‘Obstacles put in his [Augustus’s] way would only have strengthened his determination to become an artist… He suggested being allowed to attend the Slade School in London. The earnestness he put into this request made me first think he might after all make an artist… he could display plenty of determination when necessary, and his whole childhood had proved that he could give untiring application to either drawing or painting. This, combined with his obvious eagerness, made me give my consent quite willingly.’63
It was Mr Head who had recommended the Slade. The fees, Edwin discovered, were pretty stiff, but the legacy of forty pounds from Augusta would see to his son’s upkeep – and there was always the possibility of a scholarship. Besides, it would put an end to the rows that were now breaking out between them. On the whole, things could have turned out worse.
*1 Either he would discover a good partner and no gold, or some gold and a partner who ran off with it. But, except for a brief period when he dreamed of starting a tobacco factory in Ireland, he seemed to have found what he really loved – mountains, prairies, horses and empty spaces. Among the trappers, cowboys and prospectors he earned the title of ‘the rider from away back’, and, in company with a band of them, crossed Canada on horseback, fording rivers and bathing in hot springs till his skin turned dark orange. Above all he relished solitude and for some years before 1914 went to live beside an Indian encampment, whose inhabitants would appear outside his tent, sit for hours smoking their long pipes, then vanish. He also travelled through Montana ‘and always on horseback’; he wrote: ‘I used to make my bed on the ground without a tent, and the dawn was the most important part of the day.’ He married late in life a woman who had had two previous husbands and whom he discovered after her death to have been twenty years older than he thought. He had no children, but one foster daughter. He died in British Columbia on 19 March 1968, aged ninety-two.
*2 From Paris, Winifred crossed the Atlantic while still in her early twenties. By the summer of 1905 she had reached Montana, living some months with Thornton surrounded by Indians, ‘rattlesnakes and all sorts of wild animals’. The two of them planned to travel to Mexico by boat along the Mississippi. ‘The idea of orange groves and sunlight is enchanting,’ Augustus wrote to her, ‘– but too remote from my experience to be anything but a lovely dream. But depend on it, you have only to perjure yourselves to its reality to bring this family at any rate helter skelter on your tracks… I can see you and Thornton installed on the top of some crumbling teocalli with the breath of the Pacific in your nostrils.’ Eventually this plan was abandoned, and Winifred journeyed instead to Vancouver where ‘the weather was perfect: it rained every day’, and to San Francisco, ‘a beastly town’. For a number of years she gave violin lessons in California, and on 30 January 1915 married one of her pupils, Victor Lauder Shute, a failed painter who had turned engineer and worked mostly for the railroads. They had three children, Dale, Betty and Muriel, a fourth child being still-born in 1924. Although she claimed to have developed ‘such strong nerves I have played to a room full of people and forgot everybody’, she remained shy.
She never returned to Wales or England, but died in Martinez (California) on 12 April 1967, aged eighty-seven.
TWO
‘Slade School Ingenious’
1
NEW STUDENTS – OLD MASTERS
‘What a brood I have raised!’
Henry Tonks
On his first day at the Slade, in October 1894, Augustus was led into the Antique Room, presided over by Henry Tonks – and almost at once a rumpus broke out. Some of the new students, who had already worked for several months in Paris, were objecting at not being allowed straight into the Life Class. Professor Tonks, however, was adamant: the students’ taste must first be conditioned by Greco-Roman sculpture before it was fit to deal with the raw materials of life. And against this judgement there was no appeal.
Augustus was not one of those who objected. To him the absence of stumping was in itself wonderful enough. Far from having been to Paris, he had scarcely been to London and he felt his immense ignorance of everything. To the others he appeared a rather spruce and silent figure, white-collared, clean-shaven, guarding his dignity. Tonks placed him on one of the wooden ‘donkeys’, next to another new student, Ethel Hatch. ‘I found myself sitting next to a boy about sixteen’, she recalled, ‘with chestnut hair and very brown [sic] eyes who had the name “John” written in large letters on his paper… He was very neatly dressed, and was very quiet and polite, and on the following mornings he never failed to say good morning when he came in.’1
He seemed out of the ordinary in so far as he was quieter than other students, and perhaps more timid. But one of them, Michel Salaman, noticed that, when he called for an indiarubber one day and someone threw it to him, he caught it and began rubbing out in a single movement. He was supremely well co-ordinated.
Every student had been instructed to provide himself with a box of charcoals, some sheets of papier Ingres, and a chunk of bread. Their first task was to make what they could of the discobolus. Augustus fixed it with a stare, then using a few sweeping strokes, polished it off, as he thought, in a couple of minutes. Tonks, however, thought differently. It was bold, certainly, but far too summary. Yet he was interested by Augustus’s sketch.
Everything at the Slade dazzled Augustus. The spirit of dedication by which he felt himself to be surrounded, thrilled and abashed him. He hardly knew where to look. The girls were so eye-catching and the men apparently so self-assured that whatever imperfections he observed in their work he attributed to his own lack of understanding.
