110 See Malcolm Easton Augustus John: Portraits of the Artist’s Family p. 52.
111 Arthur Symons The Fool of the World (1906), p. 69.
112 Arthur Symons to Rhoda Bowser, 6 May 1900. See Roger Lhombreaud Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography (1963), p. 175.
113 Arthur Symons to John Quinn, 29 June 1914 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).
114 Augustus to Gwen, 23 June 1920. NLW MS 22305D fol. 133.
115 See Agnes Tobin: Letters, Translations, Poems. With some account of her life (Grabhorn Press for John Howell, San Francisco 1958), p. xii.
116 Quinn to Joseph Conrad, 12 April 1916.
117 Alice B. Saarinen The Proud Possessors (1959), p. 206.
118 Quinn to Josephine Huneker, 10 April 1909 and 14 July 1909.
119 ‘[Augustus John] has painted Symons with the relentless truth we all desire in a portrait,’ Harris wrote: ‘the sparse grey hair, the high bony forehead, the sharp ridge of Roman nose. The fleshless cheeks; the triangular wedge of thin face shocks one like the stringy turkey neck and the dreadful claw-like fingers of the outstretched hand. A terrible face – ravaged like a battlefield; the eyes dark pools, mysterious, enigmatic; the lid hangs across the left eyeball like a broken curtain. I see the likeness, and yet, staring at this picture, I can hardly recall my friend of twenty-six years ago.’
120 John’s portrait of Quinn now hangs in the New York Public Library. In a letter to his wife (25 August 1909) Symons gives rather a different account to Miss Tobin’s. ‘We went to John’s studio at 3. The Quinn was finished: a very fine portrait: 5 days!’
121 Quinn to John, 31 January 1910.
122 A fair example may be taken from a letter Quinn wrote to James Huneker, the American art critic (4 February 1913): ‘In my cable to Fry I expressly said that I bought the picture on your recommendation only so that if you have any fish to fry or bones to pick with Roger of the same name, then why not fry Fry. Personally, I never take fries; I always go in for roasts or broils...’
123 B. L. Reid The Man from New York. John Quinn and His Friends (1968), p. 73.
124 Ibid. p. 76.
125 Ibid. p. 77.
126 Horizon Volume IV No. 20 (August 1941), p. 125. This descripton and comment were omitted from Chiaroscuro twelve years later.
127 This letter is not in the Quinn Collection at the New York Public Library, but belongs to the author.
128 In a letter sent the previous day (31 January 1910) Quinn had written: ‘Syphilis is the national disease of Italy. Before a white man has intercourse with an Italian woman or a white woman with a “dago” (our word for an Italian) male or female should be examined by a physician, a non-Italian of course, to see there is no gonorrhoea or syphilis… and even then there is danger. For Heaven’s sake, if you do go to the rotten place look out for this. Whisky and syphilis are two of the greatest enemies of the human race and the latter often follows indulgence in the former… Youth is a precious thing.’
129 Wyndham Lewis to John n.d. NLW MS 22783D fol. 32.
130 John to Quinn, 18 December 1909.
131 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. NLW MS 22777D fols. 12–14.
132 From, in fact, Lord Grimthorpe’s villa at Ravello.
133 Chiaroscuro pp. 104–5.
134 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Hôtel Olympia, Place de l’Horloge. NLW MS 22776D fol. 104.
135 Augustus to Dorelia, 27 January 1910 from Restaurant Gelet, Aux Lices, Aries. NLW MS 22776D fol. 111.
136 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Café Gilles Roux, Paradou, Bouches-du-Rhône. NLW MS 22776D fols. 107–8.
137 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Grand Bar des Glaces, Avignon. NLW MS 22776D fols. 109–10.
138 Interview with Marie Mauron, September 1971.
139 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910) from Grand Bars des Cinq Parties du Monde, Marseilles. NLW MS 22776D fol. 117.
140 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910). NLW MS 22776D fols. 118–19.
141 John to Ottoline Morrell, 11 February 1910.
142 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910). NLW MS 22776D fols. 125–6.
143 Horizon Volume VI No. 36 (December 1942), p. 422.
144 Helen Maitland to Henry Lamb, 23 February 1910.
145 Like Augustus, Boris Anrep had landed himself with two wives in the same house – number two being useful, it was said, for selecting books from the public library for Helen on the principle of their not being the sort she would choose for herself. But Boris disappointed Helen ‘by his literary Philistinism and preference for legshows to those concerned more with the head’, Romilly John remembered (29 July 1972). ‘…It was rumoured that she came from California which might account for her devotion to Culture and her eventual rejection of Boris and Hampstead in favour of Roger Fry and Bloomsbury.’
