But Martigues was no longer the place it had been before the war. More cafés were opening up on the cours de la République, more motor cars herded under the plane trees. A new bascule bridge was put up, useful but unbeautiful. Creeping industrialism was beginning to mar that air of innocence which had first attracted John to this little community of fishermen. Progress did not stampede through Martigues: it infiltrated. For ten years he and his family continued to come and then, submitting to the advance of commercialism, left for ever.
Bazin, that essayist of the air, was now dead and his daughter, it had to be admitted, ‘rather mad’.119 Once intended as mistress for Quinn, she was recast as Poppet and Vivien’s governess. The two girls loved the Villa Ste-Anne. ‘It seems to me’, wrote Poppet,120 ‘that life went by very smoothly on these visits to Martigues. There were great expeditions round the country and picnics as many as we could wish for… Saturday nights were very gay’, dining ‘chez Pascal’, then descending to the Cercle Cupidon and dancing to their heart’s content while John, a glass of marc-cassis at his elbow, sat proudly watching them. Like the village girls, Poppet and Vivien danced together until, tiring of this, Poppet took to lipstick. ‘After that we hardly missed a dance with the young men.’ These young men would present themselves at John’s table to ask for his permission then, after the dance was over, escort the girls back to him. ‘Augustus seemed to enjoy watching us and sometimes would whirl us round the floor himself,’ Poppet remembered.
‘Then suddenly one Saturday night at dinner he looked at me with a glaring eye and growled: “Wipe that muck off your face!” Whereupon Vivien piped up with: “But she won’t get asked to dance without it – they’ll think she’s too young.” Augustus was furious. “Wipe it off!” he shouted, “and stop ogling the boys!” Then I lost my temper (always a good thing to do I later found) and I flew at him, telling him it was he who ogled all the time and that I must have picked up the habit from him – also that I noticed the girls he ogled used lipstick and I was jolly well going to do so too! This made him laugh, the whole thing passed off and I continued to dance with le joli garçon every Saturday night… So life went on.’121
For John, life depended upon weather, flowers, girls. If the sun shone there was a chance of happiness. Though ‘there was a brothel near John’s villa I always found him playing draughts,’ protested A. R. Thomson. ‘…He liked to wander in back streets of old France, smell of wine-and-garlic or wine-and-cheese in his nostrils.’ Then, if he spotted an unusual-looking woman he would rise and with swollen eyes, pursue her. But more often he found the models he needed from among his family, posing them in a setting of olive or pine trees, the speckled aromatic hills beyond and, further off, bordering the blue Étang, distant amethyst cliffs.
But there were other days when the sun refused to shine and he would energetically tinker with plans to be off elsewhere, anywhere. ‘The weather is cold and grey,’ he wrote to Dorelia. ‘…There’s nothing much in the way of flowers here and I have no models. I might as well be dead.’ He would decide to leave, return to London, paint portraits; then the clouds dispersed and he was suddenly negotiating to buy another house there. ‘Martigues is like some rustic mistress one is always on the point of leaving,’ he confided to Mitchell Kennerley, ‘but who looks so lovely at the last moment that one falls back into her arms.’122
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John’s scheme, ‘quite wise for once’,123 was to pass his winters in Provence painting intermittently out of doors, and then, in the spring or summer, explore new regions. In May 1922 he found himself in Spain. His son Robin was then in Granada studying Castilian affairs with the tutor. ‘I don’t know if I can get painting materials in Spain,’ John had hesitated; and then: ‘Spanish people, I imagine, are hideous.’124 But he went.
But he went first to Paris for a hectic week with Tommy Earp, then descended south. ‘Down here in the wilds life is much calmer,’ he assured Viva Booth, ‘indeed there are perhaps too many vacant moments and unoccupied gaps.’ Like all his random travels, there was no plot or continuity. Spain was a series of impressions: in Madrid the sight of Granero, the famous matador, limping from the ring where, the following Sunday, he would be killed; at the Café Ingles other heroes of the bullring in Andalusian hats and pigtails ‘looking rather like bulls themselves’,125 vibrating with energy; the blind, hideously deformed beggars crouching in the gutters and appealing for alms; and, at evening, the ladies of the bourgeoisie collecting in the pastry-shops to ‘pass an hour or two before dinner in the consumption of deleterious tarts and liqueurs’.126 Then, in the Alhambra, a glimpse of two friends: Pepita d’Albaicin, an elegant gitana dancer, and Augustine Birrell again, until quite recently Chief Secretary for Ireland – ‘a surprising combination’; and at Ugijar the spectacle of Robin full of silent Spanish and the tutor taking very bad photographs.
