Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  He left without a word, walking down to the village to see about a horse and trap. Here Sampson overtook him to make it clear that he need not return to the house, and upon Augustus assuring him that ‘nothing could have been further from my thoughts’103 and that he was even then on his way, Sampson relented and proposed a drink. ‘We passed several hours with drinks and gypsies,’ Augustus told the Rani. The inn resounded to the melodious din of richly inflected Romany but soon a discord was introduced by Matthew Wood’s half-brother, Howell, a hefty brute who began trying to pick a quarrel with Sampson. Feeling he might owe his friend a good deed, Augustus offered to begin matters by turning Howell out of the pub. ‘This I did and shot him into the road. Then ensued a bloody combat.’ Within the sunlit square each stripped to the waist and, in the style of the old-fashioned prizefight, began battle. After two long rounds Augustus had him on the ground ‘but he was biting my legs. Up came the others, Sampson vociferating blood and death! And the poor Gypsy was led off streaming with gore, howling maledictions in three languages.’

  It was well past midnight when Augustus arrived back in Liverpool to find the Dowdalls’ house, out of which he had been so eager to escape, impossible to enter. ‘I climbed over the fence and tried all the windows at the back. I tried to pull down one of those damn lamps,’ he told the Rani. ‘Your house is like a fortress. So I went into Sefton Park and lay under a laurel bush till dawn… about 6 [I] went and washed my gore and grime in the Central Station.’

  Though much revived by experiences that would have half killed another man, Augustus was in no frame of mind to do justice to his model, the Lord Mayor, and despite the head not being quite all there to his satisfaction,104 he got off that same day back to Norfolk.

  The reception given to the portrait when it was first shown that autumn was extreme. The press called it ‘detestable’, ‘crude’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘an insult’, ‘a travesty in paint’, and the ‘greatest exhibition of bad and inartistic taste we have ever seen’. The art critic of the Liverpool Daily Post (18 September 1909) felt able to describe it as ‘a work worse painted and worse drawn than any modern picture we can remember’, and suggested that it was ‘an artistic practical joke’ which gave Smith grounds for legal action. Another critic (19 September 1909) detected moral danger in the canvas. It was, he declared,

  ‘an attenuated specimen of what Mr John chooses to call a man, over 20 heads in length, all legs, the pimple of a head being placed on very narrow shoulders and by his side, in a ridiculous attitude, a figure that I fancy I have seen before in a Punch and Judy show. All painted in rank, bad colour and shockingly badly drawn… The public have none too great knowledge of art as it is; to publicly exhibit the work is calculated to do immense amount of harm to the public generally and the young art students who go to galleries and museums for guidance and help.’

  ‘You are being pounded and expounded (which is worse) in the Liverpool Post just now,’ Scott Macfie informed Augustus (21 September 1909). A strong body of supporters soon counter-attacked. The Liverpool Courier (25 September 1909) interpreted it as a ‘topical allegory’ which had a ‘symbolic value as representing the characteristic relationships of the Labour-Socialist Party and the Liberal Government’. While in the Western Daily Press T. Martin Wood, who described Augustus as ‘the most revolutionary’ of ‘all the revolutionaries who are now alive’, reflected upon the ‘expression of countenance, in which a soul is to be seen’.

  Liverpool was sent into an extraordinary commotion by this controversy, the echoes lasting many years. Day after day the Walker Art Gallery was packed with people coming in to ridicule or admire this ‘Portrait of Smith’, as it was now called. Letters of anonymous indignation were everywhere posted in haste, and feelings of fury, adulation and merriment were kept at a high level by all manners of Tweedledum cartoons, satirical verses and stories to the effect that Dowdall had commissioned a gang of burglars to make off with it, only to find they had taken the valuable frame and left the canvas. Though the picture represented a serious attempt, dignified yet witty, to come to terms with grand salon portraiture, Augustus did not immediately help his supporters by stating that he had introduced Smith into the picture ‘for fun’105 – and at no extra cost! But he was obviously taken aback by the venom of some attacks, which he described as ‘stupid, disgusting and unnecessary’.

