Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  There was nothing inimical in Augustus’s work to Sickert’s London Impressionists whose pursuit was ‘life’ and whose object was to draw it feverishly, Quentin Bell has explained, ‘capturing at high speed the essentials of the situation’.5 Between Sickert and himself there developed a respect tinged with irony. Sickert was amused by Augustus’s moody character. ‘I am proud to say’, he boasted, ‘that I once succeeded in bringing a smile to the somewhat difficult lips of Mr Augustus John.’6 Yet he saw the value of his work, describing him as ‘the first draughtsman that we have… the most sure and able of our portrait painters’.7 And in the New Age he paid generous tribute to Augustus’s ‘intensity and virtuosity [which] have endued his peculiar world of women, half gypsy, half model, with a life of their own. But his whole make-up is personal to himself, and the last thing a wary young man had better do is to imitate John… [he is] incessantly provisioning himself from the inexhaustible and comfortable cupboard of nature.’8

  Perversely, Augustus dismissed Sickert’s writings as ‘elegant drivel’.9 Though he liked Sickert’s work, he felt impatience with his aesthetic intrigues. Augustus seldom interested himself in art politics. While other painters held stormy meetings about New Rules and Old Prejudices, the only record of Augustus intercepting their discussions is in the spring of 1903 when, so Orpen told Conder (2 May 1903), he ‘demanded to know why after accepting Miss Gwendolen John’s pictures – they [the NEAC Committee] had not hung them. But alas this question was out of order...’10

  But Gwen was thankful to be free of the New English. ‘I think I can paint better than I used – I know I can,’ she told Ursula Tyrwhitt (8 July 1904); ‘it has been such a help not to think of the N.E.A.C. – and not to hurry over something to get it in – I shall never do anything for an exhibition again – but when the exhibitions come round send anything I happen to have.’

  Gwen finally ceased showing her pictures at the club in the winter of 1911. ‘I paint a good deal,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson after the last show (5 December 1911), ‘but I don’t often get a picture done – that requires, for me, a very long time of a quiet mind, and never to think of exhibitions.’

  Augustus continued regularly showing his work at the NEAC until the large Retrospective Exhibition of 1925, and intermittently afterwards.*1 His attitude to the New English was the same as his attitude would be to the Royal Academy. ‘Over here paltry little clubs & exhibitions agitate the artistic climate,’ he wrote to Gwen in 1904. As for the Royal Academy, it was unthinkable that he would ever belong to an institution whose shows were simply ‘a vast collection of wrong-minded stuff. Sargent, who had joined the Royal Academy in 1897, was he told Gwen, ‘the cleverest of the spoilers, moilers & toilers [who] with infallible judgement leaves out everything that makes a face interesting. His art is merely “the glass of fashion” but hardly “the mould of form”.’

  Augustus envied Gwen’s quiet as opposed to his own agitated atmosphere. He wanted her to be recognized and he worried about her neglect, over which he sometimes felt odd sensations of responsibility. But she was almost impossible to help either with gifts of money, which put her awkwardly in his debt, or with offers to manage exhibitions on her behalf, which troubled her as much as the exhibitions themselves. His moods of responsibility came and went, and she was affected both by their coming and their going.

  And he was affected by Gwen’s tenuous self-sufficiency. Her attitude, if he could have attained it, would surely have furthered his own talent. But with such a lifestyle, such an entourage, he could never afford it. For she, in her prison-like rooms, was comparatively free; while he, restlessly patrolling here and darting somewhere else, would be encumbered by the claims of voluminous and irregular families.

  2

  LIVERPOOL SHEDS AND ROMANY FLOTSAM

  ‘I become more rebellious in Liverpool.’

  Augustus John to Alice Rothenstein (December 1905)

  ‘We have taken the most convenient flat imaginable in Fitzroy Street,’ Augustus wrote to his sister Winifred a few days after his marriage. ‘It has an excellent studio. The whole most cheap.’

  By the time they returned from their honeymoon at Swanage, this flat – three rooms and a huge studio in the top part of 18 Fitzroy Street – had been redecorated and stood ready for them. But no sooner had they got there than Ida fell ill with the Swanage complaint – measles – and returned to Wigmore Street, leaving Augustus alone. It was not a good omen.