146 In the first draft of his autobiography, Augustus referred to Helen as ‘censorious’, adding: ‘I have always disappointed her, being somewhat earth-bound and unable to rise to the lofty stratosphere, where, without oxygen, she seems most at home… For, feeling myself accursed, her strictures left me subdued but with an inkling at least of higher things beyond my grasp.’ Dorelia, however, considered these observations too sarcastic and they do not appear in Chiaroscuro.
147 Dorelia to Ottoline Morrell, February 1910.
148 Romilly John The Seventh Child (1932), p. 8.
149 Rebecca John Caspar John pp. 26–8. After Augustus’s death, Caspar made arrangements for the correspondence between his father and Bazin to be given to the Musée Aéronautique in Paris.
150 John to Scott Macfie, 2 May 1910.
151 John to Arthur Symons n.d.
152 John to Scott Macfie n.d.
153 Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell p. 199.
154 Ibid. p. 200.
155 John to Chaloner Dowdall n.d.
156 Horizon Volume VI No. 32 (August 1942), pp. 135–8.
157 Frank Harris Contemporary Portraits: Third Series (1920), pp. 181–9.
158 Chiaroscuro p. 128.
159 Hesketh Pearson Extraordinary People (1962), p. 212. Also private information.
160 ‘I WENT TO NEECE TO STAY WITH SOME PEOPLE BUT I FOUND THEY WERE SO HORRIBLE I RAN AWAY ONE MORNING EARLY, BEFORE THEY WERE UP NEECE IS A LOVELY PLACE FULL OF HORRIBLE PEOPLE.’ Augustus to David John, March 1910.
161 The Gertz papers are in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
162 ‘I wired to a young woman to come and assist,’ he gruffly explained to Wyndham Lewis (July 1910), ‘Lamb accompanied the young woman and spent 2 or 3 days in this town; possibly with the object of making himself useful or perhaps with some purely sentimental motif or both.’ In fact Lamb seems to have spent about ten days there. ‘John’s alarm was naturally exaggerated by past experience,’ he explained to Ottoline Morrell.
163 ‘One evening Helen experimentally served up an untried Greek vegetable which I rashly pronounced delicious. A deathly silence ensued. It was as if I had praised Alma Tadema. Such are the pitfalls of associating with the aesthetes!’ Romilly John wrote (29 July 1972).
164 John to Quinn, 25 May 1910.
165 John to Quinn, 25 August 1910.
166 John to Quinn n.d.
167 John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.
168 John to Quinn, 25 May 1910.
CHAPTER VI: REVOLUTION 1910
1 In her lecture ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ delivered on 18 May 1924 at Cambridge.
2 The Times (7 November 1910), p. 12.
3 Morning Post (1 November 1910), p. 3.
4 Ibid. (16 November 1910), p. 3.
5 Michael Holroyd Lytton Strachey (1994 edn), p. 271.
6 Frances Spalding Vanessa Bell (1983), p. 91.
7 Ibid. p. 92.
8 Diary entry 14 December 1910. See Richard Shone Bloomsbury Portraits (1993 edn), p. 61.
9 James Bone ‘The Tendencies of Modern Art’ Edinburgh Review (April 1913), pp. 420�
��34. Collected in Post-Impressionists in England – The Critical Reception (ed. J. B. Bullen 1988), pp. 433–47·
10 Frances Spalding Vanessa Bell p. 109.
11 Vanessa Bell to Margery Snowden, 21 October 1908. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (ed. Regina Marler 1993), p. 75.
12 Laurence Binyon ‘Post-Impressionists’ Saturday Review (12 November 1910), pp. 609–10.
13 ‘The Autumn Salon’ The Times (2 October 1908), p. 8.