By mid-June his white paint had ‘just about come to an end’127 and he started back, crossing the Sierra Nevada and descending on the north to Guadix, where he was to catch a train to Barcelona.
‘The ascent was long. Snow lay upon the heights. At last we reached the Pass and, surmounting it, struck the downward trail. A thick fog veiled the land. This suddenly dispersed, disclosing an illimitable plain in which here and there white cities glittered. The distant mountains seemed to hang among the clouds. At our feet blue gentians starred our path, reminding me of Burren in County Clare… the country became more and more enchanting. As we rode on, verdurous woods, grassy lawns and gentle streams gladdened our eyes so long accustomed to the stark and sunbaked declivities of the Alpujarras.’128
Spain, John told Dorelia, was ‘very fine in parts, but there are immense stretches of nothing’. The spirit of the counry had come near, but it had not taken hold of him. ‘Art, like life, perpetuates itself by contact,’ he wrote. The moment of contact came as he was leaving Barcelona. ‘I was walking to the station, when I saw three Gitanas engaged in buying flowers at a booth. Struck numb with astonishment by the flashing beauty and elegance of these young women, I almost missed my train.’ He went on to Marseilles, but the vision of these gitanas persisted: ‘I was unable to dismiss it.’ In desperation he hired a car and returned all the way to Barcelona. But ‘of course I did not find the gypsies again. One never does.’
Spain incubated in his mind, but never hatched. When he flew back there in December 1932 on his way to Majorca, rain was to make the world unpaintable; after which Franco, like a hated bird of prey, kept him off until too late.
‘I am sure it will stimulate me,’ he had written to Ottoline Morrell, ‘and I shall come back fresher and more myself.’129 In fact he came back as someone else. He had seen many pictures in Spain. ‘At the Prado I found Velasquez much greater and more marvellous than I had been in the habit of thinking,’ he told Dorelia. ‘There is nobody to touch him.’ He went to the Academy of San Fernando and the shabby little church of San Antonio de la Florida to see the Goya frescoes of the cupola: ‘My passion for Goya was boundless.’ The streets of Madrid seemed to throb and pulse with Goyaesque characters afterwards, bringing the place alive for him. There were other paintings too that ‘bowled me over’: Rubens’s ‘The Three Graces’ and, ‘a dream of noble luxury’, Titian’s ‘Venus’. Only El Greco, at the Prado, disappointed him. Yet, mysteriously, it was El Greco who was to affect his painting. John’s ‘Symphonie Espagnole’ of 1923 is a self-confessed essay in the El Greco style that marshals all the mawkishness and conveys little of the ecstatic rhythm. These weeks in Spain form a parallel to his journey through northern Italy in 1910. From Italy he had discovered a tradition to which he belonged; in Spain he lost himself. ‘He is painting very much like El Greco now since his visit to Spain,’ Christopher Wood noted in December 1922. This influence of El Greco became a mannerism. The lengthening of the head worked well for few of his sitters, and the elongation of the body seemed to draw life out of it. It was an attempt by John to speak a new language, but he could say little in it that was ori
ginal.
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It was as a Distinguished Guest of the Irish Nation that in the summer of 1924 John went with Eve Fleming to Dublin. The occasion was a festival of ‘fatuous self-glorification’ called the Taillteann Games. Oliver St John Gogarty, as commander of the social operations, had billeted him with Lord Dunsany in County Meath. ‘Here I am entrapped,’ John wrote desperately from Dunsany Castle. ‘…Mrs Gogarty has developed into a sort of Duchess. I must get out of this. It was very fool-hardy to have come over.’130 Gogarty had warned Dunsany not to give John any alcohol – which made Dunsany determined to offer his guest as much as he could want. This would have suited John well, had Gogarty not confided to him that Dunsany was a fierce teetotaller. The result was that, in an agony of politeness, John persisted in refusing everything until, according to Compton Mackenzie, ‘Dunsany started to explain how to play the great Irish harp… After they went to bed Augustus climbed over the wall of Dunsany Park and walked the fourteen miles to Dublin.’131
During the festival banquet the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army delivered a long speech in Gaelic during which the municipal gas and electricity workers decided upon a strike. Unperturbed by the blackness, the Commander spoke on. After a minute, John leant over to Compton Mackenzie, and whispered: ‘What’s going on?’ Mackenzie explained. ‘Thank God,’ breathed John. ‘I’m only drunk then. I thought I’d gone mad.’
