Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Augustus seems to have spent his short time in Paris looking at Rembrandt, Leonardo, Raphael and Velázquez. His sister also took him to meet Carmen, and together they visited Whistler in his studio, then at work on an immense self-portrait – a ghostly face set upon a body hardly discernible in the gloom. To explain her attendance at the Académie Carmen, Gwen had written home to say that she had won a scholarship there. By this imaginary triumph she may have hoped to reconcile Edwin to the notion of giving her a small allowance. But Edwin decided to do better than this – that was, to come and see for himself how she was getting along. His arrival probably accounted for Augustus’s quick departure from Paris. To welcome him, Gwen arranged a small supper party, putting on a new dress designed by herself from one in a picture by Manet – possibly his ‘Bar at the Folies Bergère’. ‘You look like a prostitute in that dress,’ Edwin greeted her: after which she decided she could never accept money from such a man. Despite this setback, she continued going to Whistler’s school and, in order to earn enough money, began posing as a model.

  Whistler’s teaching was a perfect corrective to that of Brown and Tonks at the Slade. Painting, not drawing, came first. ‘I do not teach art,’ Whistler declared, ‘ – I teach the scientific application of paint and brushes.’ In this laboratory atmosphere, to which Augustus never subjected himself, where students could paint in the dark if need be, Gwen developed her methodical technique ‘to a point of elaboration undreamt of by her Master’.79 It was a short period of vital importance in her career, though much of her work was done independently. ‘Gwen John is well and has not been lonely,’ Ida reported to her mother. ‘She has many more friends – one Alsatian girl [Mlle Marthe] whom we are painting in the mornings. Such a beauty she is.’80

  Breakfast-time in Cold Veal Street was given over to reading Shakespeare: King Lear and King John; while in the evening the three of them sometimes ate at an anarchists’ restaurant where grubbily dressed girls fetched their own food to avoid being waited upon. Between these times they painted. ‘Gwen S. and J. are painting me,’ Ida told her mother, ‘and we are all 3 painting Gwen John.’ Their life together, with all its excitements and difficulties, dedication and triviality is charmingly described in a letter of Ida’s to Michel Salaman:

  ‘We are having a very interesting time and working hard. I almost think I am beginning to paint – but I have not begun to really draw yet. We have a very excellent flat, and a charming studio room – so untidy – so unfurnished – and nice spots of drawings and photographs on the walls – half the wall is covered with brown paper, and when we have spare time and energy we are going to cover the other half… Gwen John is sitting before a mirror carefully posing herself. She has been at it for half an hour. It is for an “interior”. We all go suddenly daft with lovely pictures we can see or imagine, and want to do… We want to call Gwen John “Anne” – but have not the presence of mind or memory. And I should like to call Gwen Salmond Cynthia. These are merely ideals. As a matter of fact we are very unideal, and have most comically feminine rubs, at times; which make one feel like a washerwoman or something common. But as a whole it is a most promising time...’

  It came to an end early in 1899. Ida returned to Wigmore Street and Gwen John established herself in a cellar below the dressmakers and decorators of Howland Street. Augustus, who disapproved of most places in which his sister decided to live, tried to include her in some of the invitations he was now receiving and the following spring the two of them went down to stay at Pevril Tower, a boarding house which Mrs Everett had opened at Swanage. Suffering from conjunctivitis, Augustus could do little work; and Gwen too was listless, wandering along the cliffs by moonlight, catching fireflies and putting them in her hair and in Mrs Everett’s. ‘I have not done anything,’ she confessed to Michel Salaman. Most days she would go off into the country, through an old wood full of anemones and primroses to the sea three miles away – and plunge in. ‘The rocks are treacherous there, & the sea unfathomable,’ she wrote to Michel Salaman, ‘…but there is no delicious danger about it, so yesterday I sat on the edge of the rock to see what would happen – & a great wave came & rolled me over & over which was humiliating & very painful & then it washed me out to sea – & that was terrifying – but I was washed up again. Today the sky is low, everything is grey & covered in mist – it is a good day to paint – but I think of people.’81

