Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  113 Dame Laura Knight to the author. She recalled that they were living in three cottages knocked into one, which made a room thirty feet in length. A panel of Dorelia at Falmouth that winter is called ‘The Mauve Jersey’.

  114 Horizon Volume XI No. 64 (April 1945), p. 258. In Chiaroscuro, p. 205, ‘our excitement’ has been changed to ‘the general excitement’.

  115 Augustus to Gwen John n.d. NLW MS 22305C fols. 114–16.

  116 Augustus to Dorelia, 6 August 1914. NLW MS 22777D fols. 52–3.

  CHAPTER VIII: HOW HE GOT ON

  1 Augustus to Dorelia, from Mallord Street n.d. (5 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fols. 59–1.

  2 John to Quinn, 12 October 1914.

  3 John to , 13 August 1915.

  4 John to Dorelia n.d. (summer 1917). NLW MS 22777D fol. 138.

  5 Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. (September 1914). NLW MS 21468 fols. 76–8.

  6 Susan Chitty Gwen John (1981), p. 136.

  7 Augustus to Gwen John, 24 October 1914. NLW MS 22305D fols. 118–19.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Augustus to Gwen John, 25 December 1914. NLW MS 22305D fols. 120–21.

  10 Winifred John to Gwen John n.d. (c. 1904). NLW MS 22307C fols. 116–17.

  11 Winifred John to Augustus John, 8 January 1906. NLW MS 22782D fols. 121–4.

  12 Thornton John to Gwen John, 7 February 1917. NLW MS 22307C fols. 51–3. Thornton came back twice to Europe. The first time was in the autumn of 1910 (when he was thinking of getting work in Ireland and brought back one of Gwen’s pictures of Fenella Lovell). The second time was at the beginning of 1915. ‘Factory work is an abomination,’ he wrote to Gwen, ‘but there is nothing to do but hold on grimly.’

  13 Ibid.

  14 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (31 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fol. 56.

  15 John to Ottoline Morrell, 1 January 1915.

  16 John to Quinn, 15 February 1915.

  17 Irish Times (21 November 1964).

  18 Augustus to Dorelia, from the Railway Hotel in Galway City n.d. (13 October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 103–4.

  19 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (17 October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 105–6.

  20 John to Quinn, 15 November 1915.

  21 John to Shaw, from Mallord Street, 18 December 1915. BL Add. MS 59539.

  22 John to Quinn, 19 October 1914.

  23 John to Quinn, 12 October 1914.

  24 This commission to paint Lord Fisher had come through Epstein, who had recently done a bust of Fisher for the Duchess of Hamilton. His three-quarter length portrait of Fisher, which was shown at the Alpine Club in 1917–18 and priced at seven hundred guineas (equivalent to £18,500 in 1996), is owned by the National Gallery of Scotland at Edinburgh, and a half-length portrait is in the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.

  25 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (c. June 1916). NLW MS 22777D fol. 119.

  26 Albert Rutherston to William Rothenstein, 8 December 1916.

  27 The Times (3 March 1920).

  28 Jan Morris Fisher’s Face (1995), pp. 132–3; see also p. 221.

  29 John to Quinn, 19 January 1916.

  30 John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

  31 Frances Lloyd George The Years That Are Past (1967), p. 84.

  32 Frances Stevenson Lloyd George. A Diary (ed. A. J. P. Taylor 1971), pp. 83, 103–4; entry for 12 March 1916.

  33 It is now in the Aberdeen Art Gallery.

  34 At the Villa la Chaumière in September 1919.

  35 Quinn to Kuno Meyer, 10 May 1916.

  36 See W. H. Davies Later Days (1925), pp. 177–84.

  37 Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

  38 John to Dorelia, from Coole Park n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 80–85.

  39 Bernard Shaw to Francis Chesterton, 5 May 1915. Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters Volume 3 1911–1925 (ed. Dan H. Laurence 1985), pp. 294–5.

  40 Lady Gregory remembered this rather differently. In Coole (1971) she wrote: ‘John asked while he was here if he might paint Richard, and I, delighted, reading a story to the child, kept him still for the sitting. I longed to possess the picture but did not know how I could do so without stinting the comforts of the household, and said no word. But I think he must have seen my astonished delight when he gave it to me, said it was for me he had painted it. That was one of the happy moments of my life.’ She also added: ‘I had from the time of his birth dreamed he might one day be painted by that great Master, Augustus John, yet it had seemed but a dream.’

  41 Anne Gregory Me and Nu: Childhood at Coole (1970), p. 47.

  42 ‘Augustus John had been very annoyed at being thwarted, and had given Richard that funny look to pay Grandma out! The picture of Richard was hung in the drawing-room, on the left of the big fireplace.’ Anne Gregory also remembered that John ‘was large and rather frightening to look at, and we felt he might step on us, as he seemed to stride about not ever looking where he was going.’ Me and Nu, Chapter VII.

  43 Lady Gregory to W. B. Yeats n.d.

  44 S. Winsten Days with Bernard Shaw (1948), p. 164.

  45 Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence (ed. Alan Dent 1952), p. 175.

  46 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 82–3.

  47 Chiaroscuro pp. 96–9.

  48 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 84–5.

  49 John to Quinn, 15 November 1915.

  50 To his secretary, Ann Elder, Shaw described John (30 April 1915) as ‘a painter of intense reputation among advanced people’. Of the three portraits Shaw temporarily owned two. In 1922 he presented one of these to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. ‘I note that you are keeping the best – with the blue background – which I suppose still adorns one of the top corners of your rooms at Adelphi Terrace,’ John wrote to him (24 March 1922). This portrait is now at Ayot St Lawrence and belongs to the National Trust.