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For one month in the spring of 1925 John stayed at the British Embassy in Berlin and, with a key to the side entrance, was free to explore this ‘strange and monstrous city’ at all hours. His impressions were scattered: Max Liebermann at eighty painting better than ever; ‘some marvellous wall decorations brought back from Turkistan by a German digger’;132 beer ‘like nectar’; and girls, ‘hearty creatures and sometimes very good looking’ who, on a more vital inspection, were revealed as being men ‘devoted to buggery’ and ‘furnished by the police with licences to adopt female attire’.133 As for embassy life, it was all very swell but ‘too strenuous for me… there are hours of intense boredom.’
Of the three portraits John painted while in Berlin with Eve Fleming, the most important was of Gustav Stresemann, the German Foreign Minister. It was Lord D’Abernon who arranged the sittings during which the Locarno Treaties advanced to the point of signature. In Lord D’Abernon’s diplomatic language, Stresemann’s ‘lively intelligence and extreme facility of diction’ inclined him ‘to affect monologue rather than interchange of ideas’.134 The British Ambassador could not get a word in. By early March, when sittings began, their negotiations had reached the verge of collapse. It was then that he had his idea. Since John knew little German, D’Abernon reasoned, there could be no grounds for not carrying on their discussions while he worked. The advantage was that Stresemann would be ‘compelled to maintain immobility and comparative silence’. John, by treating the German Foreign Minister as one of his own family, exercised his role strongly. At the first sitting, after a sentence or two from Lord D’Abernon, Stresemann broke in and was about to go on at his customary length when John ‘armed with palette and paint-brushes’ asserted his artistic authority. ‘I was therefore able to labour on with my own views without interruption,’ D’Abernon records. ‘…The assistance given by the inhibitive gag of the artist was of extreme value… Reduced to abnormal silence… Stresemann’s quickness of apprehension was such that he rapidly seized and assimilated the further developments to which the Pact proposals might lead.’135
The Locarno Pact, for which Stresemann was awarded the Nobel Prize, was eventually less controversial than the portrait. Stresemann faced it bravely and ‘even his wife’, John reported, ‘admits it’s like him at his worst’.136 To Dorelia he wrote: ‘I like Stresemann. He is considered the strongest man in German politics.’ But Lord D’Abernon, who now felt some tenderness for Stresemann, thought the painting ‘a clever piece of work’ though ‘not at all flattering: it makes Stresemann devilishly sly.’137 This proved an accurate foretaste of popular reaction. Nobody much liked Stresemann, and no party trusted him. When the portrait was shown in New York in 1928, John was much acclaimed for his ‘cruelty’. Modestly he rejected this praise. ‘I have nothing to do with German politics, but I thought Stresemann an excellent fellow, most sympathetic, intelligent and even charming,’ he wrote on 13 March 1928 to Mitchell Kennerley,138 adding with less modesty: ‘One must remember that even God chastises those whom he loves.’
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Apart from Stresemann’s silences, John had not greatly relished Berlin. The motor cars, the hard-boiled eggs, combined with a lack of handkerchiefs, unnerved him. He felt ‘very impatient’ to go somewhere new, and paint. ‘For God’s sake learn up a little Italian,’ he urged Dorelia. It was May when he boarded the train for Italy, with Dorelia, Poppet and Vivien. Romilly too was coming. ‘In a fit of megalomania’,139 he had decided to cross the Alps on foot, aided by the tutor with fourteen schoolgirls ‘on their way to spend a week-end in Paris’.140 Drifting through Italy at the head of the main party John lost his wallet with all their money in it. This calamity, though credited to the quick fingers of Italian train thieves, may in fact have been attributable to Eileen Hawthorne’s abortion for which urgent funds had just then been prescribed. For some days John’s party were luxuriously stranded in the most expensive hotel in Naples (the only one that would accept their credit), and when they finally approached the ‘barbarous island’ of Ischia, their destination, they were irritated to see Romilly, his feet in ruins, waving to them from the harbour.