  Augustus, too, seemed involved with people. Together with Orpen, Albert Rutherston and others, he had helped to organize a revolutionary campaign against the mosaic decorations of St Paul’s Cathedral by Sir William Richmond. During April and May he was busy dragooning students from all the art schools round London into meetings, trying to raise funds for the printing of notices and arranging for a public petition to be presented to the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral. ‘Sir William Richmond R.A. has for five years been decorating St Paul’s Cathedral and last year the mosaics were discovered to the Public,’ Albert Rutherston explained to his father. ‘The place has been utterly spoilt and looks now like a 2nd rate Café – it is a mass of glittering gold etc. – he has also had the cheek to cut away pieces of Wren’s sculpture and replace it by his own mosaics… Even Sir Edward Poynter P.R.A. has asked Richmond to stop his decorations.’*5

  The other excitement of these months was Augustus’s first one-man show at the Carfax Gallery in Ryder Street, off St James’s. This gallery had recently been opened by John Fothergill, a young painter, archaeologist and author, famous for his dandified clothes and later as a connoisseur of innkeeping.82 Robert Sickert, younger brother of Walter, acted as manager: and the choice of artists was left to William Rothenstein. Rodin, Conder, Orpen, Max Beerbohm all held exhibitions there as well as Rothenstein himself. By the spring of 1899 it was Augustus’s turn. ‘There is to be a show of my drawings at Carfax and Co.,’ he had written from Swanage to Michel Salaman. ‘I hope to Gaud I shan’t have all back on my hands. There is however not much fear of that as Carfax himself would probably annex them in consideration of the considerable sum advanced to me in the young and generous days of his debut.’ Singled out for praise by the didactic New English Art critic D. S. MacColl, the show was a success, earning Augustus another thirty pounds (equivalent to £l,600 in 1996).

  With this sum in his pocket he set off to join a large painting party at Vattetot-sur-Mer, a village near Étretat on the Normandy coast. William Rothenstein and his new wife, the former actress Alice ‘Kingsley’; his brother Albert Rutherston, now prophetically nicknamed ‘All but Rothenstein’; Orpen and his future wife (Alice Kingsley’s sister), Grace Knewstub, unfortunately known as ‘Newslut’; Arthur Clifton, the business manager of the Carfax Gallery, and his red-haired wife: all these Augustus knew already. But in Charles Conder he met a wistful, tentative, ailing man, his hair luxuriant but lifeless, a brown lock perpetually over one malicious blue eye, who admitted in an exhausted voice to being a little ‘gone at the knees’.

  Every morning the company rose at half-past seven, drank a cup of chocolate, and painted until eleven. Conder worked at his exquisite silk fans; Orpen was still labouring over his ‘Hamlet’ and making preliminary studies for his oil portrait of Augustus; Rothenstein painted ‘The Doll’s House’ in which Alice Rothenstein and Augustus posed on the little staircase leading up from the sitting-room;83 Augustus himself did no painting, but drew, mostly landscapes. ‘As for us,’ he wrote to Michel Salaman, ‘we grow more delighted with this place daily. The country is wonderfully fine in quality. In addition we have a charming model in the person of Mrs R’s sister [Grace] who serves to represent Man in relation to Nature. Orpen and I have been drawing with a certain industry, I think. Albert reads Balzac without cessation. Occasionally his brother drives him out into the fields with a stick but he returns in good time for the next meal with half a tree trunk gradated with straight lines to show.’

  Vattetot was a village of austere buildings with small windows and steeply pitched roofs set on the cliffs above Vaucott
es and shielded by double and triple lines of trees from the persistent winds. Farms and apple-orchards surrounded them, gentle hills and, along the coastline a quarter of a mile away, small shingle bays. Among the local farmers and fishermen the visitors attracted a good deal of notice. At eleven o’clock on most mornings, the colony would lay down brushes, make for the rocky cliffs, and dive into the breakers. Augustus was a fearless swimmer, crawling far out until he became a speck in the distance. ‘Albert and I were seduced by that old succubus the Sea – the other day,’ he wrote to Michel Salaman. ‘The waves were tremendous and the shore being very sloping there was a very great backwash – it required all our virtue to prevail in the struggle.’

  Conder preferred Orpen’s work, but everything Augustus did appealed to Rothenstein. His drawings proclaimed an amazing genius, his actions an incredible recklessness. One day he jumped into a bucket at the top of a deep well and went crashing down to the bottom. It was all that the others could do – Rothenstein perspiring with admiration among them – to haul him back to the surface. And when he sprinted, stark naked, along the beach, it seemed to Rothenstein, paddling and prawn-catching near by, that he had never seen so faun-like a figure. The coastguards, too, ogled these antics through their glasses, and all the more attentively when the girls undressed in a cave under the cliffs and raced through the waves. There was a threat of court action – but the pagan goings-on went on.

