Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Augustus disliked this description, for much the same reason that he disliked the portrait painted of him in 1900 by William Orpen,19 which did not show the uncertain, dreamy person he knew himself to be. Already by then he was paling to invisibility in the sunlight of the John reputation. ‘I am just a legend,’ he once said. ‘I am not a real person at all.’

  The essence of Augustus’s performance at the Slade, which was to nourish this larger-than-life legend, was impatience. His bang on the head had not infected him with a genius for draughtsmanship. Augustus himself described the theory of a rock releasing hidden springs of genius as ‘nonsense’, and he added: ‘I was in no way changed, unless my fitful industry with its incessant setbacks, my wool-gathering and squandering of time, my emotional ups and downs and general inconsequence can be charitably imputed to this mishap.’20

  The claustrophobia of his convalescence was what most strongly affected him. It did not confer extra qualities, but magnified certain traits, leaving him with an obsession against being confined and an additional sense of isolation. He was unable to tolerate stress, but had to outpace his anxieties. The assurance of his early drawings testifies to the speed with which he did them. His natural doubts and hesitations had no time to crowd in on him and when they began to do so, he put on an extra burst of speed. In a letter written by Charles Morgan to the art critic D. S. MacColl, he recalled some words of Wilson Steer’s: ‘Do you remember that drawing by John? It was done at a time when he drew with many lines and many of those lines were superfluous or even wrong, but then at the last moment, he would select among them and emphasize those which were right, and so, by an act of genius save a drawing which, in the hands of any other man, would have become a mess and a failure.’ This technique of acceleration served him magnificently while he was still young. He raised the standard of work at the Slade, lifted other students to a new level. ‘We can’t teach students,’ acknowledged Frederick Brown, ‘they learn from one another.’

  It was the vitality and restlessness that impressed other students. Everything seemed to contribute to his God-like aspect: his very name, Augustus, suggested the deified Roman Emperor.21 By his eighteenth birthday he was an imposing figure: a picturesque figure nearly six feet tall, with a Christ-like beard, roving eyes and beautiful hands with long nervous fingers that gave a look of intelligence to everything he did. He was not talkative. But sometimes his eyes would light up, and he would speak eloquently in a deep flowing Welsh voice.

  Physically he was the stuff from which heroes are made, and the age was right for theatrical heroes. From Oscar Wilde, who put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, to the Sitwells with their genius for publicity, English civilization was presenting a fantastic gallery of ‘characters’ – dandies and eccentrics, prophets and impresarios of the arts. The age was becoming more mechanical, personal liberty restricted, behaviour uniform. The collective frustration of Edwardian England was soon to focus upon Augustus and elect him as a symbol of free man. Through him people lived out their fantasies; for what they dared not do, it seemed he did fearlessly and instinctively. There was nothing mechanical, nothing restricted or uniform about him; there was mildness. Wyndham Lewis, who first saw him at the Slade, was to describe Augustus as ‘the most notorious nonconformist England has known for a long time.

  ‘Following in the footsteps of Borrow, he was one of those people who always set out to do the thing that “is not done”, according to the British canon. He swept aside the social conventions, which was a great success, and he became a public lion practically on the spot. There was another reason for this lionization (which is why he has remained a lion): he happened to be an unusually fine artist.

  Such a combination was rare… Here was one who had gigantic ear-rings, a ferocious red beard, a large angry eye, and who barked beautifully at you from his proud six foot, and, marvellously, was a great artist too. He was reported to like women and wine and song and to be by birth a gypsy.’22

  The triumphal progress had started.

  3

  A SINGULAR GROUP

  ‘We were much together on and off.’

  Augustus John, Chiaroscuro

  No one could have appeared more at odds with Augustus than his sister Gwen. Physically, she looked fragile. Her figure was slender; she had tiny hands and feet; her oval face was very pale, and her soft Pembrokeshire voice almost inaudible. She dressed carefully in dark colours, and latterly in black. Her hair was brown, neatly arranged, with a bow on top. But this modest impression was corrected by a look of extreme determination. The receding John chin, which Augustus now camouflaged, seemed to symbolize Gwen’s withdrawn nature. Socially ill at ease, she presented an air of aloofness.