  Money was now their chief worry. Well though Augustus’s work had sold at his exhibitions, it was not admired by everyone and could scarcely earn him enough to keep a wife, let alone children. He applied for a British Institute scholarship but did not get one. Then, that February 1901, shortly after Ida returned, a new opportunity for making a living suddenly presented itself. Albert Rutherston, having staggered round to deliver his wedding present of a kitchen table, reported that ‘there is just a chance of John going to Liverpool for a year to act as Professor in the school of art there during the absence of the present one – it would be very nice for him as he will get a studio free and at least £300 or £400 [equivalent to £15,500–£20,500 in 1996] for the year.’

  What had happened was that Herbert Jackson, the art instructor at the art school affiliated to University College, Liverpool, had gone off to the Boer War. When asked to recommend someone temporarily to fill his place, D. S. MacColl had put Augustus’s name forward;11 and, since there was no time to be lost, his proposal was at once accepted.

  Augustus arrived in Liverpool late that winter, ‘a heartening sight’, one student recalled, ‘…striding across the drab quad to the studios in his grey fisherman’s jersey and with golden rings*2 in his ears’.12 The university staff were rather flustered by this spectacle, enhanced by the beard, long hair and large magnetic eyes, and by the sonorous voice with which he sang his repertoire of ballads romantic and bawdy – rollicking songs from the old troubadours and suggestive ones imported from Parisian cabarets, little verses from Villon and whining cockney limericks with their cringing refrain:

  ‘I’m a man as done wrong to my paryents’.

  ‘Liverpool is a most gorgeous place,’ Augustus immediately wrote to Michel Salaman. He had been warned that it was an ugly city but he did not find it ugly. It enthralled him. Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it had been rising from a ‘black hole’ as Nathaniel Hawthorne, the US Consul there in the 1850s, called it, into a prosperous and dignified Victorian trading city. Its prosperity depended upon its port, one of the largest in the world, which made it a cosmopolitan meeting place ‘full of European enclaves and strange languages, while the steamships and sailing barques brought sailors’ stories, rhymes and riddles from all over the world’.13

  Lytton Strachey, who left the university a few months before Augustus John arrived there, had recoiled from the groups of starving children, drunken sailors, beggars with their dingy barrel organs, that infested the stinking slum streets and tenements that lay behind and around Liverpool’s grand façade. The crowds at the docks were ‘appalling’, he noted, and ‘all hideous. It gave me the shivers and in ten minutes I fled.’14 But Augustus revelled in this spectacle of human diversity: the knife grinders, umbrella makers, ship owners, Celtic scholars, soap kings. The only place that gave him the shivers was the Walker Art Gallery – ‘a stinking hole’15 he called it in a letter to Michel Salaman.

  ‘The docks are wondrous,’ Augustus was soon writing to Will Rothenstein. ‘The college is quite young, so are its professors and they are very anxious to make it an independent seat of learning… The town is full of Germans, Jews, Welsh and Irish and Dutch.’ Everything seemed to delight him. Whatever was new appeared exciting – and there was much that was new to him, much that smelt of adventure here. He explored the sombre district of the Merseyside with its migrant population of Scandinavians on their way to the New World, and reported to Alice Rothenstein, ‘the Mersey is grand – vast – in a golden haze – a mist of lo
ve in the great blue eye of heaven.’ He nosed around the Goree Piazza, still faintly reeking of the slave trade; he reconnoitred the Chinese Quarter off Pitt Street and Upper Frederick Street, with its whiff of opium, and looked in on the lodging houses of the tinkers round Scotland Road. Even the art school – a collection of wooden sheds on Brownlow Hill – appealed to him. ‘It is amusing teaching,’ he told Will Rothenstein.

  Over the first few weeks he and Ida put up at 9 St James’s Street, and it was here that Augustus’s one complaint lay. ‘It has been impossible to do much work yet – living as a guest in somebody’s house – a great bore.’ He was hungry for work, especially since there was soon to be another show of his pictures at the Carfax Gallery. But already by April they had found ‘very good rooms’, he reported, ‘in the house of an absent-minded and charming Professor, one Mackay’.

  ‘Some of the College professors are charming men,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman. John MacDonald Mackay, Rathbone Professor of Ancient History, was ‘the leading spirit of the College’, he assured Will Rothenstein shortly after moving to his house at 4 St James’s Road. ‘He avoids coming to the practical point most tenaciously – when arranging about taking these rooms he refused to consider terms but referred us to the Swedish Consul – who was extremely surprised when Ida spoke to him on the subject.’