14 Frances Spalding Vanessa Bell p. 93.
15 Frank Rutter ‘An Art Causerie’ Sunday Times (10 November 1912), p. 19.
16 Roger Fry ‘A Postscript on Post-Impressionism’ Nation (24 December 1910).
17 Grey Gowrie ‘The Twentieth Century’ The Genius of British Painting (ed. David Piper 1975), p. 302.
18 Pall Mall Gazette (25 November 1912).
19 In a letter dated March 1909 to Florence Beerbohm. David Cecil Transcripts, Merton College, Oxford.
‘Max has done a very funny caricature of me – dozens of awful art students in the background,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia. Besides ‘Insecurity’ (now owned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), Sir Rupert Hart-Davis has ‘run to earth’ another five Beerbohm caricatures.
20 Max Beerbohm to Florence Beerbohm, 22 May 1909.
21 ‘In the Fair Women Show, by the way, John has a portrait in oils – a full length – of “A Smiling Woman” – which seems to me really great – quite apart from and above anything else there; and you behold in me a convert.’ Max to Florence Beerbohm, March 1909.
22 Paul Nash Outline (1949), p. 7.
23 C. R. W. Nevinson Paint and Prejudice (1937), p. 189.
24 Saturday Review (7 December 1907), pp. 694–5.
25 Magazine of Fine Arts (May-August 1906).
26 Quoted by David Piper in Augustus John – the pattern of the painter’s career, BBC Third Programme (15 April 1954).
27 Richard Shone Bloomsbury Portraits (1993 edn), p. 61.
28 See Sunday Times (1 December 1912), Daily Chronicle (26 November 1912), Spectator (30 November 1912), Manchester Guardian (25 November 1912), Daily Mail (23 November 1912), Observer (24 November 1912), The Times (23 November 1912).
29 See John Woodeson ‘Mark Gertler. A Survey’ (1971).
30 Simon Watney English Post-Impressionism (1980), p. 21.
31 ‘The Academy in Totalitaria’ Art News Annual (1967).
32 Burlington Magazine Volume XV No. 73 (April 1909), p. 17.
33 John Rothenstein Modern English Painters Volume I, Sickert to Grant (rev. edn 1962), p. 207.
34 Augustus John – the pattern of the painter’s career, BBC Third Programme (15 April 1954).
35 Saturday Review (10 December 1910), p. 747.
36 Pall Mall Gazette (11 December 1910).
37 The Queen (10 December 1910).
38 Daily Graphic (10 December 1910).
39 Burlington Magazine (February 1910), p. 267.
40 It is this shared discovery, as well as his own independence, that Augustus signified in a letter to Quinn (10 February 1911): ‘I don’t think we need Fry’s lead: he’s a gifted obscurantist and no doubt has his uses in the world. He is at any rate alive to unrecognised possibilities and guesses at all sorts of wonderful things.’ Elsewhere in this letter he writes: ‘If you sent him [Fry] a gilded turd in a glass case he would probably discover some strange poignant rhythm in it and hail you as a cataclysmic genius and persuade the Contemporary Art Society to buy the production for the Nation.’
41 He had also recommended Mark Gertler’s early work – which hung alongside his own at the Chenil Gallery – but by 16 February 1916 he is telling Quinn that ‘Gertler’s work has gone to buggery and I can’t stand it. Not that he hasn’t ability of a sort and all the cheek of a Yid, but the spirit of the work is false and affected.’
With Eric Gill it was the other way about. On 10 February 1911, he is advising Quinn against buying his work. ‘Personally I don’t admire the things and feel pretty certain that you wouldn’t neither. I admit that Gill is an enterprising young man and not without ability. He has been a carver of inscriptions till quite recently when he started doing figures. His knowledge of human form is, you may be sure, of the slightest and I feel strongly that his experience of human beings is anything but profound. I know him personally. He carves well and succeeds in expressing one or two cut-and-dried philosophical ideas. He is much impressed by the importance of copulation possibly because he has had so little to do with that subject in practice, and apparently considers himself obliged to announce the gospel of the flesh, to a world that doesn’t need it. Innes calls him “the naughty schoolmaster”, Gore calls him the “precious cockney” and I call him the “artist of the Urinal”… I’ll let you know when I see a thing of Gill’s which I can really respect and desire. His present things are taking at first glance as they look so simple and unsophisticated – but, to me at least, only art at first glance.’ As Fiona MacCarthy remarks in her biography of Gill (1989), ‘For Augustus John to claim crassly that Gill was impressed by the importance of copulation because he had so little to do with it in practice was to misread Gill’s whole outlook.’ But three years later his opinion of Gill’s work had risen. ‘I also ordered you one of Gill’s things, a dancing figure in stone,’ he wrote to Quinn (26 January 1914). ‘…Gill has made good progress and his things are admirable now, both in workmanship and idea.’