  Both their personalities were elusive: hers, in its reticence, manifestly so; his, more deceptively behind the theatricality of his ‘reputation’. Despite appearances, they had much in common – an essentially simple interpretation of life, a singular sensitivity to beauty: the beauty of nature and of people, especially women, sometimes the same women. ‘With our common contempt for sentimentality, Gwen and I were not opposites but much the same really, but we took a different attitude,’ Augustus later wrote. ‘I am rarely “exuberant”. She was always so; latterly in a tragic way. She wasn’t chaste or subdued, but amorous and proud. She didn’t steal through life but preserved a haughty independence which people mistook for humility. Her passions for both men and women were outrageous and irrational.’23

  Both, in their fashion, were set apart. But Augustus’s separateness had been complicated by his partial deafness and made hysterical by the aftermath of his bathing accident. There was a disconnectedness to much that he did. Unlike Gwen, he could not bear to contain his emotions, but had to disburden himself immediately. So, although they were confronted by many similar problems, their methods of dealing with them differed.

  Before Augustus had been at the Slade many months, he was urging Gwen to join him. Her need to escape from Victoria House was as compelling as his had been, and, as he later implied, she would have joined him anyway: ‘She wasn’t going to be left out of it!’24 But there was the matter of persuading her father. Finishing schools for girls, especially in London, were a mark of social prestige. But art schools were more problematical. The Female School of Art and Design turned out to be mainly a craft academy training students as professional designers, while Queen’s and Bedford Colleges offered only a few drawing classes for women. There were also some private art schools which prepared women for the Royal Academy Schools, which had reluctantly admitted them ten years earlier – yet they still excluded them from the Life Room. The Slade was an obvious choice. The insistence on high seriousness and its connection with a university were reassuring. The women came from good families and were said to be brought there each morning by carriages or escorted by servants – a duty that Gus could freely undertake for Gwen. The Life Class itself was always conducted in silence, with the professor alone permitted to speak. Altogether it sounded an excellent establishment.

  So Gwen came to London, staying first at ‘Miss Philpot’s Educational Establishment’ at 10 Princes Square, Bayswater. But during the autumn of 1895, when she started to attend the Slade, she moved to 23 Euston Square,*1 near University College. By this time Augustus had left Acton, his paganism having proved too much for his aunt, and was living at 20 Montague Place, a superior lodging house in a street of temperance hotels, private apartments and the occasional bootmaker or surgeon. In Chiaroscuro he described himself and Gwen sharing rooms together a little later and, like monkeys, living off fruit and nuts. Early in 1897 they took the first-floor flat of 21 Fitzroy Street, a house that had recently been bought by a Mrs Everett, mother of one of their friends at the Slade, who hurriedly converted it from a brothel (the proprietress of which had described herself as ‘feather dresser’) into a series of flats and studios. Here they seem to have lived intermittently for over a year, sharing it with Grace Westray, another Slade s
tudent, and with Winifred John who had then come up to London to study music. Apart from this, and a flat over a tobacconist’s in which they lived briefly after leaving the Slade, the only rooms they shared were other people’s. They were close to each other, yet it was not practicable for them to remain together long.

  Although Gwen seldom appeared to take Gus’s advice and sometimes ridiculed his opinions (such as that she substitute an ‘athletic’ for her ‘unhygienic’ way of life) she was agitated by his presence, being unable to retain her single-mindedness when he was near. In any case they dared not stay too close – there was the danger of emotional trespass with all its trailing difficulties of guilt and regret. In her letters to him Gwen would occasionally call Gus ‘dear love’ and Gus would occasionally send her ‘a kiss’. They understood each other: but their ‘attitudes’ being so different they also upset each other. Gus’s impatient and demanding personality influenced Gwen when they were together so that she would adopt his ‘attitude’ rather than developing her own. Like him, she loved the sea, but later trained herself to paint indoors, often solitary figures, even empty rooms, sometimes a child praying in church, a vase of flowers on a table, a wide-awake cat on a cushion – all simple love objects. But Gus could never bear to stay indoors. ‘I feel acutely what I am missing all the time shut up in my studio,’ he told Robert Gregory, ‘ – all the sights & delights of the high road or any road...’25 So while she, shunning delight and living laborious days, would gather herself in solitude, he was off along all roads and any roads that might lead him to visions and symbols of what he missed: phantasmagorical gatherings of open-air men and women – gypsies, strollers, musicians and mothers with children of around the age he had been when his mother died: all dreams of wish-fulfilment. In actual life Gus agreed with Gwen that ‘loneliness is a great thing… let your neighbour be at the other end of the earth.’26 But he wanted to transcend actual life in his imagination and to lose himself perpetually in other people; whereas Gwen, desiring a more interior life, wanted to ‘go and live somewhere’, as she confided to their friend Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘where I met nobody I know till I am so strong that people and things could not affect me beyond reason’.27