  Mackay combined two qualities that appealed to Augustus’s divided nature: comedy and idealism. With his right hand raised, half to his audience, half to the sky visible through the window, a faraway look in his eyes, he would discourse in a weird moustachioed chant, interrupting himself with bursts of sing-song laughter or rhetorical indignation, often abandoning the line of his argument, yet always struggling back to First Principles. Within the chemistry of his strange, broken-back eloquence, Liverpool was transformed into a new Athens destined to save the country from materialism by the luminescence of its thought, the excellence of its work, the beauty of its art and architecture. Whatever nominal positions others may have held, Mackay was the patron of the university while Augustus lived there.

  Mackay was important to Augustus in two respects. First, he became the subject of one of his strongest portraits. He had a magnificent head, with fair unkempt hair, a powerful jaw and square chin, and the broad shoulders and torso of someone altogether larger. Augustus’s ‘official’ portrait – a three-quarter view of him decked out in his red academic robes – catches the spiritual energy of the man.16

  Secondly, he introduced Augustus and Ida to people whom, in their peculiar shyness, they might otherwise never have known. A number of these Augustus drew and painted, and a few became close friends. ‘We are to dine with the Dowdalls on Friday which I dread,’ Ida wrote to her mother. ‘They are very nice, but I would rather hide.’ A little later she is writing: ‘We had a nice little dinner with the Dowdalls on Saturday. He is a lawyer, I think, with a taste for painting – and he has a little auburn-haired wife who spends most of her time being painted by different people. Gus is to draw Dowdall’s mother.’

  Harold Chaloner Dowdall, later to become a County Court judge and, as Lord Mayor of Liverpool, the subject of one of Augustus’s most controversial portraits, was a pompous good-natured barrister, very loyal to the Johns but with a tendency to dilate, perhaps for an entire day, on the extreme freshness of that morning’s eggs at breakfast. His wife Mary, nicknamed ‘the Rani’, was ‘the most charming and entertaining character in Liverpool’, Augustus asserted. She soon became Ida’s most devoted confidante. ‘The Rani has beautiful browny-red hair and is quite exceptional, and reminds me of the grass and the smell of the earth,’ Ida wrote. As always with those she admired, she likened the Rani to an animal in its natural surroundings. ‘Certainly you belong to the woods and where creatures start and hide away at any alien sound.’

  As the daughter of Lord Borthwick, the Hon. Mrs Dowdall was Liverpool’s aristocrat. But she shocked Liverpool society dreadfully. Respectable people were put out by her habit of walking barefoot through the mud – ‘the gentle stimulant of cold mud welling between one’s toes is a clarifier of thought’, she informed them, ‘after a day’s perfect irresponsibility’. They were dismayed when, at the fashionable hour, she was to be seen swinging her stockingless legs from the back of a gypsy caravan trundling down Bold Street. They disliked her involvement with the repertory theatre which gave theatrical performances on Good Friday, her frequent modelling for dubious artists such as Charles Shannon, her awful wit, her sheer attractiveness, her unaccountable failure to take Liverpool society seriously. Above all, Liverpool was appalled by the books she wrote – novels they were, with such titles as Three Loving Ladies and, most notoriously, The Book of Martha, which, embellished with a frontispiece by Augustus, dealt with tradesmen and servants. She was also the author of Joking Apart, and her jokes, delivered in the mock-magisterial tones of her husband, were introduced by: ‘All virgins will kindly leave the Court.’ No wonder she emptied the drawing-rooms of Edwardian Liverpool.

  Augustus’s contacts with the university staff were not pushed to extremes, but among the exceptions were the Professor of Modern Literature, Walter Raleigh, who abashed him with his early morning brilliance – ‘he shone even at breakfast!’17 – Charles Bonnier, the French professor, a victim to the theory and practice of pointillisme, who ‘has been producing a most astoundingly horrible marmalade of spots yellow, purple, blue and green in my studio’;18 and Herbert MacNair, Instructor in Design and Stained Glass, a lusty bicyclist who, in later life, became a postman. He and his wife Frances, working in perfect unison, involved themselves with a peculiar form of art nouveau, producing, to Augustus’s dismay, friezes of quaint mermaids designed after the MacNair crest, staircases encrusted in sheet lead, lamps of fancifully twisted wrought iron, symbolic watercolours on vellum, embroideries depicting bulbous gnomes and fairies prettily arranged, and as their pièce de résistance a burly door-knocker 18 inches long, the delight of small boys who used it ‘to keep themselves in constant touch with the most advanced Art movement’, Augustus told Will Rothenstein. ‘…Between them [they] have produced one baby [Sylvan] and a multitude of spooks – their drawing-room is very creepy and the dinner-table was illuminated with two rows of nightlights in a lantern of the “MacNair” pattern...’