42 Gwen John to Augustus n.d. (c. 1909–10). NLW MS 22782D fols. 29–30.
43 John Currie, who appears as ‘Logan’ in Gilbert Cannan’s novel Mendel (1916), shot himself and his mistress in a fit of jealousy. ‘You remember Currie, some of whose works you bought?’ Augustus asked Quinn (10 October 1914). ‘He shot his mistress dead yesterday and then himself. He has since died of four bullet wounds in the chest. The girl [Dolly Henry] was staying here [Alderney Manor] lately carrying on a futile love affair with another young man. We all got sick of her. She was an attractive girl or used to be when I knew her first, but seemed to have deteriorated into a deceitful little bitch.
‘It is a terrible affair and it’s a good thing I suppose that Currie died. He was an able fellow and would have had a successful career.’ Augustus’s portrait of Dolly Henry (sometimes called O’Henry) is in the South African National Gallery at Cape Town, entitled ‘The Woman in Green’. The gallery also owns his portrait of Wilson Steer’s most celebrated sitter, Rose Pettigrew.
44 Spencer Gore, whose work Augustus recommended to Quinn as ‘good and promising’. In 1928 (Vogue, 25 July) he wrote: ‘The work of Spencer F. Gore, although [attracting] the admiration of a small body of genuine picture-lovers, undoubtedly failed to reach its deserved favour with the general public on account of the war following so soon after his death, which befell when he might be said to have arrived at the prime of his accomplishment. But this unconscious injustice was repaired by the April [1928] exhibition [at the Leicester Galleries], when it was realised that Gore was one of the most notable landscape painters of his time.’ And again in 1942 (Horizon Volume VI No. 36, December 1942, p. 426) he wrote: ‘The industrious apprentice is a type to be admired rather than loved. In Spencer Gore’s case, however, immense industry was coupled not only with a rare and ever-ripening talent; he possessed in addition an amiable, modest and upright nature which elicited the deep affection and respect of all those who knew him.’
45 ‘He [Greaves] is a real artist-kid, with Chelsea in his brain. I shall never cease to appreciate his work – so unlike Whistler’s at bottom.’ John to Quinn, 17 May 1912.
46 On 19 December 1913, Augustus had written to Quinn urging him to buy a Bomberg drawing, ‘extremely good and dramatic representing a man dead with mourning family, very simplified and severe. I’ld like you to have it.’ Quinn bought it for fifteen pounds (equivalent to £670 in 1996).
47 Vogue, 11 January 1928, ‘The Paintings of Evan Walters’; 7 March, ‘The Unknown Artist’; 18 April, ‘The Woman Artist’; 27 June, ‘P
aris and the Painter’; 25 July, ‘Three English Artists’; 22 August, ‘Some Contemporary French Painters’; 3 September, ‘Five Modern Artists’; 31 October, ‘Interior Decoration’. The series was originally intended to comprise twelve articles but, even with the help of T. W. Earp, Augustus did not get beyond eight.
48 Arnold Bennett The Pretty Lady (1918).
49 Frank Rutter Since I Was Twenty-five (1927), pp. 191–2.
50 He was, however, elected with Oscar Kokoschka and Jack Yeats as an honorary member of the London Group in the Second World War.
51 Roger Fry to Will Rothenstein, 28 March 1911. The Letters of Roger Fry (ed. Denys Sutton) Volume I (1972), p. 344.
52 27 July 1920. See The Letters of Roger Fry Volume II (1972), p. 486.
53 See Mary Lago Imperfect Encounter pp. 10–13.
54 The Library, King’s College, Cambridge.
55 ‘Seriousness’ by Clive Bell, New Statesman and Nation, 4 June 1938, pp. 952–3. ‘If only Augustus John had been serious what a fine painter he might have been… in my opinion “the latest paintings of Augustus John” at Tooth’s gallery in Bond Street are almost worthless.
‘They are not serious: in the strict sense of the word they are superficial. The painter accepts a commonplace view and renders it with a thoughtless gesture. And even that gesture is not sustained… the picture crumbles into nothingness. Nothingness: at least I can find nothing beneath the general effect… there is less talent than trick; and there is no thought at all… the master has preferred carelessly to dash on the canvas a brushful of colour which at most indicates a fact of no aesthetic importance...’
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