American Archives of Art, Detroit, Michigan
Correspondence to John Beatty and Homer St Gaudens.
McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma
Correspondence to Cyril Connolly.
Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York
Correspondence to William Kent Rose.
University of Delaware Library, Newark, New Jersey
Correspondence to Ulick O’Connor.
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Correspondence to Elmer Gertz.
Special Collections, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor
Sonnet to ‘Alick [Schepeler]’.
Division of Special Collections, New York University Libraries
Correspondence to Ronald Firbank.
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Correspondence to William and Alice Rothenstein (bMS Eng 1148 [772], 1148.1 [151–153]). There are also letters from Ida John and Gwen John to the Rothensteins. One letter from Augustus John to George Reavey (bMS 943.9 [19]).
Widener Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Correspondence to Theodore Spencer.
University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign
Correspondence to Grant Richards.
University of Cincinatti, Ohio
Correspondence to Dorothy Brett.
Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Correspondence to Aleister Crowley.
Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles
Correspondence to Emery Walker.
Department of Manuscripts, The Huntington, San Marino, California
One hundred and six letters and two poems to Alick Schepeler.
Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, Buffalo, New York State
Correspondence to Conger Goodyear.
Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York State
Correspondence to Wyndham Lewis (ninety-eight letters and two from Dorelia), also manuscript entitled ‘The Cerements of Gold’ and one letter headed ‘To Whom It May Concern’). See Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Catalogue of Manuscript Material in the Department of Rare Books, Cornell University Library, compiled by Mary F. Daniels (1972).
Bertrand Library, Bucknell University Library, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Correspondence to Oliver St John Gogarty (1917–55) and two letters from Dorelia to Gogarty.
Schlesinger Library of the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts
One letter to Dorothy Ardlow, and one letter to Florence Cary Koehler.
Boston University Libraries, Massachusetts
Correspondence to Catherine and Mikaly Karolyi, and one letter to Stuart Cloete.
Yale University Library, New Haven
Correspondence to John Drinkwater, Norman Douglas, Sylvia Hay and Mr Stewart-Jones (all in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). There is also a letter from John to James Rockwell Sheffield in the Sterling Memorial Library.
CANADA
National Gallery of Canada, Ontario
One letter to the gallery concerning copyright (copy, June 1922), and correspondence (1923–71), including letters from Lord Beaverbrook, Vincent Massey and the Hogg Museum at Harvard, regarding John’s cartoon ‘Canadians at Lens’ (charcoal on paper, 12 feet by 40 feet). There are also letters from Caspar John about other pictures (the National Gallery of Canada owns nine oil paintings, fifteen etchings, and sixteen drawings, watercolours and other works by Augustus John).
Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University, Ontario
Correspondence to Bertrand Russell.
University of Victoria, British Columbia
Letter to Herbert Read.
AUSTRALIA
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
Correspondence to and about Basil Burdett.
FRANCE
Musée Aéronautique, Paris
Correspondence with M. Bazin.
NEW ZEALAND
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
One letter to Frank Lewis.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My indebtedness to the many people, galleries, libraries and museums that helped me to write my original biography of Augustus John is recorded in the first edition. In the preparation of this revised edition I have been further assisted by Nicola Beauman; John Beynon and Marion Hutton, Curator and Hon. Art Curator of Tenby Art Gallery; Jane Bond; Michael Bott, Keeper of Archives and Manuscripts at the University of Reading Library; Annette Bradshaw, Deputy Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Sally Brown and T. A. J. Burnett in the Department of Manuscripts and Manuscript Collections at the British Library; Mrs Robin Paisey and Alison Lloyd at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; David Carver, Archivist at the National Gallery, London; Charles Cholmondeley; Honor Clerk and Jonathan Franklin at the National Portrait Gallery, London; Caroline Cuthbert and David Fraser Jenkins at the Tate Gallery; Roy Davids, formerly at the London office of Sotheby’s; Mark Evans, Assistant Keeper (Fine Art) at the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff; Patrick Farndale; Jerome Farrell, City of Westminster Archivist; Susan Flint; Sir Angus Fraser; Cathy Henderson, Librarian at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; Jane Hill; Sara S. Hodson and Mary L. Robertson, Curators of Manuscripts at the Huntington; Francesca John; Rebecca John, who gave me access to the papers of her father, the late Sir Caspar John; John Kelly, who gathered for me all references to Augustus John in the letters of W. B. Yeats; Erika Kruger, Registrar at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Cecily Langdale at the Davis & Langdale Company, New York; Linda Lloyd Jones, Head of Exhibitions and Susanna Robson, Assistant Curator, Special Collections, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Assistant Archivist in the Department of Manuscripts and Records, the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Edward Morris, Curator of Fine Art at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Hayden Proud, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Dr D. M. Pugh, who was for a time Augustus John’s doctor and also for a time my own; Gillian Raffles at the Mercury Gallery, London; Ian Rogerson, who let me see the text of his introduction to a forthcoming edition of John Sampson’s Welsh Gypsy Folk-Tales; Anthony Sampson, who showed me the typescript of his book on his grandfather, John Sampson; Richard Shone, Assistant Editor of the Burlington Magazine; Greg Spurgeon, Head of Documents and Storage and Cindy Campbell, Archivist, at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Mary Taubman; Daphne Todd, President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, London; S. R. Tomlinson, Assistant Librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Joan Winterkorn at Bernard Quaritch Ltd, London.