  People were frequently threatening to affect Gwen beyond reason, and she did not recover from her passions so easily as Gus appeared to do. ‘I was born to love,’28 she wrote, but how could she put all this energy of loving into her work? While at the Slade she formed an attachment to another girl.29 When this girl began a love affair with a married man, Gwen decided that it must be stopped. Failing to persuade her, she declared an ultimatum: either the affair must cease or she herself would commit suicide. There was no doubting her sincerity. ‘The atmosphere of our group now became almost unbearable,’ Augustus records, ‘with its frightful tension, its terrifying excursions and alarms. Had my sister gone mad? At one moment Ambrose McEvoy thought so, and, distraught himself, rushed to tell me the dire news: but Gwen was only in a state of spiritual exaltation, and laughed at my distress.’30

  From dramatic involvements of this kind Gwen had to protect herself. Only then could she control her energy, limit misfortunes and pursue her search for ‘the strange form’.31 She had to fight the terrible tendency towards ‘impatience and angoisse’32 she shared with Gus, learn to prepare slowly and paint quickly. In this lifelong acquiring of patience lay her belief that ‘my vision will have some value in the world… I think it will count because I am patient and recueillée in some degree.’33

  She was not naturally sombre – Augustus testifies to her ‘native gaiety and humour’. Ruthless towards those who bothered her – ‘I will not be troubled by people’34 – she remained obstinately vulnerable to those whom she loved and admired. ‘I am ridiculous,’ she wrote. ‘I can’t refuse anything that is asked of me.’35

  About Augustus’s pictures Gwen said little – neither of them talked to each other much about painting. Besides she was always being sent newspaper cuttings from her father about Gus’s spectacular successes. But in a letter she sent Ursula Tyrwhitt in the winter of 1914–15 she wrote: ‘I think them rather good. They want something which perhaps will come soon!’ Of her work Augustus was a consistent admirer from early days. ‘Gwen has done a wonderful masterpiece,’ he wrote to Michel Salaman of her ‘Self-Portrait in a Red Blouse’36 in 1902. In his last years, after Gwen had died, this admiration curdled into a sentimentalized concoction – ‘Fifty years after my death I shall be remembered as Gwen John’s brother’ – reminiscent of Bernard Shaw’s theatrical exit line after his visit to Meudon (‘Shaw, Bernard: subject of a bust by Rodin: otherwise unknown’).37 Yet Augustus’s admiration was genuine, often expressed and acted upon during her lifetime. ‘I have seen him peer fixedly, almost obsessively, at pictures by Gwen as though he could discern in them his own temperament in reverse,’ John Rothenstein recalls: ‘as though he could derive from the act satisfaction in his own wider range, greater natural endowment, tempestuous energy, and at the same time be reproached by her single-mindedness, her steadiness of focus, above all by the sureness with which she attained her simpler aims.’38

  *

  Round Gwen and Gus there soon gathered a group of talented young artists. A new spirit of comradeship, unknown in Legros’s time, invaded the Slade. ‘The girls were supreme,’ Augustus recalled. Among this ‘remarkably brilliant group of women students’, in what Augustus called ‘the Grand Epoch of the Slade’, were Ida Nettleship and Gwen Salmond,39 the latter a self-possessed and outspoken girl whose ‘Descent from the Cross’ was much admired. But perhaps the most precocious of all was Edna Waugh, very pretty and petite and with long hair down to her waist, who had gone there in 1893 at the age of fourteen, won a scholarship and in 1897 scored a dramatic triumph with her watercolour ‘The Rape of the Sabines’, showing women in traumatic positions being carried off by strange men for ‘purposes unspecified’. She was proclaimed an infant prodigy, another Slade School ‘genius’. The poetic imaginings with which she filled her notebooks particularly impressed Tonks, with whom she was a favourite and who predicted she would be a second Burne-Jones, to which she replied that on the contrary she would be ‘the first Edna Waugh’. But to many people’s dismay she did not long remain Edna Waugh.