  By far the most valuable new friend Augustus made was the university Librarian, John Sampson. A portly man, almost twice Augustus’s age, Sampson was ponderous in his manner but at heart a poet, a romantic and a rebel. His influence on Augustus over the next two years was to change his life. The two men met in the late spring of 1901 and struck up an immediate friendship.

  Sampson was almost pedantically self-taught. He had left school at fourteen, been apprenticed to a lithographer and engraver in Liverpool, read literature at night and, having learnt the aesthetic disciplines of typography and design, set up a small business as printer in the Liverpool Corn Exchange. He had ambitions to become an artist – ambitions which Augustus quickly quelled. But his abiding passion was the pursuit of lost languages, the unknown vocabularies and grammars of ancient mother tongues still miraculously to be heard across woods and fields and mountainsides in the heart of Wales. These fugitive words – ‘ablatives or adverbs or queer things of that sort’ – spread through him an extraordinary pleasure, especially when their curators turned out to be those ‘exasperating lovely creatures’, the gypsy girls; for ‘man does not live by philology alone.’ Sampson seemed to regard the rhyming slang and ‘flying cant’, the beautiful grand syllables of forgotten tongues, as orchestrated clues to some treasure. It was, he later said, ‘like finding a tribe of organ-grinders who among themselves spoke Ciceronian Latin’. He particularly relished the challenge of locating Shelta, the obscure uncorrupted jargon in which the tinkers communicated their secret messages, tracking it down ‘from one squalid lodging house and thieves’ kitchen to another’.19 His search had led him to a great Celtic scholar from Leipzig, Kuno Meyer, then teaching German at University College, Liv
erpool. It was through Meyer’s influence that Sampson was appointed the first Librarian at the university.

  There was much in the huge and gentle figure of Sampson for Augustus to admire: the sardonic humour, the irresistible lure of the fields and hills, the vast accumulation of odd knowledge. ‘You are a learned man,’ Walter Raleigh wrote to Sampson (16 July 1908), ‘and a rogue, one of the sort of fellows who think they can conduct the business of life on inspirationist principles, and who run an office pretty well much the same way as they make love to a woman.’20 He was said to write seventy-seven love letters a year, and looked a commanding figure as he strode through the streets of Liverpool in his old velvet jacket, disgracefully baggy trousers, with his muff and gin bottle and a battered slouch hat set at an angle, his chest thrust out, legs moving powerfully. He knew how to drink, was a great smoker, liked reading Romany poems amid clouds of strong tobacco smoke. ‘A heavy figure with a florid countenance’, Geoffrey Keynes remembered him, ‘hunched in an armchair at a great desk covered with papers, a gold-rimmed pince-nez dripping off his nose over a wide waistcoat scattered with portions of food...’21 Despite his intimidating scholarship, a rather overbearing manner and fierce temper, there was something lovable about him: a gentleness in his voice and much boyish ardour. He was followed everywhere by devoted women with exotic names – Damaris, Doonie, Kish – who dedicated themselves to him and his work.

  ‘The majestic Sampson’ reminded Augustus of ‘a magnificent ship on a swelling sea’. His chief influence in the first year or two of their friendship lay in the refreshing new model of married life he presented. Augustus was fearful of domesticity; the long dark imprisonment of wedlock filled him with unease. Sampson, though never indiscreet, showed him a freer, more open-air version of marriage. Seven years ago he had married a pretty Scottish girl, Meg Sprunt, much younger than himself and famed for her flying hair. Now they had two sons and a daughter. ‘I really must abandon these casual wandering ways now that I am a husband and parent,’ Sampson admitted. But he could not help slipping off for a day or a week to the favoured camping places of the travellers, gazing at their long black hair glittering with gold coins, their fields ablaze with quilts and tents. He would sit eating the delicious otchi-witches (hedgehogs) and listen in ecstasy to their riddles, folk-tales and songs played on harps and on fiddles improvised from an ashplant and a few hairs from the tail of a horse. To hear the lovely words, the marvellous rising sounds of their language, became a linguistic passion for Sampson, guiding him to happiness or to madness – perhaps both. His face lit up, he was overcome by an immense emotion. ‘Did you hear him use the ablative – how perfectly beautiful!’ He was a very perfect Rai (gentleman scholar): ‘the large and rolling Rai’, Augustus called him, or ‘Rai of Rai’s’ as he was known in wild places beyond the university.