Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Augustus had hoped by this time to sell the Chelsea Art School to a Mrs Flower, ‘a remarkable woman’ and a cousin of Ida’s, so that he could spend more time in Paris. ‘The school has been very successful so far – I mean the first year was remarkably so – we have almost paid off our debts,’ he wrote invitingly to Michel Salaman. ‘No doubt there is a veritable goldmine in it, but the process of digging is long & tedious. Having prospected so successfully both Orpen & I would be happy to retire with all the glory & leave the yellow dirt for others to grab. We have the school with its lavish appurtenances, its golden prospects and a nucleus of brilliant pupils complete for sale & for a mere song.’40

  Augustus hoped that Michel Salaman might hurry along the negotiations, but it was not until the summer of 1907 that they completed the sale. The delay did not please Orpen and irritated Augustus, who continued to be bound to the school, though ‘only morally bound’, he explained. In fact he was wonderfully neglectful after the first year. ‘I hope the school will go on merrily,’ he wrote cheerfully to Orpen in 1906. ‘I thought it had stopped long ago.’41 But Orpen too had been away, in Dublin. He did not like to be connected with something that might turn out to be a failure. Their gold-mine was tiresome for both of them. ‘I am sick of the school and tired of Orpen,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia (1906). ‘…I think of chucking it – even if I have to pay off debts.’

  That he did continue teaching at Rossetti Studios was partly due to an exciting new development early that winter. This was the acquisition of a gallery next to Chelsea Town Hall in the King’s Road. Orpen, who largely financed it at the start, persuaded Knewstub to open the Chenil Gallery, as it was called – a small town house ideally suited, Knewstub saw, for accommodating his cultural dreams. Downstairs were two small rooms: one he converted into a ‘shop’ selling canvases, paints and all manner of artist’s equipment; the other he established as an etching-press room for artists wishing to print from or prove their own plates. Upstairs there were two exhibition rooms, one of which held a permanent collection of work by the regular platoon of Chenil painters: Ambrose and Mary McEvoy, David Muirhead, William Nicholson, James Pryde, Orpen and Augustus himself. At the back was a large studio which Augustus was often to use in the years to come.

  The first one-man show at the new gallery, in May 1906, was of etchings by Augustus, and this stimulated continuous work over the early months of this year. ‘I have to spend days seeing to my etchings,’ he explained to the pregnant Dorelia as the weeks passed and still he did not return to Paris, ‘ – a man has ordered a complete set. I find to my astonishment I have done about 100.’ This man was the art historian Campbell Dodgson who, on 20 February 1906, had written to Will Rothenstein asking him to approach Augustus and find out whether he would let the British Museum (for which Dodgson worked) have a selection of his etchings and drawings. Rothenstein put Dodgson directly in touch with Augustus and a week later they met. ‘I went to see John yesterday and looked through his etchings which interest me very much,’ Dodgson reported to Rothenstein (28 February 1906). ‘He is quite willing to give me specimens of his drawings hesitating only on the grounds that he hopes to do better, and would not like us to have things that he hopes to tear up some years hence; but there is not much fear of such a fate befalling certain things that I saw yesterday and would like to secure. But [Sidney] Colvin will go himself in a few days and settle the matter.’42

  Once his initial interest in the plates had passed, Augustus was often careless about their preservation, allowing them to be scratched, battered and corroded by verdigris. So when Knewstub stepped forward to rescue these plates from further harm, and superintend their printing and publication in the catalogue of the coming exhibition, he found himself confronted by a vast salvage operation. He cleaned, he scraped, he searched, and as many plates as he could find (whether in sufficiently good condition to yield editions, or so badly treated that they had to be destroyed) he took over and numbered, together with all such early proofs as he could discover in Augustus’s studio.

  The Chenil exhibition ‘far exceeded what I expected’, Augustus told Charles Rutherston.43 He would continue his experiments with needle and copper for another three years, though on a gradually diminishing scale. After 1910 he produced only half a dozen or so more etchings – a small group of portrait studies of a girl’s head; a head of John Hope-Johnstone recovering from measles; and two self-portraits. His later work shows an advance from the sometimes rather laboured earlier efforts, with their ample use of dry-point, to the pure etched line of his most successful plates. But the medium was too slow, too small. The paraphernalia of needles and plates, of nitric and sulphuric acid, which had captured his interest at first, eventually fatigued him. He wanted to try something new.

