22308C fol. 29.

187  Augustus to Gwen John n.d. (October-November 1930). NLW MS 22395C fol. 146.

188  Dorelia to Gwen John, 28 June 1928, 14 September 1928, 22 July 1929, 15 December 1930, n.d. (c. 1932). NLW MS 22308C fols. 29–46.

189  Dorelia to Gwen John, 11 January 1933. NLW MS 22308C fol. 47.

190  Dorelia to Gwen John, 30 May 1939. NLW MS 22308C fol. 55. See also letter of 15 June 1939, fol. 56.

191  Chiaroscuro p. 256.

CHAPTER XI: THINGS PAST

1  John to Mrs W. M. Cazalet, September 1939.

2  John to Herbert Barker, 4 February 1938.

3  Augustus to Edwin John, 22 August 1944. NLW MS 22312C fol. 53.

4  Daily Telegraph (5 May 1948).

5  Listener (13 May 1948), p. 794.

6  Augustus to Caspar John, 14 April 1961. NLW MS 22775C fol. 50.

7  John to Conger Goodyear, 10 January 1948.

8  John to Conger Goodyear, 8 August 1949.

9  John to T. W. Earp, 6 June 1944.

10  John to Mrs W. M. Cazalet, 10 May 1943.

11  John to Kit Adeane n.d.

12  ‘Augustus John’, unpublished monograph by Alan Moorehead.

13  Tom Pocock Alan Moorehead (1990), pp. 181–2.

14  Sunday Times (22 July 1973), p. 34.

15  John to Mavis Wheeler n.d.

16  Shaw to John, 26 February 1944. See Alan Moorehead Montgomery. A Biography (1967), pp. 187–90. See also Bernard Shaw Collected Letters Volume 4 1926–1950 (ed. Dan H. Laurence 1988), pp. 700–1.

17  Augustus to Edwin John, 23 February 1944 and 22 August 1944. NLW MS 22312C fols. 51 and 53.

18  Bernard Sham Collected Letters Volume 4 1926–50 (ed. Dan H. Laurence 1988) pp. 700–1.

19  Augustus to Simon John, 15 April 1944.

20  John to Bernard Shaw, 29 February 1944. British Library Add. MS 50539 fol. 38.

21  Augustus to Simon John, 14 September 1944.

22  The painting is reproduced in Alan Moorehead’s Montgomery. A Biography, and a drawing, which was exhibited in May 1944 at the Royal Academy, is reproduced in Nigel Hamilton’s Monty. Master of the Battlefield (1983). Montgomery, Hamilton wrote, ‘never saw this fine crayon sketch – perhaps the only portrait ever to capture the ascetic missionary behind the soldier’s mask’ (see facing p. 544). There is a conversation piece drawn by James Gunn showing John painting Montgomery in the presence of Bernard Shaw. See Brian Montgomery Monty. A Life in Photographs (1985), p. 102. John’s oil portrait belongs to Glasgow University.

23  Among John’s papers was a letter from Oscar Kokoschka thanking him for his attempts to help him escape from Prague.

24  John to Leonard Russell, 31 September 1953. NLW MS 21570E.

25  John to Dora Yates, 28 July 1936.

26  Dora Yates to John, 25 November 1959. NLW MS 22787D fols. 102–3.

27  Ibid.

28  John to Dora Yates, 29 November 1956.

29  Dora Yates to John, 22 August 1952. NLW MS 22787D fol. 78.

30  John to Dora Yates, 13 October 1953.

31  John to Dora Yates, 30 June 1960.

32  John to Dora Yates, 13 March 1946.

33  John to Mrs W. M. Cazalet, 16 June 1941 and 26 September 1941.

34  Chips. The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (ed. Robert Rhodes James 1967), p. 389.

35  Nancy Cunard Grand Man (1954), p. 195.

36  John to Mary Keene, 26 January 1948.

37  Augustus to Vivien John n.d.

38  John to Winifred Shute, 21 June 1942.

39  John to Winifred Shute, 18 October 1940.

40  John to Will and Alice Rothenstein, 15 June 1940.

41  Kenneth Clark The Other Half. A Self-Portrait (1977), p. 1.

42  Country Life (7 December 1940).

43  Burlington Magazine (December 1940), p. 28.

44  Augustus to Dorelia, 21 May 1942.

45  ‘I am thoroughly in sympathy with your determination to remain a commoner in spite of antique conventions. May you win the battle!’ John to Anthony Wedgwood Benn, 16 March 1961.