  After its showing at Liverpool, the picture toured the country, always followed by a wake of argument. ‘There is nothing to justify the indignation expressed by the Liverpool worthies,’ one paper proclaimed after it was shown at the NEAC Winter Exhibition in 1911. But the Athenaeum (2 December 1911), as at some new Bonnard, could still ‘marvel somewhat at Mr John’s innocence of the science of perspective’, while other critics invoked the names of Gainsborough, Sargent, Velázquez and Whistler.

  One man who stood up for the portrait from the beginning was Dowdall himself. On all public occasions he announced that it was splendid, and went so far as to supplement Augustus’s honorarium out of his own pocket. ‘I consider it a great picture, and for what my opinion is worth, I am prepared to go nap on it,’ he was reported as saying.106 Nevertheless it was to prove something of a white elephant to the Dowdall family, following them from house to house in its atrocious golden frame and dominating their lives. ‘You will have to build a special room to hold it,’ advised a friend.107 Such friends had to enter through the back door at Liverpool since the portrait blocked the entrance hall. It also cost a fortune to insure, required the hiring of a special railway truck to move and, when stationary, attracted crowds of Augustus’s devotees who would call round demanding to view it, making the Dowdalls’ lives a torment. Eventually, in 1918, Chaloner Dowdall decided to sell it. Liverpool, despite its hostility, still felt a proprietary right in the picture and was critical of this decision. But Augustus took a different line: ‘I’m glad to hear you found the old picture useful at last,’ he wrote to him (14 October 1918), ‘and that it fetched a decent price. It was really too big for a private possession of course, failing the possession of a palace to hold it. I don’t forget how well you acted by me at the time.’

  The National Gallery had offered Dowdall six hundred and fifty pounds (equivalent to £14,200 in 1996) but E. P. Warren, a private collector who lived with John Fothergill at Lewes House in Sussex, topped this with an offer of one thousand four hundred and fifty pounds (equivalent to £31,700 in 1996). Dowdall asked the Rani whether their son (then aged ten) would prefer to see his father enshrined in the National Gallery at a fairly nominal price or enjoy the proceeds of the full market price – to which she replied, ‘Don’t be a fool!’ So the portrait went to Warren’s beautiful eighteenth-century house where it joined a Lucas Cranach, a Filippino Lippi and, in the garden, Rodin’s ‘Le Baiser’. With his money Dowdall then bought a house, Melfort Cottage, in Oxfordshire with three acres of land where he lived for the next thirty-five years. But the picture had not come to rest. When Warren died, his heir Asa Thomas lent it to the Walker Gallery where it was exhibited in 1932. But Liverpool was still dead set against it, and the gallery’s director refused to buy it. Not for another six years was it bought. ‘I have now to make a confession,’ Sydney Cockerell then wrote to Dowdall (2 June 1938). ‘As London Adviser to the Felton Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria I am guilty of having caused the banishment to Melbourne of your magnificent portrait by Augustus John. It is really too bad as it is perhaps his masterpiece and it certainly should have remained in England. How mad your fellow citizens of Liverpool were to allow it to go out of their hands!’

  The price this time had risen to two thousand four hundred pounds (equivalent to £68,500 in 1996) – twenty-four times the original fee. It was shown at the Tate Gallery in London for a month, then left for Australia. Sixteen years later it returned to Liverpool, and to the Walker Art Gallery where, for six weeks in 1954, it was the centrepiece of an Augustus John show having Liverpool connections. ‘It may well be that something of this
conflict, aligned in the same way, will divide Liverpool again now,’ wrote Hugh Scrutton with a nostalgia for the aggressive past. ‘…At all events visitors to the Walker Art Gallery can now see this stormy petrel of a picture returned to its original place of showing. And it may be their last chance. For the picture will return to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in September and it is anybody’s guess whether it will return again within their lifetime from Australia.’108