The teaching of Tonks gave Augustus the sense of direction he had so far lacked. In such a place he seemed to know who he was and the part he had to play. Whatever successes he gained later in his career, he remained to a certain extent a Slade student all his life. In its strengths and limitations, this was the single most important influence on him.
*
When Augustus John came to London, the Slade School was twenty-three years old, and about to enter one of its most brilliant phases. Its tradition was founded upon the study of the Old Masters, and laid special emphasis on draughtsmanship – on the interpretation of line as the Old Masters understood line, and of anatomical construction. ‘Drawing is an explanation of the form,’ Augustus was told. This was the Slade motto, and he never forgot it.
The school had opened in 1871, at a time when British art was at a low ebb. Cut off by its indifference from the exciting developments taking place on the Continent, the Royal Academy with its English literary tradition was all-powerful. The time was ripe for some form of revolution.
The new school took its name from Felix Slade, a wealthy connoisseur of the arts, who, on his death in 1868, had left £35,000 to found professorships of art at Oxford, Cambrige and the University of London. The Oxford and Cambridge chairs – the former taken by Ruskin – were to be solely for lecturing. In London the executors were asked to found a ‘Felix Slade Faculty of Fine Arts’, and University College voted £5,000 for building the Slade School as part of the college quadrangle off Gower Street.
The first professor, Edward Poynter, was an unlikely choice. A fellow student of George du Maurier, he was portrayed in Trilby as Lorimer, the ‘Industrious Apprentice’. In his inaugural address he attacked the teaching in schools, where months were spent upon a single elaborate drawing, and recommended ‘the “free and intelligent manner of drawing”…of the French ateliers, of which he had experience as a pupil of Gleyre...’2 He recommended other innovations too: men and women must be offered the same opportunities; students were not examined on admission; and all the teachers had to be practising artists.3
Poynter did not remain long at the Slade. He became President of the Royal Academy, and in 1876 handed over the Slade torch to Alphonse Legros. Much in the condition of British art over the next fifty years is suggested by his career.
Legros taught his students to draw freely with
the point, and to build up their drawings by observing the broad planes of the model. A friend of the great French artists of the period – Degas, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Rodin – he was himself a good draughtsman, a disciple of Raphael and Rembrandt, of Ingres and Delacroix. One of his pupils, William Rothenstein, has described his methods of teaching drawing:
‘As a rule we drew larger than sight-size, but Legros would insist that we studied the relations of light and shade and half-tone, at first indicating these lightly, starting as though from a cloud, and gradually coaxing the solid forms into being by superimposed hatching. This was a severe and logical method of constructive drawing – academic in the true sense of the word… He urged us to train our memories, to put down in our sketch-books things seen in the streets… to copy, during school hours, in the National Gallery and in the Print Room of the British Museum...’4
Legros took no trouble to hide his hostility to the Royal Academy which, he believed, represented neither tradition nor scholarship, and he encouraged his students to be independent of Burlington House. He was close neither to the Salon painters nor to the Impressionists, and eventually he became an isolated figure. His instruction in painting, as opposed to drawing, was later described by Walter Sickert as ‘almost a model of how not to do it’.
Legros retired from the Slade a year before Augustus arrived, but his principles were firmly established there. He and Poynter had been trained in the studio schools of Paris, and were in a line of studio teachers stretching back to the Renaissance. This was the atmosphere in which Augustus found himself at the age of sixteen – that of a medieval-Renaissance workshop school, which launched him on his Renaissance life.
By the time Legros retired, the Royal Academy had become aware of the Slade’s growing strength, but despite its efforts to get one of its men appointed, the chair was offered to Frederick Brown. Brown was then forty-two, ‘a gruff, hard-bitten man, of great feeling, with something of the Victorian military man about him, such as the colonel who had spent his life on the North-West Frontier, surrounded by savages, which indeed his life as a progressive artist and teacher during the ’seventies and ’eighties must have rather resembled.’5 This somewhat grim figure, with his greying hair, chin-tuft, prognathous jaw and grave bespectacled eyes, was invariably dressed in a black frock coat. His teeth seemed permanently clenched, giving him the appearance of a man who would stand no nonsense – nor would he. He had studied in Paris under Robert-Fleury and Bouguereau, and for the past fifteen years had been head of the Westminster School of Art, which he expanded from evening classes and ran on the lines of a French school. He was popular with his students, many of whom followed him from Westminster to the Slade. His severe expression and high standards were complemented by great patience and he endeared himself to students by his wonderful memory – he would often refer to drawings they had done years before, and he became a great collector of their work.
One of these students who was to follow Brown to the Slade was a young Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Henry Tonks. Tonks, who had become increasingly attracted to the artist’s life, was eloquent in persuading his patients to pose as models and, when obliged to fall back on the dead, he seized every opportunity to draw the corpses that were dissected in his class. In about 1890, while Senior Resident Medical Officer at the Royal Free Hospital, he had started to attend the Westminster School of Art as a part-time student, hurrying off to its evening classes smelling strongly of carbolic.