46  John to Sir Herbert Read, 18 January 1953. This letter is in the Collections Division of the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Some of the matters in which they diverged are given in a review Read wrote in the Burlington Magazine (December 1940, p. 28) where he criticized John’s tendency to idealize his types. ‘We must say “idealize” in preference to “romanticize” because one has only to compare such drawings with the superficially similar drawings of Picasso’s “blue” period to see that, while Picasso has a particular brand of romanticism (a Baudelairean romanticism), he never palliates the underlying drabness and horror. John’s gypsies are too coy, and they share this quality with his religious and allegorical figures… “Le dessin, c’est la probité de l’art” – Mr John quotes this saying of Ingres’ at the head of his catalogue, but it is a maxim with a double edge. In the sense that draughtsmanship is an index to the sensibility and skill of the artist, these drawings are a triumphant vindication; but the maxim might also mean that an artist’s drawings betray his limitations – the limitation of his interests no less than the degree of his skill. John is a typical studio artist, and there is little in his work to show that he has lived through one of the most momentous epochs of history. An artist creates his own epoch, it will perhaps be said, his own world of reality; and this is true enough. But surely that world, if it is to compete in interest with the external world, must be inhabited by figures somewhat more substantial than John’s appealing sylphs.’

About John’s portraits, however, Read admitted ‘there is no denying his superb mastery of this form… the pencil already prepares us for that balance out of psychological insight and formal harmony which his brush secures with such instinctive facility.’

47  ‘Did I tell you about August[us] John, whom I duly tackled or rather sounded, weeks ago? He said lots of publishers had been at him. One offered him £10,000 [equivalent to £308,000 in 1996] in advance for his memoirs. He said, “Oh, that’s not enough: I want £20,000.” They rose to £13,000.’ T. E. Lawrence to Jonathan Cape (September 1932). See Michael Howard Jonathan Cape, Publisher (1971), p. 151.

48  John to Cecil Gray, ‘Wednesday 1933’. British Library Add. MS 57785 fol. 72.

49  Alfred Mclntyre of Little, Brown and Company to Jonathan Cape, 27 June 1938. The contract with Little, Brown, dated 26 July 1938, gave John an advance on royalties of $5,000 and provided for delivery of the manuscript by 1 January 1940. The Jonathan Cape contract, dated 2 May 1938, allowed John an advance of £2,000 (equivalent to £57,000 in 1996). Both advances were payable on the day of publication, and both contracts lapsed in 1940.

50  M. S. Wilde of the British and International Press.

51  Jonathan Cape to Alfred Mclntyre, 24 January 1940.

52  Jonathan Cape to Alfred Mclntyre, 15 August 1940.

53  February, Vol. III, No. 14, 1941, pp. 97–103; April, Vol III, No. 16, 1941, pp. 242–52; June, Vol. III, No. 18, 1941, pp. 394–402; August, Vol. IV, No. 20, 1941, pp. 121–30; October, Vol. IV, No. 22, 1941, pp. 285–92; February, Vol. V, No. 26, 1942, pp. 125–37; August, Vol. VI, No. 32, 1942, pp. 128–40; December, Vol. VI, No. 36, 1942, pp. 421–35; January, Vol. VII, No. 37, 1943, PP·59–66; August, Vol. VIII, No. 44, 1943, pp. 136–43; December, Vol. VIII, No. 48, 1943, pp. 405–19; August, Vol. X, No. 56, 1944, 128–46; April, Vol. XI, No. 64, 1945, pp. 242–61; December, Vol. XII, No. 72, 1945, pp. 417–30; January, Vol. XIII, No.73, 1948, pp. 49–61; October, Vol. XIV, No. 82, 1946, pp. 224–31; June, Vol. XVII, No. 102, 1948, pp. 430–41; April, Vol. XIX, No. 112, 1949, pp. 292–303.