  *

  Returning to camp, Augustus found that everything was not well. Arthur had misbehaved with the harness, and Augustus fired him on the spot. They were now, with their various caravans, carts, animals and boys, immovable. In desperation, Augustus wired an SOS to his friend Charles Slade,109 who lived not far off at Thurning. ‘Have fired Arthur can you come help love conveniently at once John.’ Slade galloped over and shepherded the convoy back to his farm. But the travelling life was taking a heavy toll of them. Slade took a number of photographs that September exhibiting the brave equipment with which they had encumbered themselves. The vans, still bright, were in the ‘cottage’ style, with ornate chip-carved porch brackets projecting at the front and rear, and steps which, when the horses had been unharnessed and put out to graze, fitted between the dipped shafts. The tents, to judge from Augustus’s drawings, were of the traditional gypsy construction – a single stout ridge-pole carrying five pairs of hazel-rods shaped into a cartwheel, over which framework blankets could be fastened by skewers or pinhorns.110 There are no horses in the photographs, possibly because they had begun to die off. One stumbled and fell en voyage, projecting Augustus over its head; another collapsed while standing in the shafts ‘and I sold it to the knacker for a sovereign’. Photographs of Dorelia and Edie suggest that they too were worn out by the rigours of road life. The boys, while at Thurning, all caught whooping cough, which they communicated to the Slade children; and the general discomforts of their camp even reached Augustus himself. ‘I shall be damn glad to get on with my own work,’ he grumbled to John Quinn (September 1909). He returned thankfully to Church Street, having agreed to decorate the Chelsea house of Lady Gregory’s nephew, Hugh Lane. He would never go on such a rough-and-tumble journey again, but it was not long before he began speculating about agreeable variants. ‘I don’t suppose we shall return this summer,’ he admitted to Slade, with whom he had left a number of his vans and sons. ‘I wish I had the vans in France. Do you know how much it would cost to heave them over the Channel?’

  8

  FATAL INITIATIONS

  ‘John is – has always been – one of my greatest friends, the only man who now has imaginative genius.’

  Arthur Symons to Gwen John (27 October 1919)

  ‘I have been seeing a lot of Arthur Symons lately,’ Augustus wrote to Ottoline (1 October 1909). ‘I’m afraid he’s about to break down again and that will be the end. He reads me poems that get more and more lurid.’

  They were an ill-assorted pair. The son of a puritanical Wesleyan minister, Arthur Symons had been brought up along nervously conventional lines and indoctrinated with a vast dose of the Knowledge of Evil. Against the effects of this upbringing he had received a vaccination at the hands of Dr Havelock Ellis who, during a week’s visit to Paris, introduced him to the debauchery of cigarettes and wine. Upon such weeds and fruit was Symons’s celebrated Knowledge of French Decadence brought to birth. He was a man, in George Moore’s words, ‘of somewhat yellowish temperament’, who, according to Will Rothenstein, ‘began every day with bad intentions… [and] broke them every night’. His spirit was eager enough, but his body, undermined by the chronic illnesses which afflict those who will outlive their contemporaries, was weak. Though much obsessed with notions of sex, he was not a passionate man but something different: a passionate believer in passion. The rhyme was preferable to the deed, and he would dizzy himself, in verse, with visions of belly dancers, serpent charmers and other exotic temptresses. More prosaically, he had married Rhoda Bowser, a strong-willed scatterbrain and occasional actress. He needed about him people who were strong, people who had an appearance of strength greater than his father’s had been. It was this quality that attracted him to Augustus.

  They had met in Gordon Craig’s studio in Chelsea early in 1903 – ‘one of the most fortunate events of my life’, as Symons remembered. The following spring, when Augustus held his show at the Carfax Gallery, Symons wrote a glowing appreciation of it in the Anglo-French paper, Weekly Critical Review (2 April 1903). Many years later, in an article entitled ‘The Greatness of Augustus John’, in which he selected Augustus as ‘the greatest living artist’, Symons recalled his first reaction to the Carfax exhibition. Two sentences from Baudelaire had occurred to him: ‘Je connais pas de sentiment plus embarrassant que l’admiration’; and ‘L’énergie c’est la grâce suprême’. These two sentences sum up very well the commerce of their relationship. Symons traded his admiration in exchange for Augustus’s stimulating treatment. He set out to please, sitting for Augustus, dedicating books to him, deferring to his literary taste, assailing him with congratulatory poems; and he set out to take from him something he badly needed: energy. Wilde had once described him as ‘an egoist without an ego’. Augustus appeared to supply this ego from the dynamo of his overcharged personality. It was not difficult for Symons to identify himself with Augustus. ‘I knew that he, like myself, was a Vagabond, and that he knew the gypsies and their language better than anyone else,’ Symons wrote. And then, as he told John Quinn (30 January 1914), ‘I was born at Milford Haven in Wales – oddly nine miles along the coast from where Augustus was born.’ Were they not blessed then, or afflicted, with the same Celtic blood? Had they not endured similar upbringings? In his diary Symons noted:

  ‘John’s fascination is almost infamous; the man, so full of lust and life and animality, so exorbitant in his desires and in his vision that rises in his eyes.

  His mother, who died young, was artistic, did some lovely paintings his father still keeps in Tenby. There he got some of his gift – as I did from mine. I for verse, he for painting. Our fathers never really understood us… John’s father hated art and artists; the mother, imaginative. So was mine: both imaginative: one derives enormously from one’s mother.’

  Augustus lived vividly in Symons’s imagination. ‘Arthur Symons has sent me a poem he had dedicated to me – all about bones and muscles and blatant nakedness,’ Augustus wrote to Alick Schepeler. ‘I ask myself what I have done to merit this?’ The poem, ‘Prologue for a Modern Painter: to A. E. John’ is a hymn to vitality, a declaration of his faith in the kind of life he could never make his own, except through someone else:

  Hear the hymn of the body of man:

  This is how the world began;

  In these tangles of mighty flesh

  The stuff of the earth is moulded afresh...

  Here nature is, alive and untamed,

  Unafraid and unashamed;

  Here man knows woman with the greed

  Of Adam’s wonder, the primal need.

  The spirit cries out and hymns

  In all the muscles of these limbs;

  And the holy spirit of appetite

  Wakes the browsing body with morning light.111

  But what had Augustus done to merit such a rhapsody? For one of the paradoxes of their friendship was that where Augustus dreamed, Symons, in his tireless search for ‘impressions’, often acted. He had breathed in the fantastical air of Dieppe deeper than Augustus, stopping impatiently for a night while in pursuit of some prehistoric fishwomen, could ever have done. And he had actually gone to many of the places, especially in Italy, that Augustus had merely read about. Yet because Symons dreaded action ‘more than anything in the world’,112 he was determined to see Augustus as a great man of action. What mesmerized him was the apparent lack of that guilt which so weighed down his own actions wherever he went.

  The flow of poems was for some years their main line of communication. It formed, for Symons, a kind of
umbilical cord attaching him to a creative source of life. ‘Dear Symons,’ Augustus replied from Church Street, ‘Today I’ve just come back to find another beautiful poem for me! I would have written columns of gratitude for the others you sent, only the words, not the will, failed me.’*4

  Then, in 1908, disaster had overtaken Symons: he had gone mad in Italy. From Venice, urged on by exasperation, he fled to a hotel in Bologna where his wife Rhoda, dressed like a dragonfly, hurried to his side. She found him racked by terrible phantoms, but her concern seemed only to sharpen his torment. For repeatedly she would demand: ‘Do you really love me, Arthur?’ One night he disappeared: he had given his answer. ‘So it has come at last!’ she soliloquized. ‘He no longer loves me!’ Next morning, however, Symons returned and created some dismay by failing to recognize his wife, and then, with foul curses filling his mouth, rushing off chased by horrible shapes and shadows. The hotel manager then explained to Rhoda: ‘Madam, your husband is mad. He has bought three daggers.’ In hysterics she raced back to England, to be arraigned by a herd of Bowsers for having deserted her husband. Symons, meanwhile, had lost himself, drifting day after day in ever-increasing fatigue from one ominous spot to another. ‘I walked and walked and walked – always in the wrong direction.’ At last he was arrested in Ferrara, manacled hand and foot, and thrown into a medieval gaol. It was only with great difficulty that his friends and family got him released and dispatched back to England where, in November 1908, he was confined to Brooke House, a private mental home.