Tonks was exactly the person Brown felt he needed to support him at the Slade. He was well educated, businesslike, and had a gift for teaching and a knowledge of anatomy that gave him special insight into the process of figure-drawing. Like Brown, he was dissatisfied with the mechanical methods of instruction employed in most art schools. If Brown resembled a Victorian colonel, Tonks, who was tall and gaunt, had the commanding presence of a nineteenth-century cardinal.
In the late autumn of 1893 Brown offered him the post of his assistant. Tonks was ‘amazed, almost beside himself with pleasure’. A few months before Augustus arrived there, he took up his new career at the Slade. So began the famous partnership of Brown and Tonks, those two lean and rock-like bachelors, which was to carry on the teaching reforms of Legros, establish the Slade tradition of constructive drawing, and influence generations of British art.
*
From morning till late afternoon, Augustus toiled over the casts of Greek, Roman and Renaissance heads. Then, initially for short twenty-minute poses, he and the other new students were allowed down into the Life Class. Augustus entered this studio for the first time with feelings of awe. Seated on the ‘throne’, he saw a girl, Italian and completely naked. ‘Perfect beauty always intimidates,’ he wrote. ‘Overcome for a moment by a strange sensation of weakness at the knees, I hastily seated myself and with trembling hand began to draw, or pretend to draw this dazzling apparition.’6 Looking round, he was astonished to observe that the other students appeared almost indifferent to the spectacle, and his respect for them mounted even higher.
The regime at the Slade was still austere. Men and women worked together only in the Antique Rooms. They were segregated elsewhere and rarely met in the evenings. ‘This is not a matrimonial agency,’ Brown told Alfred Hayward, a student whom he had come across saying good morning to a young girl in one of the corridors. Models and students were forbidden to speak to one another; older students in the Life Rooms had little communication with the new pupils, and the hierarchy was like that of a public school. Augustus seemed fixed in his work all day long and half the night. Wherever he went he took his sketchbook, filling it with rapid drawings of his fellow students.
In criticizing their monthly compositions one day, Tonks had said he wanted his students to go to the National Gallery more often and look less at the Yellow Book, with its drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. Augustus passed much of his free time at the National Gallery, the British Museum and other permanent collections in London. What he saw in these places overwhelmed him. He could not sort out his ideas, could not decide what excited him most or what suited his own talent best – the treasures of Europe were at the end of a bus ride to Trafalgar Square. He flitted from picture to picture. Should he be a Pre-Raphaelite or a latter-day disciple of Rembrandt? Or both – or something else again? Looking back at this period years later, he concluded: ‘A student should devote himself to one Master only; or one at a time.’7 His earliest master, on whom he began modelling his drawing, was Watteau.
The crowded cosmopolitan streets of London stimulated and confused him during these first months. The pervading smell of chipped potatoes, horse dung and old leather; the leaping naphtha flames along the main roads; the wood-block paving of the streets looking like squares from a Battenburg cake; the glittering multicoloured music halls; the costermongers with their barrows of fruit and flowers; the vendors of pickled eels, ices and meat pies; the jugglers and conjurors who performed for pennies: it was too foreign for him to absorb. He walked everywhere – from Bermondsey to Belgravia, from the narrow streets of cobblestones where chickens scavenged and the shabby slum children played to fashionable Hyde Park where men and women, glossily hatted, rode to and fro, their horses gleaming with health, their coachmen decked out in authoritative livery. It seemed that no encounter was impossible, and every adventure for the asking – if only he had the courage to find his voice.
But he was boorishly shy, and also poor. Most evenings he would return after dark to a dreary little villa, 8 Milton Road, Acton, where he lived with one of his ‘Jesus Christ Aunts’; and every morning he left early on his long day’s journey into town to reach the Slade long before ten o’clock when classes officially began. Occasionally his father would send him a small amount of money and he would hurry off to the music halls. In the melodramas and variety shows at the Alhambra, the Old Mogul, the Metropolitan, the Bedford, Collins’s and Old Sadler’s Wells, where a crowd of students could take a box for a shilling, he sketched the buskers and comed
ians, including the legendary buffoon Arthur Roberts, and the singers and dancers with their magical names, Cissy Loftus, Cadieux and Mary Belfont, who held him in thrall.8 They were more real than reality. One student later remembered him shouting out his own line in one of the songs, and the singer improvising her refrain to cap it, and then the two of them keeping up the repartee, she in her harsh cockney, he in his vibrant Welsh, among the cheering and stampeding audience. He went to these music halls whenever he could afford it, and sometimes when he could not: and once or twice was ignominiously thrown out.
But he was much alone. On Sundays he would often wander round Speakers’ Corner, listen to the orators, join the crowds and gaze at the outlandish sights – then, bursting with nervous energy, march all the way home. Often he travelled great distances, staring into people’s faces, carrying under his arm one or other of his two favourite books – Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Hamlet.
Augustus John Page 8
