Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

17 Chiaroscuro p. 60.

  18 Augustus John to Will Rothenstein, 9 March 1902. He continues: ‘I felt inclined to add my patch of homemade sienna in reference to the past.’

  19 Anthony Sampson ‘Scholar Gipsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ Chapter 2.

  20 The Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh 1879–1922 (ed. Lady Raleigh 1926), Volume II p. 333.

  21 Geoffrey Keynes The Gates of Memory (1981), p. 112.

  22 Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (c. 1914). NLW MS 21459E fol. 50.

  23 Augustus John to John Sampson, 22 October 1902. NLW MS 21459E fols. 2–3.

  24 Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (1907). NLW MS 21459E fols. 21–2.

  25 Augustus John to John Sampson, 23 February 1911. NLW MS 21459E fol. 32.

  26 Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (December 1904). NLW MS 21459E fol. 13.

  27 John Sampson to Augustus John, 22 November 1930. NLW MS 22785D fols. 42–3.

  28 Augustus John to John Sampson, September 1911. NLW MS 21459E fol. 33.

  29 Geoffrey Keynes The Gates of Memory p. 379.

  30 John Sampson to Augustus John, 2 February 1924. NLW MS 22785D fols. 29–30. Sampson had finished the letter R in 1911 and started S. ‘Scanning this new sea anxiously from the mast-head,’ he wrote to Augustus (30 August 1911), ‘I see it simply bristles with rocks not indicated on the charts.’ He sent the completed work to the Clarendon Press in July 1917, and though ‘a little wearied by the severity of Indian phonology’ was confident that the great work should prove ‘a complete guide to sorcery, fortune-telling, love and courtship, kichimas [inns], fiddling, harping, poaching and the life of the road’. NLW MS 22785D fol. 22.

  31 W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, 4 October 1907. Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

  32 Anthony Sampson ‘Scholar Gipsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ Chapter 3.

  33 Ethel Nettleship was a cellist who, in the First World War, became an ambulance driver and nurse in Italy and Malta and who had such a bad time there that, on her return, she took to lacemaking for her nerves. ‘Untidy and gay,’ Sir Caspar John remembered,’ – always hard up – accessible and directly interested in all our lives.’ Ursula, the third sister, was rather stern and aloof compared with Ethel. An adventurous mountaineer and skier, she became a singer and teacher of singing. She was for a long time closely connected with the Aldeburgh Festival, at which Benjamin Britten dedicated his A Ceremony of Carols to her. ‘Her energy, her eagerness, her determination to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, forced those she taught to give of their best, and produced remarkable results,’ wrote Ann Bridge (The Times, 7 May 1968). ‘Moving about, gesticulating, her greying hair wild, Ursula Nettleship conducting her choir was in fact an inspiring sight – lost in the music, utterly unselfconscious, dragging the sounds she wanted out of, often, very unpromising material.’

  34 This building, which has now been destroyed, was between No. 2 Rodney Street and the hospital at the corner of Mount Pleasant.

  35 Augustus John to Will Rothenstein. See Men and Memories Volume II p. 9.

  36 The Sandon Studios Society, of which John was elected an honorary member, was later set up in opposition to the University School of Art, to encourage freer and more vigorous draughtsmanship and a less restrictive attitude to painting. It was officially opened at 9 Sandon Terrace on 5 December 1905, but ‘any formality intended’, records R. H. Bisson in The Sandon Studios Society and the Arts (1965, p. 18), ‘was dissipated by Augustus John, who got very cheerful and fell headlong down the stairs’.

  37 Saturday Review (7 December 1904), p. 695.

  38 William Rothenstein Men and Memories Volume II (1932), p. 3.

  39 Two Liverpool models who later went ‘to breed in the colonies. May they raise many a stalwart son to our Empire!’ John wrote to the Rani.

  40 Campbell Dodgson A Catalogue of Etchings by Augustus John 1901–1914 (1920), pl. 14. (Hereafter referred to as CD, with the number.)

  41 One of his subjects, for instance, was ‘A Rabbi Studying’, from a drawing by Rembrandt. CD 73.

  42 Some of the plates would have been better if they had been left in the pure etched state, without being carried to a finish by lavish use of drypoint, which sacrificed their original crispness, leaving them soft and veiled. A number of the best ones are incomplete studies or sheets of studies, where the needle has been used like a pencil and the emphasis is on line; where, with a minimum of cross-hatching, the face has been left free from the rubberized pockmarks of dots and dashes intended to suggest variations of surface and of tone. These studies are often less self-conscious than the finished products, picked out more precisely in order to stress a curve or a fold. Some of the series of heads form a natural design on the page, and some of the studies give the impression of a fine watercolour wash. But John is at his best with single figures, and to his Liverpool period belong several good portraits including ‘The Mulatto’; ‘The Old Haberdasher’; ‘The Jewess’ with her shrewd suspicious gaze; and ‘Old Arthy’, where the effect of strong light behind the head creates a silhouette which the dense cross-hatching emphasizes without negating the figure, since the lines become part of the creases of the face and the shadows cast by it.