Skirting the shores, John sought anxiously for some pictorial motif. They were to stay at the Villa Teheran, a little wooden house with a veranda, that stood by itself on a miniature bay. It belonged to Mrs Nettleship and, being loaded with fleas, proved uninhabitable: ‘it was clear this place offered nothing to a painter.’141 John marched his family off to Forio, the next town along the coast, and quartered them more happily above some vineyards overlooking the sea. The oleander, nespoli, quince, orange, lemon and pepper trees, ‘with the addition of a bottle of Strega’, contributed greatly, John recalled, ‘towards our surrender to the spirit of the place. Indeed, at night, when the moon shone, as it generally did… resistance had been folly.’142 But it was as holiday-maker, not primarily as painter, that John surrendered. He would float on his back in the phosphorescent sea for hours, while Dorelia bathed more grandly in a black silk chemise that billowed about her as she entered the waves. There were picnics on the beach, sunbathing on the long flat roof of their new villa, and expeditions through the island behind a strongly smelling horse. ‘Apart from drowning, life on the island presented few risks,’ John grumbled.143 Even the werewolves, reported to range the mountain, remained invisible. So, it was back to portrait painting, ‘finding myself very well occupied here with the two superbly fat daughters of the local Contessa’.144 The cook’s little girls also came to sit, side by side in a window, wearing alarmingly white-starched dresses. But a portrait of Mussolini, arranged by an ardent Fascist they had met, fell through. In his place Dorelia assembled various exotic blooms: and so John added to his flower pictures, the best of which, wrote the art critic Richard Shone, have ‘something of the freshness of Manet’s late flower paintings’.145
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John was destined to cross the Atlantic six times; and, in one form or another, the United States visited him several times more. The purpose of all this traffic was the innocent one of ‘making a useful bit of money’.146
He had first attracted attention in the United States when, in 1910, his portrait of William Nicholson was shown at the Carnegie Institute’s International Exhibition in Pittsburgh. Travelling there for the first time thirteen years later it was as the guest of the Carnegie Institute, which had invited him to act as the British representative on its jury. He embarked on 28 March 1923, elated to be on his way at last to the land of his boyhood day-dreams. ‘The Americans all wear caps and smoking-suits in the evenings, and smo
ke very long cigars,’ he wrote to Dorelia from the SS Olympic. ‘They are very friendly people.’ When his hat flew off into the sea, they rushed up in numbers to offer him their own which, one by one as he accepted them, also flew off. ‘There must be a continuous track of caps along our route.’ On board he met several passengers who petitioned him to paint portraits: Mrs Harry Payne Whitney, ‘quite a pleasant woman but infernally lazy’; a ‘big fat sententious oil king… who argues with me’; and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who told him ‘startling things about the spook world. It really seems quite a good place somewhat superior to this one in fact… Lady Conan Doyle is like people I’ve met in my youth – all spiritual love and merriment and dowdy clothes.’
Of all contemporary British artists, John was then the best known in northern America. At the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York no other modern painter, with the exception of Odilon Redon, had been so well represented.147 The huge Armory had been packed with the elite of New York ‘cheering the different American artists, cheering Augustus John, cheering the French...’148 Critics and journalists had soon been dispatched to interview John, and many reports of his ‘recent activities’ appeared in American papers. ‘Augustus John is now at the height of his fame,’ the New York magazine Vanity Fair had declared in June 1916. ‘Not even the war… has taken public attention off Britain’s most conspicuous native painter.’
On arriving, hatless, in New York harbour he was penned down by a press of journalists who, like pirates, boarded the ship even before it berthed. ‘They sought to get a “story” out of me. I stood them a drink instead.’149 They were delighted by his appearance – ‘thoroughly consistent in living up to what he ought to look like’; he thought them ‘nice boys’.
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