  For no one, unless it was to be Augustus’s own wife, better illustrated the heavy burdens of domesticity upon artistic endeavour. In the spring of 1896, a young barrister, William Clarke Hall, had written to Edna’s parents formally requesting permission to propose marriage to her. He was more than a dozen years older than she was, but had admired her since she was thirteen – ‘the child for whom of all things in the world I care most’. This was a big shock for Edna. She liked Willie when he used to come and see her father. She was struck by his piercing blue eyes, but could not tell whether or not she loved him. Did she like him simply because he worshipped her so extravagantly? She was so young she did not know what she felt. ‘You occupy more than half my imaginings,’ she assured him. But he, offended by her fractional hesitation, accused her of being ‘completely self-absorbed’; and because he ‘seemed so much more mature than myself, she felt he must be able to ‘understand so truly what is wrong with me’. Her mother considered her to be engaged and so apparently did everyone else. So presumably she was – at any rate it seemed inevitable. ‘Don’t bother your head whether you care for Willie with lasting love,’ her friend Ida Nettleship counselled her, ‘…when you love you will know.’ But Edna did not know, perhaps because, as Ida explained to William Clarke Hall, ‘it’s a child’s love that Edna bears you.’40

  In her last year at the Slade, Edna asked Gwen John for advice on oil painting. Gwen had learnt from Ambrose McEvoy the Old Master technique of putting on fluid paint in layers, modifying the underlying colour (a green monochrome wash) with a series of semi-transparent glazes. But Edna found that this ‘was not the right medium for me’, and that ink and watercolour suited her best. Her talent had more in common with Augustus’s. ‘I wanted to draw
a subject quickly,’ she wrote, ‘seize it, convey my impression.’41 The aim of all these students on leaving the Slade was to have their pictures exhibited by the New English Art Club. Early in 1899 Gus and Edna, the two hares in the race, would be the first to get their work accepted. It was the beginning and almost the end of Edna’s artistic life. For, a few months earlier, on 22 December 1898, she became the first of this group of students to be married. William Clarke Hall was thirty-two, Edna nineteen: a confused Victorian adolescent bride desperately missing her artistic friends and feeling ‘in a shadow full of weight and strange lurking despair’.42

  Beside these women, according to Augustus, ‘the male students cut a poor figure.’ Chief among them was William Orpen, the son of an Irish solicitor, who arrived at the Slade in 1897 encrusted with prizes from the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. With his arrival, a new force made itself felt in Gower Street. It was the force, primarily, of tireless industry and ambition. Orpen was a gnome-like, slim and active figure, very popular with the other students. His high cheekbones were given prominence by sunken pale cheeks, light grey eyes, and thick brown unkempt hair. He wore a small blue serge jacket without lapels – of a type usually worn by engineers. In 1899, he was to win the Summer Composition Prize with his outstanding ‘The Play Scene in Hamlet’, which uses the open auditorium of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre to depict a rehearsal of Act III with diverse groups of figures, including Augustus embracing Ida Nettleship. But his father had by now had enough of his son’s painting and gave him the alternative of taking up some serious business or being cut off with a hundred pounds. Orpen took the hundred pounds and never looked back. There seemed nothing he could not accomplish. He was a devoted disciple of William Rothenstein, and after a successful proposal of marriage was to become his brother-in-law. Later, while in Ireland working as an art teacher, he met an American patron, a specimen comparatively rare before the transatlantic jet. This was the stylishly beautiful Mrs St George, who became his mistress and the guide to his successful professional career. ‘You are certainly the most wonderful thing that ever happened,’ he acknowledged.43