54  John to T. W. Earp, 20 March 1947.

55  Introduction by Daniel George to Finishing Touches, p. 9.

56  Ibid. p. II.

57  John to Daniel George, 19 October 1950.

58  John to Clare Crossley, 9 May 1952.

59  ‘Augustus John’ by Sir Desmond MacCarthy, Sunday Times, 2 March 1952; ‘Memories of a Great Artist’ by Sacheverell Sitwell, Spectator, 7 March 1953, p. 302; ‘Augustus John’s Self-Portrait’ by Henry Williamson, John O’ London, March 1952, pp. 296–7. See also ‘Self-Portrait’ by Harold Nicolson, Observer, 2 March 1952; ‘Augustus John: A Self-Portrait’ by Denys Sutton, Daily Telegraph, 8 March 1952; The Times, 5 March 1952; ‘Painting with a Pen’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 March 1952. The book was also well received in the United States where it was published by Pellegrini and Cudahy. See, for example, ‘Magic-Lantern Show’ by Joseph Wood Krutch, Nation, pp. 277–8. See also Quentin Bell in the New Statesman (20 November 1964), p. 797.

60  Listener (20 March 1952), p. 476.

61  Harlech Television, 18 July 1968.

62  Julian Maclaren-Ross ‘Sfumato’ The Funny Bone (1956), pp. 25–9.

63  John to Daniel George, 11 August 1954.

64  ‘The piece called “The Girl with Flaming Hair” – a young woman picked up in Tottenham Court Road – might very reasonably be allowed a place in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s “Contes Cruels”,’ wrote Anthony Powell in the Daily Telegraph (3 December 1964). For some of John’s correspondence with Daniel George over Finishing Touches see Catalogue 158 (1981), Rendells Inc., Newton, Massachusetts.

The first impression of Chiaroscuro, costing 30 shillings (£1.50), was 10,000 copies. It was published on 3 March 1952, the unsold stock being converted on 25 April 1955 to a cheap edition costing 15 shillings (75 pence) which went out of print on 4 November 1968. An edition published by the Readers Union early in 1954 of 31,792 copies was produced independently of Jonathan Cape. Finishing Touches was published on 12 November 1964 and cost 25 shillings (£1.25). The first impression ordered was for 3,000 copies, and a second impression of 750 copies was printed on 8 June 1965. The two volumes were amalgamated in 1975 and brought out by Cape under the title Autobiography in an edition of 2,000 copies costing £6.50.

65  See Cecily Langdale Gwen John (1987), p. 130 n. 11.

66  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 17 July 1930. NLW MS 21468D fol. 176.

67  Cecily Langdale Gwen John p. 130 n. 1.

68  Augustus to Edwin John n.d. (1 January 1940). NLW MS 22312C fol. 19.

69  Augustus to Edwin John n.d. (1 May 1940). NLW MS 22312C fols. 28–9.

70  Augustus to Edwin John, 22 January 1942. NLW MS 22312C fol. 49.

71  Augustus to Edwin John, 5 July 1944. NLW MS 22312C fol. 52.

72  Augustus to Edwin John, 22 August 1944. NLW MS 22312C fol. 53.

73  Augustus to Edwin John, 4 March 1946. NLW MS 22312C fol. 57.

74  Augustus to Edwin John, 11 September 1946. NLW MS 22312C fol. 62. Edwin John was then living in the village of Mousehole, Cornwall.

75  Augustus to Edwin John, 30 November 1946. NLW MS 22312C fol. 65.

76  Edwin John to Augustus, 24 December 1951. NLW MS 22782D fols. 20–1.

77  See NLW MS 22782D fols. 18–25, 22312C fols. 27–77.

78  Winifred Shute to Augustus John, 3 March 1956. NLW MS 22782D fol. 125.

79  Instead of a memoir Augustus reworked his Matthiesen catalogue essay as an article in Horizon Volume XIX No. 112 (April 1949), pp. 295–303, and this, with some revisions, appeared in Chiaroscuro pp. 247–56; later his Burlington Magazine contribution (Volume LXXXI No. 475 [October 1942]) was reprinted in Finishing Touches pp. 79–81.

80  Finishing Touches p. 81.

81  John to Pamela Grove, 25 February 1945.

82  John to Sylvia Hay, 5 June 1959.

83  Marie Mauron to the author, 1969.

84  Chiaroscuro p. 261. See also Horizon Volume XVII No. 102 (June 1948), p. 438.

85  Chiaroscuro p. 262.

86  Horizon Volume XVII No. 102 (June 1948), p. 440. In a letter to Matthew Smith (5 December 1946) he wrote: ‘I thought the country as good as ever but didn’t do anything with it.’

87  William Empson to the author, 6 December 1968. See also Hugh Gordon Proteus Listener (3 December 1964), pp. 902–3.

88  John to Cyril Connolly, 5 November 1949. McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.

89  Chiaroscuro p. 264.

90  John to T. W Earp, 20 March 1947.

91  Augustus to Edwin John, 29 November 1947. NLW MS 22312C fol. 72.

92  Augustus to David John, 22 June 1942.

93  Socialist Leader (18 September 1948). See also The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4 In Front of Your Nose 1945–50 (1970 edn), pp. 595–6.