  *

  Augustus’s treatment of his copperplates was similar to the way he treated his friendships. He liked to keep an army of acquaintances in reserve, upon any number of which he could call when the mood was on him. He wanted fair-weather friends; he wanted them to be, like some fire brigade, in permanent readiness for his calls; and he enjoyed summoning them fitfully. Among the etchings at the Chenil Gallery were several portraits of friends who had already sped out of his life: Benjamin Evans, who had shot down the drain;44 Ursula Tyrwhitt and Esther Cerutti, who had been outshone by later models. There were others, too, of whom he saw only little these days. Michel Salaman, who had graduated from art student into fox-hunting squire; ‘little Albert’ Rutherston, already partially eclipsed by little Will Rothenstein; the monkey-like Orpen, who had grown curiously attached to a gorilla in the Dublin zoo – ‘perhaps the only serious love affair in his life’;45 and Conder, who in June 1906 had become so ill he was forced to relinquish painting.

  There were two motives behind all Augustus’s friendships: inspiration and entertainment. Either they stimulated him when at work, or they induced self-forgetfulness in the intervals between working. But none of them could live up to his veering needs. He knew this and mocked himself for it. ‘I am in love with a new man,’ he told Dorelia on 16 March 1906, ‘Egmont Hake – a bright gem!’ Such mysterious gems – and there were many of them – would glitter for a day and then be lost for ever. His most consistent relationships were those which were held together by humour or, more simply, renewed by imaginative periods of absence. He welcomed the retreating back, the cheerful goodbye, the disappearing companion whose tactful vanishing trick saved in the nick of time their comradeship from the terrible contempt that grew with familiarity. He relished people such as John Sampson, whom he could abandon ‘in the Euston Road while he was immobilized under the hands of a shoe-black’, and then meet again, their feelings charged with nostalgia; and of course Gwen, for whom, though she could not work under her brother’s shadow, he continued to feel admiration shot through with exasperated concern.

  What Gwen had known about Gus, others, such as Wyndham Lewis, were beginning to discover for themselves. ‘I want also to do some painting very badly, and can’t do so near John,’ Lewis complained to his mother (1906). ‘…Near John I can never paint, since his artistic personality is just too strong, and he [is] much more developed, naturally, and this frustrates any effort.’46 Partly because of this frustration, Lewis turned to his writing, being known by Augustus as ‘the Poet’ because he had produced, in next to no time, ‘thirty sonnettes’, some of them as good as Baudelaire’s. Now that Augustus was jostling between Paris and London, he was able to see far more of Lewis, then on the move between England, France and Germany while brewing up his Dostoevskyan cocktail of a novel, Tarr. They would go off to nightclubs together, or sit drinking and talking at the Brasserie Dumesnil in the rue Dareau, recommended by Sickert for its excellent sauerkraut. ‘Not that I find him absolutely indispensable,’ Augustus conceded, ‘but at times I love to talk with him about Shelley or somebody.’47 Lewis himself preferred to talk about Apaches and ‘to frighten young people’ with tales of these Parisian gangsters. But what chiefly amused A
ugustus were Lewis’s ‘matrimonial projects’ which formed part of his material for Tarr. If the artist, Lewis seems to argue, finds much in his work that other men seek in women, then it follows that he must be particularly discriminating in his love affairs, and scrupulously avoid sentimentality and all other false trails that lead him away from reality. It was a theme nicely attuned to Augustus’s own predicament. ‘I am like a noble, untaught and untainted savage who, embracing with fearful enthusiasm the newly arrived Bottle, Bible and Whore of civilization, contracts at once with horrible violence their apoplectic corollary, the Paralysis, the Hypocrisy and the Pox,’ he wrote. ‘…So far I have been marvellously immune.’

  Lewis’s immunity appeared even stronger. Prudence, suspicion and an aggressive shyness ringed him about like some fortress from which he seldom escaped. ‘Lewis announced last night that he was loved!’ Augustus reported to one of their model-friends, Alick Schepeler.

  ‘At last! It seems he had observed a demoiselle in a restaurant who whenever he regarded her sucked her cheeks in slightly and looked embarrassed. The glorious fact was patent then – l’amour! He means to follow this up like a bloodhound. In the meanwhile however he has gone to Rouen for a week to see his mother, which in my opinion is not good generalship. He has a delightful notion – I am to get a set of young ladies during the summer as pupils and of course he will figure in the company and possibly be able to make love to one of them.’