I would also like to record my gratitude to the late Vivien White, Augustus John’s daughter, who, as owner of the copyrights, renewed the permission first given to me by her mother, Dorelia John, to quote from Augustus John’s writings and reproduce his pictures.
I am grateful to Alison Samuel, my editor at Chatto & Windus, for passing her critical eye over the old and new portions of my text and helping me to harmonize them. I am also indebted to Toby Buchan for his valuable policing of my typescript. I have retained what Willa Cather called ‘the irregular and intimate quality of things made by the human hand’, and I owe much to Sarah Johnson for transferring my prehistoric manuscript on to post-modernist disks.
Finally I must pay tribute to my wife, who propped me up and pulled me through when I fell ill, enabling me to complete this book.
MICHAEL HOLROYD
Porlock Weir, September 1995
NOTES
PREFACE
1 Stephen Spender World Within World (1951), p. 76.
2 Mary Taubman to the author, 6 March 1995. See also her introductions to the Gwen John exhibitions organized by Faerber and Maison Ltd (1964), the Arts Council of Great Britain (1968) and Anthony d’Offay (1976). Her Gwen John was published by the Scolar Press in 1985
.
3 Now in the National Library of Wales. NLW MS 22802D.
4 Portraits by Augustus John: Family, Friends and the Famous (National Museum of Wales 1988), p. 11.
5 Romilly John to David Fraser Jenkins, 3 March 1979. National Museum of Wales.
6 ‘Photocopy and be damned: literature and the libraries’, Sunday Times (2 September 1984).
7 Philip Larkin Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (1983), p. 99.
8 Some John and Nettleship papers were purchased from Caspar John’s daughter Rebecca John in October 1988, and two small groups of correspondence and drafts of Augustus John’s autobiographical writings for the Sunday Times were bought at Sotheby’s in April and December 1989. All these were incorporated into the main archive, but other odds and ends of correspondence acquired since then have been catalogued separately.
9 NLW MS 22305C fols. 5–6.
10 Richard Shone Augustus John (1979), p. 3.
CHAPTER I: LITTLE ENGLAND BEYOND WALES
1 This lodging house was Corporation property owned by Ancient Grant. Its lease was assigned to William John on 23 October 1877. Two years later, on 17 December 1879, the lease was devised to William Willams.
2 After Augustus John’s death in 1961 a plaque commemorating the place where he spent his early years was fixed by the Haverfordwest Council at No. 5 Victoria Place. On neither his brother’s nor his sisters’ birth certificates had any number been given. Winifred, who was still alive in the United States, could not remember the number; Thornton, nearing ninety and living in Canada, appears to have copied down the number 5 from the address (5 Tower Hill) of the solicitor who wrote to him asking after his birthplace.
No. 7 Victoria Place is now part of Lloyds Bank. The John family leased it from a Mr Joseph Tombs, and the number is confirmed by several directories of the period. No. 7 Victoria Place is also given on the birth certificate of Augustus’s youngest uncle Frederick Charles John, born on 20 September 1856. In 1995 the Civic Society Guild of Freemen put up a plaque marking the birthplace of Gwen and Augustus on Lloyds Bank, a few yards from the rogue plaque on the Victoria Bookshop next door.