94  There were only two issues of the Delphic Review, Winter 1949 and Spring 1950. John’s article ‘Frontiers’ occupies pages 6–11 of the first issue.

95  John to Bertrand Russell, 6 February 1961. ‘Very disappointed,’ he had cabled Russell. ‘Had looked forward to jail.’ See Caroline Moorehead Bertrand Russell (1992), p. 509.

96  The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell Volume III 1944–67 (1969), p. 118. See also p. 146.

97  ‘The Great Bohemian’, Time and Tide (9 November 1961).

98  Breon O’Casey to the author, 7 September 1969.

99  Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers (1966), p. 277.

100  Stephen Spender Journals 1939–1983 (ed. John Goldsmith 1985), 1 July 1955, p. 157·

101  John to Sylvia Hay, 7 September 1956. In the collection of Professor Norman H. Pearson, Yale University, New Haven.

102  John to Cyril Clemens, December 1955.

103  John to Sylvia Hay, 7 January 1959.

104  John to Hope Scott, 3 October 1950.

105  John Rothenstein Time’s Thievish Progress (1970), pp. 24–5.

106  Diana Mosley A Life of Contrasts (1977), p. 89.

107  Harlech Television, 18 July 1968.

108  John to Alan Moorehead, 31 March 1952.

109  John to John Davenport, 11 March 1956.

110  John to Joe Hone, 4 February 1956.

111  John to D. S. MacColl n.d.

112  John to Kelly, 23 July 1952, 20 May 1952, 2 July 1952, 15 March 1952; Kelly to Earp, 20 January 1954; John to Kelly, 30 September 1953; Kelly to Earp n.d. (1954); Hugo Pitman to Kelly, 12 August 1952. Royal Academy.

113  Sunday Times (14 March 1954).

114  Kelly to John, 10 February 1954; Kelly to Lady John Hope (Liza Maugham), 2 June 1954; Kelly to John, 28–9 June 1954; Kelly to John, 1 April 1954. Royal Academy.

115  Dorelia to Kelly n.d. (March 1954). Royal Academy.

116  John to Kelly, 16 March 1954. Royal Academy.

117  The Times (13 March 1954).

118  John to Hugo Pitman, 27 December 1952.

119  John to Hugo Pitman, 10 November 1954.

120  John to Dorothy Head, 16 November 1954.

121  John to Mrs W. M. Cazalet, 16 June 1941.

122  Augustus to Simon John, 14 September 1944.

123  John to Michael Ayrton, February 1961.

124  Augustus to Caspar John, 7 January 1955.

125  Best of Friends. The Brenan–Partridge Letters (ed. Xan Fielding 1986), p. 209.

126  Augustus to Edwin John n.d.

127  Gerald Brenan A Personal Record (1974), p. 356.

128  Augustus to Caspar John, 7 January 1955.

129  John to Clare Crossley, 12 January 1955.

130  John to Sylvia Hay n.d.

131  John to Matthew Smith, 22 December 1948.

132  John to Count William de Belleroche, 5 September 1956.

133  John to Matthew Smith, 5 September 1956.

134  John to Matthew Smith, 24 December 1953. In a letter to Caspar John of about the same date (NLW MS 22775C fol. 10) John wrote: ‘I have been much distressed by the death of Dylan Thomas and have managed to write a note about it for a paper called Adam in an edition wholly devoted to the Poet.’ John’s essay, ‘The Monogamous Bohemian’, appeared in the January 1954 issue of Adam Literary Magazine, and was reprinted in E. W. Tedlock’s Dylan Thomas – the legend and the poet (1960). Another essay by John, originally appearing in the Sunday Times (28 September 1958), was reprinted in J. M. Brinnin’s A Casebook on Dylan Thomas (1960), and in Finishing Touches pp. 108–15.

135  John to Count William de Belleroche, 21 June 1956.

136  William Gaunt to the author, 16 October 1971.

137  One of Matthew Smith’s portraits of John is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; another at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and the third, which was sold at Sotheby’s on 13 May 1987, is privately owned. John’s portrait of Matthew Smith is in the Tate Gallery.

