Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  4 Men and Memories Volume I (1931), pp. 22–5.

  5 George Charlton ‘The Slade School of Fine Art’ The Studio (October 1946).

  6 Horizon Volume III No. 18 (June 1941), p. 394.

  7 Chiaroscuro p. 41.

  8 Some of John’s music hall sketches made at the Alhambra were exhibited at the Mercury Gallery, London (15 January–10 February 1968). John also made a portrait of Arthur Roberts dated, almost certainly inaccurately, 1895, now in the National Portrait Gallery. ‘I consider him [Arthur Roberts] about the most important buffoon England has ever produced – a born comedian and a most accomplished artist,’ he wrote to the National Portrait Gallery (14 May 1929). In Henry Savage’s autobiography, The Receding Shore, there is a brief mention of John doing a portrait of Arthur Roberts in about 1922.

  9 Chiaroscuro p. 42.

  10 Ibid. p. 44.

  11 Finishing Touches p. 29.

  12 Letter to the author, 1969.

  13 Letter to Ursula Tyrwhitt. Augustus’s letters to Ursula Tyrwhitt are at the National Library of Wales, NLW MS 19645C; and so are Gwen John’s letters to Ursula Tyrwhitt, NLW MS 21468D.

  14 Famous People, No. 31 of a series of 50. Illustrated by Angus McBride and described by Virginia Shankland. A secondary John legend involved Augustus’s son Caspar who dived on to a rock in 1930 and emerged from the waves a potential admiral.

  15 Daily Telegraph (1 November 1961).

  16 Augustus John: Studies for Compositions. Centenary Exhibition National Museum of Wales 1978.

  17 Spencer Gore to Doman Turner, 25 January 1909. See John Rothenstein Modern English Painters Volume I Sickert to Smith (1976 edn), p. 177.

  18 Evening Standard (19 January 1929).

  19 This portrait is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Many years after it was painted John described it in Finishing Touches as ‘most regrettable’. Orpen had painted it in imitation of Whistler’s ‘Carlyle’, and at the time John wrote of it to Michel Salaman: ‘Orpen’s portrait of me extracts much critical admiration. It is described in one notice as a clever portrait of Mr John in the character of a French Romantic.

  ‘One far-seeing gentleman hopes that I will emerge from my Rembrandtine chrysalis with a character of my own! I have just been to the Guildhall and return exalted with the profound beauty of Whistler’s Carlyle.’

  20 Finishing Touches p. 30.

  21 ‘Augustus Caesar,’ so the poet said,

  ‘Shall be regarded as a present god

  By Britain, made to kiss the Roman’s rod.’

  Augustus Caesar long ago is dead,

  But still the good work’s being carried on:

  We lick the brushes of Augustus John.

  Punch 27 February 1929

  22 Rude Assignment (1950), pp. 118–19.

  23 This letter was written to John Rothenstein (14 May 1952) after having read Rothenstein’s essay on Gwen John in Modern English Painters. Gwen ‘was never “unnoticed” by those who had access to her’, he corrected Rothenstein.

  24 Chiaroscuro p. 49.

  25 Augustus John to Robert Gregory n.d. (1909). NLW MS 21482D.

  26 Augustus John to Michel Salaman, August 1902. NLW MS 14928D fols. 59–60.

  27 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. NLW MS 21468D.

  28 Quoted in Susan Chitty Gwen John (1981), p. 142.

  29 Possibly Grace Westray, a Slade student who lived with Gwen, Augustus and Winifred at 21 Fitzroy Street for a time and whom Gwen painted as ‘Young Woman with a Violin’ (Cecily Langdale Gwen John [1987] pl.5 cat. no. 4) and Augustus drew (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge PD 942). Her addresses up to 1914 are remarkably similar to those of Ambrose McEvoy and his wife. After the war she appears to have married a Mr Reardon and by 1930 was widowed and living in Wiltshire. ‘She and Mary McEvoy have both visited,’ Louise Bishop wrote to Gwen (22 October 1930). NLW MS 22304C fol. 50.

  30 Chiaroscuro p. 249.

  31 See Gwen John Retrospective Exhibition Catalogue, Arts Council, 1968. Introduction by Mary Taubman.

  32 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 22 July 1936. NLW MS 21468D fol. 179.

  33 Letter from Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. NLW MS 21468D.

  34 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 23 July 1927. NLW MS 21468D fol. 160.

  35 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 6 June 1936. NLW MS 21468D fols. 140–2.