  43 Introduction to Augustus John: Fifty-two drawings, Lord David Cecil (1957), p. 12.

  44 The Walker Gallery was soon to return this compliment. When, in 1902, a group of subscribers gave William Rothenstein’s portrait of John to the gallery, it was catalogued anonymously as ‘Portrait of a Young Man’. When offered John’s official portrait of Chaloner Dowdall as Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1918, the gallery refused it. The first example of his work it bought was ‘Two Jamaican Girls’, in 1938.

  45 To Will Rothenstein, 9 March 1902.

  46 To Will Rothenstein n.d.

  47 Ida John to Ada Nettleship, 16 October 1901. NLW MS 22798B fols. 38–9.

  48 Ida John to John Trivett Nettleship, 24 December 1901. NLW MS 22798B fols. 72–4.

  49 These included a rather military portrait of Oliver Elton, the English Literature don; a curious King Lear impression of Edmund Muspratt, Pro-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, emerging from the shadows of a dark background; a sombre Victorian impression of Sir John Brunner, the radical plutocrat, with mother-of-pearl flesh tones, a white beard and a moustache slightly ginger on one side; a likeness of Sir John Sherrington, the scientist and a special friend of Ida’s, a timid, gauche figure, his eyes distrustfully peering through weak spectacles; and a comfortable spongy portrait of the architect Charles Reilly, rather sadly wrapped in a black-and-white scarf. ‘I took great pride & pleasure in painting Elton & shall look forward to documenting you with equal zest,’ Augustus wrote to Sir Charles Reilly on 15 May 1931, recording his wish to ‘keep up my old Liverpool associations’. Twenty-six years earlier he had written to Reilly, ‘I don’t remember Mr Muskpratt [sic] but crossed eyes are always good to paint as Raphael knew.’

  The portrait of Chaloner Dowdall (1909) is now at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; of Kuno Meyer (1911) at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; those of Mackay, Elton, Muspratt, Brunner and Sherrington at the University College Dining Club, Liverpool; and that of Reilly at the School of Architecture in Abercrombie Square, Liverpool.

  50 Ida John to Michel Salaman n.d. (July 1902). NLW MS 22788C fols. 69–70.

  51 In his preliminary synopsis for an autobiography, 1923.

  52 One impression, at least, is dated 1902. CD 47.

  53 ‘I would subscribe to make Augustus John Director of a Public House Trust,’ Walter Raleigh wrote to D. S. MacColl (27 May 1905). John’s time at Liverpool was later commemorated by a new public house, The Augustus John, which was erected next to the postgraduate club.

  54 Augustus John to Michel Salaman, July 1902. NLW MS 14928D fol. 57.

  55 Unpublished diaries of Arthur Symons.

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

  57 Unpublished diary
of L. A. G. Strong, in the possession of B. L. Reid, biographer of John Quinn.

  58 Augustus John to Michel Salaman, 1902. NLW MS 14928 fols. 52–3, 67–8.

  59 Osbert Sitwell Laughter in the Next Room (1975 edn), p. 29.

  60 Men and Memories Volume II p. 4.

  61 ‘I Speak for Myself’, recording for BBC Far Eastern Service, 10 September 1949.

  62 Ibid.

  63 Chiaroscuro p. 100.

  64 Walter Pater Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).

  65 In January 1903 John did two etchings of Lewis, and in the same year an excellent drawing and one of his very best oil portraits ‘full of Castilian dignity’, as John Russell described it, ‘ – displayed in a moment of repose’. Lewis did a drawing of John that is reproduced in the former’s volume of memoirs, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937).

  66 Wyndham Lewis to Augustus John n.d. (April 1910). NLW MS 22783D fols. 28–31.

  67 ‘I called you poltroon for not daring to let me know before in what contempt you held me – when I had admitted you – fondly – almost to my secret places, for not honouring me so far as to be frank in this,’ John wrote (June 1907) in a letter that gives the flavour of their explosive friendship. ‘I called you mesquin [shabby] for jesting at my discomfiture, for playing with words over the stricken corpse of our friendship, ever sickly and now treacherously murdered at a blow from you, poor thing! And I called you bête for so estimating me as to treat me thus – cavalierly – for though my value as a friend has not proved great, it is neither nil nor negligible. And I say this from the very abysm of humility. Nor am I one to be dismissed with a comic wave of the hand...