3 The dates of their births were: Thornton, 10 May 1875; Gwendolen Mary, 22 June 1876; Winifred Maud, 3 November 1879.
4 Until 1850 the abominable crime of ‘associating with gypsies’ was punishable by hanging.
5 Winifred John to Gwen John, 10 July 1910 (National Library of Wales MS 22307 fols. 119–23).
6 Horizon Volume III No. 14 (February 1941), pp. 98–9.
7 This house, though altered and precariously named ‘Rocks Drift’, still stands. It has a large entrance hall and stairwell, drawing-room, dining-room and six bedrooms. It was built using the stone from Settlands, the next bay.
8 Besides being a labourer, William John was a violin player. ‘I am hoping that the musician will turn out to have been a wandering minstrel,’ Augustus wrote to H. W. Williams on discovering this fact (16 May 1952). ‘…His musical gifts reappeared in one or two of my descendants.’ Perhaps the most celebrated musician among these descendants is the cello player Amaryllis Fleming. Augustus’s sister Winifred played the violin, and her daughter Muriel Matthews is a respected cellist in America. Augustus’s son David was for many years an oboist in the Sadler’s Wells orchestra, and another son, Edwin, played the flute.
9 His obituary in the Haverfordwest and Milford Haven Telegraph (9 July 1884) notes that ‘The funeral was largely attended by the principal professional men, as well as the leading tradesmen of the town and neighbourhood.’
10 Joanna (b. 1840), Emma (b. 1842), Alfred (b. 1844), Edwin, and Clara Sophia (b. 1849).
11 William John used to describe Alfred as a solicitor, though in fact he never passed the law exams, and probably acted as managing clerk, a position he could hold without legal qualifications.
12 Alfred John, with his haggard good looks and air of impoverished innocence, came to fulfil Augustus’s ideal of a Bohemian English gentleman. Visiting his nephew one hot summer day, he accidentally revealed by a spontaneous gesture that, underneath his mackintosh, he wore no clothes at all. With equal transparency, he added to his family name a ‘St’ and, as Alfred St John, was rewarded with a very fine funeral service, free of charge, by the clergy of St David’s Cathedral.
13 It was not until the removal of the Sex Disqualification Act in 1919 that women were permitted to qualify as solicitors. The first woman was admitted in 1922.
14 Benjamin died on 12 January 1856 of hydrocephalus and convulsions, aged two months; William had died six days earlier from the same cause, aged one year and eleven months; Sydney died after fourteen days of diarrhoea on 13 August 1861, aged five weeks; and Thornton died on 15 May 1861, aged eleven years, of congestion of the brain, fever and debility.
15 Now in the Tenby Museum. It is a copy of a David Cox. The picture of cattle is owned by Muriel Matthews, Augusta’s American granddaughter.
16 Alison Thomas Portraits of Women (1994), p. 71.
17 The death certificate inaccurately gives her age as thirty-four.
18 William John died of cerebral softerina on 6 July 1884.
19 Aunt Leah went straight to the United States, where she picked up a slight American accent and a large band of disciples. Aunt Rosina’s travels were more circuitous, and her destinations always preceded by a series of brown-paper parcels. Sustained by a diet of over-ripe fruit and protected by a dense fur muff, she set off for Switzerland from where she wrote a number of letters in purple ink testifying to her brief enthusiasm for Dr Coué, who believed that if people repeated ‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better’ many thousands of times, the world might become a more cheerful place. From here she went to Japan, where she collected a miniature Japanese maid, and later, improbably passing through Mason, Nevada, married Owen H. Bott, a druggist with two sons. Under the pitiless blue of the Californian skies, she caught up with Winifred, terrifying her children with her cottonwool hair, her humped back and restless scuttling from place to place.
20 Gwen, Augustus and Winifred were baptized at St Mary’s Church, Tenby, on 21 January 1886.
21 William John’s will is dated 14 June 1881, a little over three years before his death from a disease that would have made him legally incompetent.