  ‘Under this discipline we all ripened steadily,’ Augustus recorded.84 In the evenings they sat, Orpen, little Albert and himself, in the café singing, smoking, drinking their calvados, and listening to Conder, a bottle of Pernod at his elbow, telling his muffled stories of nights with Toulouse-Lautrec and sinister experiences in Paris. He used these stories to hold his young friends late into the night, dreading to be alone. But Orpen would steal away early to get on with his work, while Augustus was always last to leave. Conder’s reliance on Pernod, which he used both as a drink and as a medium for his brush, sent tremors of apprehension through Augustus, and he told the Rothensteins that, in the event of his ever feeling tempted to drink, Conder’s example would be a powerful disincentive. As for calvados, that was rather different: he felt bound to use its quickening properties to draw nearer the soil and, by a kind of chemical magic, grow fruitful. Seeing the way things were going, Alice Rothenstein began to import quantities of restorative tea from England.

  Sometimes they would set off for long walks: to Fécamp, for the sake of the incomparable pâtisserie; to the little casino at Vaucottes, Conder always leading; to Étretat, a charming place with high cliffs at both ends of the promenade, full of smart people and mixed bathing (‘the women all wear black silk stockings with their bathing costumes’, Albert Rutherston reported); and to Yport, four miles away, where lived a tailor who decked Augustus out in a dazzling pale-blue corduroy suit with tight jacket and wide pegtop trousers. ‘He looks splendid,’ Orpen had reported to John Everett, ‘and is acting up to his clothes’ – much to the terror of Alice Rothenstein. Fearful that he or Conder would seduce her sister Grace, she decided to send her back to London in what she supposed to be the more harmless company of Orpen. Late at night, and chaperoned by the Rothensteins, they would all wander back from Yport along the beach, sometimes bathing again by moonlight: ‘wonderful days and wonderful nights these were,’ remembered Will Rothenstein,85 who had begun his honeymoon with hay fever and ended it with jaundice.

  In August, Orpen returned to complete his ‘Hamlet’ and Augustus travelled with him and Grace Knewstub as far as Paris. They stayed close to Montparnasse station, and the two painters spent their nights on the town, their days half-asleep in the Louvre. ‘It was so pleasant there,’ Augustus wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘I wish you had been with us to wander in the Louvre, after the hot sun and dazzling light outside to be in the cool sculpture galleries… I envy the sleeping Hermaphrodite its frozen passion, its marble self-sufficiency, its eternal languor.’

  Augustus’s own passions were sleepless. He returned to Vattetot and was soon addressing rhapsodies to Grace Knewstub’s chiffon scarf. ‘Seeing it round your neck and tinted with your blood, it was unto me even Beauty’s embellishment.’ But his drawing of Grace, done in his new etching style, was to be given with ‘unhesitating devotion’ to Orpen’s new young model Emile Scobel. ‘Mr Augustus is very well,’ Orpen reported to Michel Salaman on his return from France. ‘I left him with a lady! He was to come to the station to see me off (myself and Miss Knewstub) but did not turn up.’ Everything seemed to be going wrong for Orpen. He was using Augustus’s studio in Charlotte Street which had no gas stove. ‘When I return I’ll get a more presentable machine,’ Augustus assured him, ‘which will make the house sweet and render the studio an absolute trap for pretty girls.’ But Orpen was then more interested in his summer composition for the Slade. ‘My Hamlet would kill high morality,’ he wrote in another letter to Salaman that September, ‘ – Hamlet ought to be treated like a “Day of Judgement”. Miss John is settled in 122 Gower Street. She is a most beautiful lady! Miss Nettleship I have seen but she has not posed yet, to tell the truth I am afraid to ask her to take the pose as she has seen my Hamlet – I will wait till Gus comes back I think – Miss John says she would not take it.’