  ‘The wall you think fit to surround yourself with at times might be a good rampart against enemies, but its canvas bricks cannot be considered insurmountable to friends, and indeed (imagining them detachable) it would be an impertinence to level them in all seriousness at one’s devoted head. I am as little inquisitive by habit as secretive by nature… I have never committed the indecency of trespassing on the privacy of your consciousness, of which you are rightly jealous. But in a friendly relationship I expect, yes, I expect, a frankness of word and deed as touching that relationship – an honest traffic – within its limits – a plainness of dealing, which is the politeness of friends. That we have never practised – you have never – it seems to me – given the Index of friendship a chance. It would appear that you live in fear of intrusion and can but dally with your fellows momentarily as Robinson Crusoe with his savages before running back to his castle...’

  68 ‘Now, as for your recent drawings of which you sent me photostats, I must at once admit my inability to discover their merits, qua drawings,’ John wrote to Lewis (undated). ‘They lack charm, my dear fellow (from my point of view that is).’ In Blast, No 2 (1915), Lewis wrote an article called ‘History of the Largest Independent Society in England’, in which he called John ‘a great artist’, adding that he was lacking in control and prematurely exhausted – ‘an institution like Madame Tussaud’s’. He also credits John with bringing some exotic subject matter into English painting, before going on to describe his gypsy cult as hothouse and fin de siècle. Shortly after this article appeared the two painters met one night at a restaurant. John, all smiles at first and with a ‘woman-companion’, invited Lewis to join them, but later in the evening, when the talk turned to Blast, he lost his temper.

  Next day John wrote to apologize. ‘I must have been positively drunk to assume so ridiculously truculent an attitude upon such slender grounds. Your thrusts at me in “Blast” were salutary and well-deserved, as to the question of exact justice – any stick will do to rouse a lazy horse or whore and the heavier the better. I liked many of your observations in Blast if I don’t feel the particular charm of those designs which last night I characterized as “pokey”. Probably “charm” is quite the last thing you intend. I think pokiness is an excellent and necessary element of design and I understand and admire your insistence on it. But I deplore your exclusion of all the other concomitants provided by an all too lavish creation – and with which I imagine none is better able to deal than you.’

  69 Rebecca John Caspar John (1987), p. 17.

  70 Finishing Touches p. 26.

  71 The painting was bought by Charles Rutherston and now belongs to the Manchester City Art Gallery.

  72 Modern English Painters (1976 edn) Volume I p. 179. The picture is in the Manchester City Art Gallery.

  73 Called simply ‘Esther’. CD 1903.

  74 Tate Gallery, London, Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Catalogue no. 3171.

  75 The Burlington Magazine (May 1909).

  76 They were married on 31 August 1870 at the Register Office in Camberwell when he was twenty-two and she eighteen.

  77 Ida John to Michel Salaman n.d. (September–October 1902). NLW MS 22788C fols. 79–80.

  78 Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society Volume XLIX 3rd Series parts 1–2.

  79 ‘Miss McNeill’, Manchester City Art Gallery.

  80 Now in the Manchester City Art Gallery.

  81 Malcolm Easton Augustus John (1970), p. 43.

  82 Arthur Ransome Bohemia in London (1907; 2nd edn, 1912), p. 89. See also Malcolm Easton Augustus John.

  83 Charles McEvoy (1879–1929), the brother of Ambrose McEvoy, a village playwright and gifted clown.

  84 The Burlington Magazine No. 475 (October 1942), p. 237.

  85 Gwen John, Exhibition Catalogue, Arts Council, 1968. Introduction by Mary Taubman.

  86 Ida John to Gwen John n.d. (1903). NLW MS 22307C.

  87 Ida John to Gwen John (August 1903). NLW MS 22307C fols. 8–16.

  88 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 3 September 1903. NLW MS 21468D fols. 2–6.

  89 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. (late 1903). NLW MS 21468D fols. 7–8.