138  Peter Quennell ‘Augustus John’ Harper’s Bazaar (February 1952), p. 45. Photographs by Cartier-Bresson.

139  Lucy Norton to the author, 1973.

140  John to Matthew Smith, 1 July 1959.

141  BBC Panorama, 4 November 1957.

142  Sunday Times (18 January 1953).

143  John to Eric Phillips, 9 December 1952.

144  John to Joe Hone, 9 February 1956. It was purchased by a number of subscribers, headed by Hugo Pitman and Lennox Robinson, and unveiled at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in November 1955.

145  John to Mary Anna Marten, 31 January 1953.

146  John Rothenstein Time’s Thievish Progress p. 15.

147  John to Joe Hone, 9 February 1956. See also Tenby Observer and County News (15 October 1954).

148  Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters Volume 4 (ed. Dan H. Laurence 1988), p. 794.

149  Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson 1935–1956 (1958), p. 336–7, 8 December 1955. The drawing is reproduced as frontispiece to this volume. Powys reckoned John to be ‘one of the 3 great men I’ve met in my life’, the other two being Thomas Hardy and Charles Chaplin. He was particularly pleased that John had also done a portrait of his brother T. F. Powys (1933). ‘So two of the Brothers Powys will be seen by the next and the next generations as the great artist saw them,’ he wrote to G. Wilson Knight (14 July 1958).

150  Thornton John to Augustus, 25 June 1959. NLW MS 22782D fols. 119–20.

151  Augustus John to Winifred Shute, November 1959.

152  John to John Davenport n.d. NLW MS 21585E.

153  Augustus to Caspar John, 6 May 1960. NLW MS 22775C fols. 41–2.

154  Tenby Observer and County News (30 October 1959).

155  John to Tristan de Vere Cole, 5 February 1956.

156  Maurice Collis: Diaries 1949–1969 (ed. Louise Collis 1977), p. 55, 9 September 1953. ‘His face was very expressive, like an actor’s. He had very great charm. Affection, intimacy, indignation, sadness flitted across his features. There was emotion of some kind showing all the time… not intellectual, not kind, not even very intuitive or sympathetic for others but human and greatly experienced in life. One sees very few Englishmen with such faces in the upper classes, but tramps, beggars and poets (old style) sometimes have that look.’

157  John to Sir Charles Wheeler, 11 April 1960.

158  Roderic Owen with Tristan de Vere Cole Beautiful and Beloved (1974), p. 225.

159  Fergus Fleming Amaryllis Fleming (1993), pp. 150–1. See also pp. 179–81, 199. Eve Fleming did not in fact marry Lord Winchester, who remained married to Bapsy Pavry. ‘When I saw the announcement in the Times I received quite a shock,’ John had written to her (23 July 1953). ‘…As the Marquess remarked to some journalist it was quick work on his part.’ NLW 21622D.

160  John to Daniel George, 28 September 1952.

161  John to Alfred Hayward, 13 June 1952.

162  John to Doris Phillips, 9 December 1952.

163  Augustus to Edwin John, 30 May 1954.

164  Charles Wheeler High Relief (1968), p. 116.

165  Augustus to Edwin John, 1 December 1960.

166  Charles Wheeler High Relief p. 116.

167  John to Sir Philip Dunn, 11 February 1960.

168  John to Sir Charles Wheeler, 8 March 1960.

169  Now in the Royal Academy Library.

170  John to Sir Charles Wheeler, 4 March 1961.

171  John to Cecil Beaton n.d.

172  David John to Robin John, 20 November 1971.

173  Sven Berlin Dromengro: Man of the Road (1971), pp. 196–7.

174  Richard Hughes ‘Last Words from Augustus’ Sunday Telegraph (5 November 1961).

175  Anthony Powell ‘The Great Bohemian’ Time and Tide (9 November 1961).

176  Osbert Lancaster ‘Last of the Great Unbeats’ Daily Express (1 November 1961).

177  Daily Telegraph (1 November 1961), p. 12.

178  Tooth’s Gallery, 15–30 March, ‘Paintings and Drawings not previously exhibited’. Christie’s, First Studio Sale, 20 July 1962 (115 drawings, 70 paintings) £99,645 (equivalent to £1,200,000 in 1996). Christie’s, Second Studio Sale, 21 June 1963 (103 drawings, 62 paintings) £33,405 (equivalent to £391,200 in 1996). Both studio sales were held primarily to pay off death duties, John’s estate having been valued at approximately £90,000 (equivalent to £1,119,000 in 1996).