  But when not in the vein to be amused by Lewis’s eccentricities, Augustus would quickly get needled. It was almost as if his own easy romanticism was being caricatured. ‘The poet irritates me,’ he admitted, ‘he is always asking for petits suisses which are unheard of in this country and his prudence is boundless.’ The conclusion was obvious. ‘What a mistake it is to have a friend – or, having one, ever to see him.’

  The trouble was that Augustus could not be alone for long. Without an audience he disappeared. The dark interiors of the pubs and cafés were like wombs from which he could be reborn. He would saunter in as if on the spur of the moment, choose his companion for an hour or two, a Juliet for a night: then it was over and he could be someone else. Such encounters, with no hangover of duty, were marvellously invigorating. If friends were God’s apology for families, it surely followed they should be as unlike one’s own family as possible. But perfection could not be found in any single man, for perfection must suit all weathers. ‘I cannot find my man,’ he told Alick Schepeler, ‘ – hence I have to piece him together out of half a dozen – as best I can.’

  Upon the construction of this composite friend Augustus spent much haphazard energy. A little less McEvoy, for example, was quickly balanced by more Epstein and the introduction of a new artist into his life, Henry Lamb. In his correspondence, Augustus sometimes has fun with Epstein. ‘Epstein called yesterday and I went back with him to see his figure which is nearly done,’ he wrote to Dorelia in 1907. ‘It is a monstrous thing – but of course it has its merits – he has now a baby to do. The scotch girl [Margaret Dunlop] was here – she is the one who poses for the mother – he might at least have got a real mother for his “Maternity”. He is going about borrowing babies. He suggested sending the group to the N.E.A.C.!! Imagine Tonks’ horror and Steer’s stupefaction!’

  Augustus did some good etchings of Epstein. Most striking of all is a red-pencil drawing which Epstein himself much liked. By using the point of a very hard pencil Augustus gives this portrait a taut quality, a tightness of face and mouth indicating both intellect and temperamental force. The rhetorical pose of the head bends a little to the romantic conception of genius, but the drawing48 also emphasizes the ‘closed to criticism’ nature of Epstein’s personality.

  He had much criticism to close his mind to. The ‘monstrous thing’ Epstein was working on in his studio in Cheyne Walk early in 1907 was almost certainly one of the eighteen figures, representing man and woman in their various stages between birth and death, that were to embellish the new British Medical Association building in the Strand. These figures, mostly nudes, caused much outrage when, in the spring of 1908, they were first thrust upon the public gaze. ‘They are a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see,’ one newspaper informed its readers.49 Other experts, including clergymen, policemen, dustmen and the Secretary of the Vigilance Society, were soon adding their voices to this vituperative hymn. The statues were ‘rude’; they exerted a ‘demoralizing tendency’ and constituted ‘a gross offence’. In short, they would ‘convert London into a Fiji Island’. Who could doubt that these objects must become a focus for unwholesome talk, a meeting place for all the unchaste in the land?

  Many artists defended Epstein. But Augustus, who privately did much to help him,50 saw clearly that artistic support was irrelevant to moral indignation and would never impress the public. ‘Epstein’s work must be defended by recognised moral experts,’ he wrote to the art critic Robert Ross. ‘The Art question is not raised. Of course they would stand the moral test as triumphantly as the artistic, or even more if possible. Do you know of an intelligent Bishop for example? To-morrow there is a meeting to decide whether the figures are to be destroyed or not. Much the best figures are behind the hoarding which they refuse to take down. Meanwhile Epstein is in debt and unable to pay the workmen.’

  Augustus’s advice was quickly taken up, and the Bishop of Stepney, Cosmo Gordon Lang, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was persuaded to mount the ladders to the scaffolding, from where he inspected the figures intimately and, on descending, declared himself unshocked. His imperturbability did much to reassure the British public and soothe the Council of the British Medical Association, which instructed work to proceed.