  Ida, however, agreed to take the pose which would involve her and Gus leaning together, with their arms round each other. Then Orpen fell ill. ‘The wretched Orpen has got jaundice or verdigris or something horrible,’ Augustus later told Ursula Tyrwhitt. According to Orpen his complaint was more complicated, and not unconnected with Augustus. ‘My illness [jaundice] has been very severe. I was not able to eat for nearly ten days, but everything has started going down now! – I am still yellow – I have also got some nasty animals on a certain portion of my body – Gus’s doing – Dog that he is – this is my judgement for Paris! Tell him not!’

  Augustus himself appeared wonderfully unaffected by these adventures, as if protected by unthinking innocence. ‘How he escaped getting the Ladies Fever we couldn’t make out,’ John Everett noted with irritation in his journal (1899). ‘Tonks used to say it must be his natural dirt.’

  At the end of September, Augustus, Conder, Alice and the convalescent Will left for Paris where, over the next ten days, they fell in with that ‘distinguished reprobate’ Oscar Wilde. Wilde had recently been released from prison and was living in a small hotel on the Left Bank. Though appreciative of him as ‘a great man of inaction’ and a ‘big and good-natured fellow with an enormous sense of fun, impeccable bad taste, and a deeply religious apprehension of the Devil’,86 Augustus felt embarrassed by his elaborate performances of wit, not knowing how to respond. ‘I could think of nothing whatever to say. Even my laughter sounded hollow.’ Despite this, Wilde seems to have been much taken with ‘the charming Celtish poet in colour’,87 as he described Augustus. Alice Rothenstein, noticing this friendliness, grew unexpectedly fearful for his reputation and hurried Augustus along to the hairdresser. Next day Oscar looked grave. ‘You should have consulted me’, he said, laying a hand reproachfully on Augustus’s shoulder, ‘before taking this important step.’

  Stifled by these long unspontaneous lunches at the Café de la Régence and the Café Procope, Augustus was on the lookout to escape with Conder and find ‘easier if less distinguished company’. The two of them would go off ‘whoring’, as Conder called it, visiting a succession of boîtes de nuit in Montmartre until the first pale gleams of the Parisian dawn showed in the sky, and each with a companion went his way. Once again much of the waking and sleeping day was spent in the Louvre, of which Augustus never seemed to tire. ‘Imagine,’ he wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘we were on the top of the Louvre yesterday! On the roof, and grapes and flowers are there. The prospect was wonderful – Paris at one’s feet!’

  Two painters made a special impression on him. The first was Honoré Daumier who ‘reinforced with immense authority the lesson he had begun to learn from Rembrandt, of seeing broadly and simply, and who ta
ught him to interpret human personality boldly, without fearing to pass, if need be, the arbitrary line commonly held to divide objective representation from caricature’.88 The second was Puvis de Chavannes whose pictures of an idealized humanity and the relationship between figures and landscape were to be a lifelong inspiration to him.

  After he had spent his money from the Carfax exhibition, Augustus borrowed twenty pounds from Michel Salaman with the intention of travelling back via Brussels and Antwerp. But the life in Montmartre held him until his last pound note was gone. ‘I’ve had a fantastic time here,’ he told Ursula Tyrwhitt (October 1899) ‘ – we spent all our money and can’t go to Belgium so we’re off home tonight.’

  6

  …INTO ‘MORAL LIVING’

  ‘I have no ability for affairs.’

  Augustus John to Michel Salaman (1902)

  The legend that was sown when Augustus dived on to a rock at the age of seventeen had by now bloomed. Only after he left the Slade, and the exterior discipline of Tonks and Brown had been removed, did he, in Michel Salaman’s words, ‘kick over the traces’. This transformation particularly astonished John Everett,89 who had met Augustus in October 1896, shared 21 Fitzroy Street with him during part of 1897, and who had left England for a year at sea in 1898. On his return to London in 1899 the first person he met was Orpen, who eagerly apprised him of all the scandalous things Augustus was up to: how he went pub-crawling and got gloriously drunk; how he knew a prostitute who would always go back to him if she could not pick up anyone in the streets; how he had careered all over the flowerbeds in Hyde Park with the police in hot pursuit – and other marvels. Remembering his companion of two or three years ago – ‘a poor physical specimen [who] never played any games… a very quiet boy, a great reader, a studious youth’ who avoided all the organized rags and tugs-of-war and was thought by some to be ‘a nonentity’ – Everett was nonplussed. ‘If you had told me that of any man at the Slade I’d have believed you,’ he replied to Orpen. ‘But not John.’