  36 NLW MS 14928D. The picture was bought by Frederick Brown at the Slade, and, a year after his death in 1941, was purchased by the Tate Gallery.

  37 Table-Talk of G.B.S. (ed. Archibald Henderson 1925), pp. 90–1.

  38 Modern English Painters (1976 edn) Volume I, ‘Gwen John’, pp. 160–1.

  39 In his obituary notice (The Times, 1 February 1958) of Lady Smith, Augustus wrote: ‘The death of Lady (Matthew) Smith has removed one of the last survivors of what might be called the Grand Epoch of the Slade School. Gwen Salmond, as she then was, cut a commanding figure among a remarkably brilliant group of women students, consisting of such arresting personalities as Edna Waugh, Ursula Tyrwhitt, my sister Gwen John, and Ida Nettleship.

  ‘Gwen Salmond’s early compositions were distinguished by a force and temerity for which even her natural liveliness of temperament had not prepared us. I well remember a Deposition in our Sketch Club which would not have been out of place among the ébauches [sketch, rough draft] of, dare I say it, Tintoretto!

  ‘…“Marriage and Death and Division make barren our lives”. Gwen Smith had reason to know this but she also had the pluck to face it bravely, which is what made all the difference.’

  40 See Alison Thomas Portraits of Women (1994), pp. 24–9.

  41 Quoted by Alison Thomas in Edna Clarke Hall. Milne & Moller, Max Rutherston, catalogue (1989).

  42 Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 55.

  43 Bruce Arnold Orpen. Mirror to an Age (1981), p. 237.

  44 Ibid. p. 234.

  45 Modern English Painters Volume I, ‘William Orpen’, p. 227.

  46 Men and Memories Volume I p. 334.

  47 See The Listener (23 November 1967).

  48 Unpublished reminiscences. But see ‘Edna Clarke Hall: Drawings and Water-colours 1895–1947’ in the catalogue of the Slade Centenary Exhibition at the d’Offay Couper Gallery, October 1971.

  49 ‘The Slade Animal Land’, a notebook of caricatures of staff and students at the Slade in 1898, shows the BEARDGION, a cartoon of Augustus John by Logic Whiteway with the explanatory caption: ‘This simple creature is so accomplished that, according to the Tonk, Michael Angelo isn’t in it.’ See National Library of Scotland Acc. 3969 1965.

  50 Gwen also won a certificate for figure drawing, while Augustus after his second year was awarded a second certificate for advanced antique drawing, a £3 prize for the study of a standing male nude, a certificate for head painting, and a £6 prize for figure painting.

  51 Men and Memories Volume I p. 333.

  52 Mary Taubman Gwen John (1985), p. 15.

  53 See John’s Introduction to the Catalogue of Drawings by Ulrica Forbes, Walker’s Galleries, 118 New Bond Street, London, 17 October 1952.

  54 ‘A Note on Drawing’, from Augustus John: Drawings (ed. Lillian Browse 1941), p. 10.

  55 Chiaroscuro p. 46.

  56 Augustus John: Studies for Compositions (National Museum of Wales 1978) pls. 1–3. The text for ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’ came from Numbers 21:9. ‘And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.’ The painting is owned by the Slade School.

  57 Chiaroscuro p. 48.

  58 Rude Assignment p. 119.

  59 Men and Memories Volume I p. 333.

  60 Chiaroscuro p. 36.

  61 Ibid. p. 27.

  62 Jack Nettleship wrote a biography of Browning. One of his brothers, Henry, was Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford; another, Richard, was a Fellow and Tutor at Balliol, and a friend of Benjamin Jowett; and the third, Edward, a
prominent oculist. Jack regretted not having done the lions in Trafalgar Square, of which, he believed, he could have made a far better job than Sir Edwin Landseer.

  63 Ethel Nettleship to Caspar John, 27 June 1951. NLW MS 22790D fols. 34–9·

  64 W. B. Yeats Autobiographies (1955), p. 271.

  65 See NLW MS 22798B fols. 11–15, 55–71.

  66 Ada Nettleship’s maiden name was Hinton, and she was the sister of James Hinton who wrote an enormous philosophical work and then, according to David John, went off his head. ‘I had an idea of “discovering” him,’ Romilly John records (1 August 1972), ‘but have always been completely baffled after reading two sentences and had to start again, and so on indefinitely. James Hinton’s son was the author of a book on the fourth dimension, involving the construction by the reader of hundreds of cubes with differently coloured surfaces and edges.’