  Though Augustus admired Epstein’s sculpture, he was impatient with some aspects of his personality and shocked to discover that this milk-drinker from America excelled in blowing his own trumpet.51 ‘I hope Epstein will find his wife a powerful reinforcement in his studio,’ Augustus wrote to Will Rothenstein (19 September 1906) on learning of the sculptor’s engagement to Margaret Dunlop. ‘Perhaps she will coax him out of some of his unduly democratic habits.’ As proud and touchy as Augustus was truculent, Epstein appeared determined to attract hostility. Augustus was able to oblige him here, and their friendship was often blown on the rocks.

  But in these early days they got on well enough. Augustus’s extravagance in the middle of so much polite good taste was refreshing to Epstein, and he admired Augustus’s skill. Besides, Epstein needed encouragement and Augustus could afford to give it. Often they would be joined by McEvoy in whose gentle company neither felt disposed to quarrel. Epstein also dropped round at the Chelsea Art School where he posed as a model for a shilling an hour, and afterwards there would be black periods of silence as he and Augustus leant against one of its walls: then a remark from Epstein – ‘At least you will admit that Wagner was a heaven-storming genius.’ Finally from Augustus an ambivalent grunt.

  A witness to these exchanges, and much impressed by them, was Henry Lamb. Lamb had recently thrown up his medical studies in Manchester and, in a desperate bid to become an artist, turned up in London with an alluring wild girl called Nina Forrest whom, after Mantegna’s Saint, he rechristened ‘Euphemia’. While Lamb trained himself as an artist, Euphemia became an artist’s model and was soon posing for Epstein. She had a natural sense of theatre, and drama perpetually hovered in the air around her. She was also ‘a great romancer’ and would grow famous for her amorous anecdotes. How interesting ‘impure women are to the pure’, Virginia Woolf later meditated over her. ‘I see her as someone in mid-ocean, struggling, diving, while I pace my bank.’52 Early in 1906 Euphemia discovered she was pregnant and, on 10 May, Henry and she were married at the Chelsea Register Office with Augustus as one of their two witnesses – shortly after which she appears to have had a miscarriage.

  For the time being Augustus was no more than a witness to Euphemia’s romances, but h
e involved himself quite seriously in Henry’s career. While Euphemia somehow seemed ‘always well supplied with money’, Henry was impecunious. Arriving in London with a modest stipend and working intermittently as an illustrator for the Manchester Guardian, he enrolled at the Chelsea Art School at the beginning of 1906 and would sometimes sleep there on the model’s throne. On coming in at night he would find a fresh cartoon done by Augustus during the evening – large works of many almost life-size figures that dazzled him. Occasionally Augustus, in his rumbling voice, would brood on these compositions: ‘I think of taking out that figure and introducing a waterfall.’ Lamb, wide-eyed, felt himself to be in the incalculable presence of genius.

  Bernard Leach, the potter, remembered Lamb’s first day at the Chelsea Art School. ‘Augustus came in late straight from some party looking well groomed and remarkably handsome, picked up a drawing board, and instead of using it sat behind this new student and watched him for half an hour. They talked and Augustus invited Henry to his home.’53

  Augustus had a powerful impact on Lamb, giving his draughtsmanship a technical fluency and professionalism, warming his rather clinical line, enriching it with new vitality. What Lamb lacked was confidence. ‘The sight of my recent products fills me with dejection,’ he wrote; ‘my pictures… deject me beyond sufferance.’ In Augustus’s company this dejection lifted. He appeared ‘a heaven-sent star destined to light the way for a beginner’, wrote Lamb’s biographer Keith Clements.

  It was a matter of style and also of lifestyle. Another art student, Nina Hamnett, saw Augustus as ‘a tall man with a reddish beard, in a velvet coat and brown trousers, striding along… a splendid-looking fellow and I followed him down the King’s Road.’54 Lamb too followed Augustus, modelling himself on his manner, his looks, his life. It was as if, for a time, Augustus imprinted his personality on him. ‘I should have been Augustus John,’ Bernard Leach recalled Lamb saying. Inevitably, Augustus was flattered by this talented follower. What could be more proper than a young man wishing to act apprentice to him? It was a concept he had always understood and needed to benefit from himself. He responded generously. ‘I hope you are doing designs lightheartedly,’ he wrote (24 October 1906). ‘ – What is so becoming as cheerfulness and a light heart? I think the old masters are apt to presume upon our reverence sometimes – one is always at a disadvantage in the society of the illustrious dead – perhaps it would be high time to bid them a reverent but cheerful adieu! since we have invented umbrellas let us use them – as ornaments at least.’