22 NLW MS 22782D fols. 115–16.
23 Chiaroscuro p. 28. All page numbers are taken from the first Jonathan Cape editions of Chiaroscuro and Finishing Touches (1952 and 1964). The two books were republished, with an additional chapter, under the title Autobiography in 1975.
24 Letter to the author, 18 October 1968.
25 Chiaroscuro p. 25.
26 Later the Sea Beach Hotel, Tenby.
27 This building (the original house of which was built by Edward Morgan in the 1830s) was later converted into a public library. In the cemented grounds two trees were planted, an oak in memory of Augustus, and a birch in memory of Gwen. Greenhill School later moved to the outskirts of Tenby.
28 Chiaroscuro p. 36.
29 At the junction with South Cliff Street. Later the property became the Hallsville Hotel.
30 Letter to the author, 18 October 1968.
31 Chiaroscuro p. 37.
32 Ibid. p. 19.
33 Ibid. pp. 31–2.
34 Thornton John to Augustus John, 3 February 1959. NLW MS 22782D fols. 115–16.
35 Augustus John to Caspar John, 16 August 1952. NLW 22775C fol. 7.
36 Augustus John to John Davenport n.d. (late 1940s). NLW MS 21585E.
37 Winifred John to Augustus John, 8 January 1906. NLW MS 22782D fol. 124.
38 Winifred John to Augustus John, 3 March 1956. NLW MS 22782D fol. 125.
39 Cecily Langdale Gwen John (1987) p. 115.
40 Anthony d’Offay Gwen John: 1876–1939 (1982).
41 Thornton John to Augustus John, 3 March 1948. NLW MS 22782D fol. 111.
42 Thornton John to Gwen John, 7 September 1935. NLW MS 22307C fol. 88.
43 Win
ifred John to Gwen John, 10 July 1910. NLW MS 22307C fols. 122–3.
44 Thornton John to Gwen John, 14 July 1920. NLW MS 22307C fols. 71–2.
45 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, summer 1910. NLW MS 21368D fol. 46.
46 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 1908. NLW MS 21468D fol. 25.
47 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan Gwen John. Papers at the National Library of Wales (1988), p. 11.
48 Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (July 1908). NLW MS 22776D fols. 89–90.
49 Letter to the author from Darsie Japp, 13 December 1968.
50 Chiaroscuro p. 12.
51 Augustus John to Bill Duncalf, 22 May 1959 (privately owned).
52 Augustus John to John Sampson, n.d. (c. 1912). NLW MS 21459E fol. 46.
53 Augustus John to John Sampson, 13 March 1912. NLW MS 21459E, fol.44.
54 Entry for 22 June 1919 in The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner (ed. Claire Harman 1994), p. 37.
55 Augustus John to Ada Nettleship n.d. NLW MS 22775C fol. 81.
56 The word petulengro means horseshoe-maker or smith. It was T. W. Thompson who first identified Borrow’s Jaspar Petulengro with a certain Ambrose Smith.
57 William Rothenstein to Max Beerbohm, 24 July 1941. Quoted in Robert Speaight’s William Rothenstein (1962), p. 402.
58 Evening Standard (19 January 1929).
59 Horizon Volume XIX No. 112 (April 1949), p. 295.
60 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan Gwen John. Papers at the National Library of Wales, p. 9.
61 Letter to the author, 18 October 1968.
62 Chiaroscuro p. 35.
63 Evening Standard (19 January 1929).
CHAPTER II: ‘SLADE SCHOOL INGENIOUS’
1 BBC talk first transmitted on 17 November 1967. Augustus’s eyes were actually blue.
2 George Charlton ‘The Slade School of Fine Art’ The Studio (October 1946).
3 In his inaugural lecture, Systems of Art Education, Poynter had attacked the current methods of English art teaching in which ‘a trivial minuteness of detail [was] considered of more importance than a sound and thorough grounding in the knowledge of form’, and only at the end of the course was the student allowed to do what he should ‘have been set to do the first day he entered the school, that is to make studies from the living model’. He himself intended to ‘impress but one lesson upon the students, that constant study from the life-model is the only means they have of arriving at a comprehension of the beauty in nature...’ See Edward Poynter Lectures on Art (1879) and also Andrew Forge The Slade 1871–1960.
Augustus John Page 99