  67 Ethel Nettleship to Caspar John, 27 June 1951. NLW MS 22790D fols. 34–5·

  68 W. B. Yeats Autobiographies p. 193.

  69 Ibid.

  70 Chiaroscuro p. 48.

  71 This synopsis was done for Hubert Alexander, who had got to know Augustus through Dorelia McNeill. In the 1920s Alexander had turned publisher and approached John for his memoirs. ‘I’ve been thinking of the book and will send you shortly a provisional synopsis,’ John wrote to him on 21 February 1923. Alexander believes he may have got the synopsis about 1927, but since there is a holograph synopsis among Augustus’s papers, it may never have been sent. Certainly by 1932 negotiations were still continuing and Sir Charles Reilly remembered that year ‘a publisher came down [to Fryern Court] and offered him great sums for his autobiography, finally reaching £13,000 [equivalent to well over £400,000 in 1996] the sum I heard him say Lady Oxford got for hers, but he nobly turned it down.’

  72 Chiaroscuro p. 48.

  73 Finishing Touches p. 40.

  74 Chiaroscuro p. 147. In 1941 Sir John Rothenstein came across this picture at the Leger Galleries, bought it for the Tate Gallery, and showed it to John for identification. At first he failed to recognize it, but later did acknowledge it to be his. In his Modern English Painters, Rothenstein described it as a rather fumbling and pedestrian essay and, though probably a fair example of his painting at this time, laboured, niggling in form, hardly modelled at all. But John himself, on reading this, objected: ‘The “Old Lady’s” head is very well modelled: the hands unfinished yet expressive. She couldn’t move them easily.’

  75 Ida Nettleship to Ada Nettleship, 18 September 1898. NLW MS 22798B fols. 18–19.

  76 Letter from Ida Nettleship to her mother n.d. NLW MS 22798B fols. 16–17.

  77 Ida Nettleship to Ada Nettleship, 20 September 1898. NLW MS 22798B fols. 20–1.

  78 Ida Nettleship to Ada Nettleship, December 1898. NLW MS 22798B fols. 30–1.

  79 Chiaroscuro p. 250.

  80 Ida Nettleship to Ada Nettleship n.d. (late September 1898). NLW MS 227988 fols. 22–4.

  81 Gwen John to Michel Salaman n.d. (spring 1899). NLW MS 14930C.

  82 Fothergill’s inn was the Spread Eagle at Thame in which, for a time, Augustus’s son Romilly worked, and for which Dora Carrington painted an inn sign (now gone). He was the author of Confessions of an Innkeeper, John Fothergill’s Cookery Book, The Art of James Dickson Innes, My Three Inns, etc.

  83 Rothenstein had first heard of Ibsen through Conder, and in his Men and Memories (Volume I p. 56) writes: ‘We were all mesmerised by Ibsen in those days.’ The picture, now in the Tate Gallery, expresses the tension of Act III of The Doll’s House when Mrs Linden and Krogstad are listening for the end of the dance upstairs. Subsequently it became famous as a ‘problem picture’ mainly perhaps on account of its dark colour. ‘I am portrayed standing at the foot of a staircase upon which Alice has unaccountably seated herself,’ John wrote in his Introduction to the Catalogue of the Sir William Rothenstein Memorial Exhibition at the Tate Gallery (5 May–4 June 1950). ‘I appear to be ready for the road, for I am carrying a mackintosh on my arm and am shod and hatted. But Alice seems to hesitate. Can she have changed her mind at the last moment?… Perhaps the weather had changed for the worse...’ The picture, painted between June and October 1899, was exhibited in the British section of the Paris Exhibition in 1900, where it won a silver medal.

  84 Introduction to the William Rothenstein Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Gallery (May–June 1950).

  85 Men and Memories Volume I p. 352.

  86 Horizon Volume III No. 18 (June 1941), p. 400.

  87 Oscar Wilde to William Rothenstein, 4 October 1899. See The Letters of Oscar Wilde (ed. Rupert Hart-Davis 1962), p. 811.

  88 John Rothenstein Modern English Painters, Volume I p. 179. Rothenstein instances ‘The Rustic Idyll’ of about 1903 as having been done under the immediate impact of Daumier. This work – possibly watercolour on dampened cartridge – is now in the Tate Gallery, and is called ‘Rustic Scene’. It has an unusual texture – soft, blurred contours – and is more dramatic than most of John’s work. ‘“The Rustic Idyll” I remember well,’ John wrote to the Tate Gallery (16 March 1956). ‘It is one of several pastels I did soon after leaving the Slade. Though hardly an Idyll, it has dramatic character… I don’t consider it has merit as a pastel.’