  90 Augustus John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (October 1903). NLW MS 22776D fol. 19.

  91 In an undated letter to Mrs Hugh Hammersley.

  92 Edna Clarke Hall’s unpublished diary for 1898. Quoted in Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 62.

  93 Ida John to Mary Dowdall (the Rani), March 1903.

  94 Edna Clarke Hall to Ida John. Quoted in Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 85.

  95 Augustus John to Michel Salaman n.d. (late 1902). NLW MS 14928D fol. 67.

  96 Alison Thomas Portraits of Women p. 86.

  97 Augustus John to Gwen John n.d. (autumn 1903). NLW MS 22311D fol. 135.

  98 Ida John to Gwen John n.d. (late December 1903). NLW MS 22397C fols. 19–20.

  99 Ida John to Winifred John n.d. (spring 1904). NLW MS 22311D fols. 138–9.

  100 Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (late 1904). NLW MS 21459E fol. 12.

  101 Ida John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (autumn 1903). NLW MS 22311D fols. 136–7.

  102 Ida John to Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill n.d. (spring 1904). NLW MS 22207C fols. 21–2.

  103 Ida and Augustus John to Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill, December 1903. NLW MS 22307C fols. 17–18.

  104 In May 1904 Lady Gregory sent Augustus a copy of her Poets and Dreamers, an ‘astonishing book’, he called it. In a letter to Lady Gregory (25 May 1904) he wrote: ‘Mr John Sampson of Liverpool know[s] more than any man about the Tinkers. He has collected a considerable vocabulary of their words besides tales and rhymes, and was the first to solve the mystery of their language and its origins. I have only known some English Tinkers whose language is but a debased and impoverished derivative of the Irish Tinkers‘…If you would care I would willingly send you the hundred words or so I know of English Shelta but I feel it is the richer Irish dialect you ought to come across and Mr Sampson is its custodian.’ Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

  105 Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols. 96–8.

  106 Ida and Augustus to Gwen and Dorelia, December 1903. NLW MS 22307C fol. 18. Essex County Council has placed a commemorative plaque on Elm House.

  107 Augustus John to
John Sampson n.d. (1903). NLW MS 21459E fol. 7.

  108 Dorelia to John Rothenstein (19 January 1951). See Modern English Painters (1976 edn), ‘Sickert to Grant’, p. 187.

  109 ‘Dorelia by Lamplight at Toulouse’ (privately owned); ‘The Student’ (City of Manchester Art Gallery); and ‘Dorelia in a Black Dress’ (Tate Gallery, 5910).

  110 Ida John to Gwen John n.d. and 24 August 1903. NLW MS 22307C fols. 8–16.

  111 Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904. NLW MS 22305D fols.96–8.

  112 Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904. NLW MS 22305D. fols. 96–8.

  113 Dorelia’s words, spoken to the author, while describing this time.

  114 Ida John to Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill n.d. (spring 1904). NLW MS 22397C fols. 21–2.

  115 Augustus John to Gwen John, 28 March 1904 and 16 May 1904. NLW MS 22395D fols. 96–101.

  116 Dorelia to the author, 3 July 1969.

  117 Ida John to Gwen John n.d. (May/June 1904). NLW MS 22307C fol. 23.

  118 Ibid.

  119 Gwen to Dorelia n.d. (May/June 1904). NLW MS 22789D fols. 58–9.

  120 Dorelia McNeill to Gwen John n.d. (May/June 1904). NLW MS 22308C fols. 9–10.

  121 Ibid.

  122 Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (May/June 1904). NLW MS 22789D fols. 60–1.

  123 Leonard to Gwen John n.d. (June/July 1904). NLW MS 22305C.

  124 ‘Love seeketh not itself to please,

  Nor for itself hath any care,

  But for another gives its ease,

  And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.’

  So sang a little Clod of Clay,

  Trodden with the cattle’s feet,

  But a Pebble of the brook

  Warbled out these metres meet:

  ‘Love seeketh only Self to please,

  To bind another to its delight,

  Joys in another’s loss of ease,

  And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.’

  125 Gwen John to Dorelia McNeill n.d. (July 1904). NLW MS 22799D fol. 35.

  126 ‘Miss Dorelia Ardor, Pirini, I must keep writing,’ he wrote from La Place Verte in Antwerp. ‘You have not written to me yet. Do you not believe you are precious to me, invaluable one! I am alone and what can I do but think, and thoughts of all sorts come to me. I know if I don’t hear from you tomorrow I will come to find you again. I can always claim you; I will have you for myself… I have tears of love for you and yet I am not drunk. Sweet I have met you on the high-way and I have recognised you and kissed you and you have fled into the woods and I have followed you at last and found you again. My girl, my sweet friend whom I love so much can you withhold your lips your eyes and your heart and your mind from me your lover – he who will take no denial – no denial. No denial is valid with him henceforth. It is useless – my lady, Sibyl, Dryad, form without circumference, incomprehensible simplicity, earth and air –