  89 Everett, who had been baptized Herbert, registered at the Slade as Henry Everett, but he always called himself John Everett. He added to the confusion by marrying his cousin – Mrs Everett’s niece – Kathleen, who altered her Christian name fractionally to Katherine. A dedicated marine painter, John Everett never sold a marine painting during his life, but bequeathed them all (1,700 oils and a larger number of drawings and engravings) to the National Maritime Museum, which held a memorial exhibition of his work in 1964.

  90 Men and Memories Volume I p. 352.

  91 Ibid.

  92 Rothenstein’s portrait of Augustus is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

  93 Augustus John to Michel Salaman, February 1900. NLW MS 14928D.

  94 Gwen John seems to have been living at 122 Gower Street illegally and without furniture. The house was officially inhabited by a woman called Annie Machew, who since October 1898 had paid no rates. The rating authorities who attempted to collect the money owing to them throughout 1900 reported that there were ‘no effects’ there. For this reason the house does not appear in Kelly’s Post Office Directory until three years later, when it had been taken over by the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks.

  95 Three of Conder’s paintings of Swanage are in the Tate Gallery.

  96 What became of the large decoration is not known, though a number of small versions of the subject exist, showing the influence of Goya and Delacroix. One is an oil which belonged to Humphrey Brooke, Secretary of the Royal Academy (1952–68); another, a wash drawing in the Quinn Collection in New York, was sold by the Fine Art Society at the Slade Centenary Show (autumn 1971); a third, a pen and wash drawing, is in the Tate Gallery (reproduced in Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture Volume I 1964, pl. 51).

  97 Horizon Volume III No. 18 (June 1941), p. 401.

  98 Letter from Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. NLW MS 14928D.

  99 Horizon Volume III No. 18 (June 1941), p. 401.

  100 Chiaroscuro p. 38.

  101 NLW MS 19645C.

  102 John’s drawing of the Château de Polignac, done with black crayon on white paper and very Flemish in its atmosphere, is now in the Manchester Art Galleries. It is reproduced in Augustus John. Fifty-two drawings (1957), pl. 5.

  103 Men and Memories Volume I p. 358.

  104 Some pages from his sketchbook at this time were exhibited at the Mercury Gallery, London, 15 June 1967–10 February 1968.

  105 Chiaroscuro p. 49.

  106 E. Fox-Pitt ‘From Stomacher to Stomach’ (unpublished autobiography).

  107 Men and Memories Volume II p. I.

  CHAPTER III: LOVE FOR ART’S SAKE

  1 From an essay Osbert Sitwell d
id not include in A Free House. It will be found in André Theuriet Jules Bastien-Lepage & his Art (1892), pp. 139–40. See also Malcolm Easton Augustus John (1970).

  2 Alfred Thornton Fifty Years of the New English Art Club (1935).

  3 Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (spring 1900). NLW MS 14928D.

  4 Cambridge Review (March 1922).

  5 Quentin Bell Victorian Artists (1967), p. 91.

  6 The English Review (January 1912).

  7 The Burlington Magazine (February 1916).

  8 New Age (28 May 1914).

  9 Letter from Augustus John to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 5 August 1910. This correspondence is at the University of Texas, Austin.

  10 This and other unpublished Orpen letters were owned by Miriam Benkovitz, the biographer of Ronald Firbank.

  11 Herbert Jackson was Professor Walter Raleigh’s brother-in-law, while D. S. MacColl was connected by marriage to Oliver Elton, who succeeded Raleigh as Professor of Modern Literature at Liverpool.

  12 Dora E. Yates My Gypsy Days (1953), p. 74.

  13 Anthony Sampson ‘Scholar Gipsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ (unpublished), Chapter 2.

  14 Lytton Strachey by Himself (ed. Michael Holroyd, 1994 edn), p. 104.

  15 Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (April 1900). NLW MS 14928D fol. 39·

  16 This portrait, which hung in Liverpool University Dining Club, was later the cause of a historic decision. First exhibited at the NEAC in the Winter Show of 1903, it was to have been awarded the Gold Medal for Painting at the International Exhibition at St Louis, Missouri, in the following year. Learning that this prize was to go to so young and relatively obscure an artist, the President of the Royal Academy and the English members of the international jury took the astonishing step of withdrawing, without explanation, the entire British section.