  51 Wyndham Lewis to John, from 19 rue Mouton Duvernet, avenue d’Orléans (Paris) n.d. NLW MS 22783D fols. 19–20.

  52 Shaw to John, 6 August 1915.

  53 He attributed the expression to Shaw’s midday intake of vegetables, though admitted (16 May 1915) that ‘the one in which you have apparently reached a state of philosophic oblivion is perhaps liable to misinterpretation’. It was originally credited with the title ‘The Philosopher in Contemplation’ or ‘When Homer Nods’. It was bought by an Australian who later sold it in London where it was purchased by the Queen. It now (1995) hangs in Clarence House as part of the Queen Mother’s collection.

  54 Shaw to John, from the Hydro, Torquay, 6 August 1915.

  55 Between John’s portrait and Rodin’s bust, which had been done a few years earlier, Shaw differentiated. ‘With an affectation of colossal vanity, Shaw gestured and genuflected before the Rodin bust of himself when I once visited him,’ Archibald Henderson wrote (George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century, 1956, p. 789); ‘but during a later visit delightedly rushed me into the dining-room to see the Augustus John poster-portrait, in primary colours – flying locks and breezy moustaches, rectangular head, and a caricaturishly flouting underlip. To the John portrait he pointed with a delicious chuckle: “There’s the portrait of my great reputation”; then pointing to the Rodin bust, he breathed: “Just as I am, without one plea”.’ But it is arguable that, by 1915, Shaw’s protective covering, which he called ‘G.B.S.’, was complete.

  56 It was at this exhibition that the famous ‘ladies of Gregynog’, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, acting on the advice of Hugh Blaker, Curator of the Holburne Museum at Bath, bought their first Augustus John pictures – ten oils (including the self-portrait on the jacket of the Chatto & Windus hardback edition of this book) and a drawing – for £2,350 (equivalent to £84,500 in 1996). In 1918 Margaret Davies bought another oil (‘Study of a Boy’ [Edwin]), and in 1919 added John’s portrait of W. H. Davies (whose Selected Poems and The Lover’s Song Book were published by the Gregynog Press) as well as a portfolio of ten drawings to their joint collection. T
his collection was eventually given to the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff.

  In October 1920 John dispatched a complete set of his etchings to the National Museum of Wales, the only other public collections having this suite of etchings being Cambridge and Berlin (and in 1949 the British Museum, to which Campbell Dodgson bequeathed his collection). Though the National Museum of Wales was given two John pictures by the Contemporary Art Society in 1936 and 1942, it was not until the end of the 1940s that it bought its first John work (a flower painting, ‘Cineraria’, in 1948 and a nude design in 1949). In 1962 the museum bought the full-length painting ‘Dorelia in the Garden at Alderney Manor’ at the Christie’s sale of John’s work. It also bought portrait drawings of John Cowper Powys and Frank Brangwyn in the 1960s, and then the small oil paintings of Caitlin Macnamara and Ida John and the ‘French Fisher-boy’ of 1907 (owned by Judge Stephen Tumim), some studies for his Slade School ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’ and miscellaneous studies and sketchbooks that had been owned by Michel Salaman, all in the 1970s. From the estate of Dorelia in 1972 the museum purchased over one thousand drawings, one hundred and ten paintings and three bronzes, making it, in the words of the Assistant Keeper, Mark L. Evans, ‘the principal repository of John’s work and the main centre for research on his art’.

  57 Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 16 March 1915. British Library.

  58 Lytton Strachey to Carrington, 8 March 1917. ‘At first she [Vivien] completely ignored me. She then would say nothing but “Oh no!” whenever I addressed her. But eventually she gave me a chocolate – “Man! Have a chockle,” – which I consider a triumph.’

  59 ‘Vivien John. Malaysia: its People and its Jungle’. Upper Grosvenor Galleries, 19 January-6 February 1971.

  60 See Nicolette Devas Two Flamboyant Fathers (1966), pp. 36–49.

  61 John to Dorelia, April 1915. NLW MS 22777D fols. 74–5.

  62 Some years later, when John was visiting the composer Jack Moeran in Norfolk, he called on Brownsword; and continued seeing her later still after she was widowed, ‘always on friendly terms’.

  Gwyneth became a talented painter, and mixed with the Johns after she had grown up, but remained outside the family circle. She was always fond of Augustus, would frequently see him in London, and lent him her studio to work in occasionally. ‘He was a unique and wonderful man,’ she wrote after his death.

  63 John to Quinn, 13 August 1915. In The Arms of Time. A Memoir (1979), pp. 63–72, her son Rupert Hart-Davis wrote, ‘the two people who most often advised her to give up alcohol altogether were John and her brother Duff, two of the most persistent drinkers of their time.’ John also introduced her to Wyndham Lewis with whom, ‘her heart as always too soon made glad’, she had an affair. John, too, was fascinated by her and ‘after his fashion, loved her. She thought him a genius.’ He drew several pencil heads of her and of her two children, Deirdre and Rupert, for whom he recommended John Hope-Johnstone as a holiday tutor. ‘He challenged all comers to box with him,’ Rupert Hart-Davis remembered, ‘and the milkman, who was a much better performer, repeatedly knocked him down, saying “Sorry, sir” each time.’

  64 According to Ezra Pound, this verse sprang from ‘the Castalian fount of the Chenil’. In a letter to Wyndham Lewis (13 January 1918) Pound noted: ‘(Authorship unrecognised, I first heard it in 1909). It is emphatically NOT my own, I believe it to have come from an elder generation.’

  65 In the last week of January 1915. Lamb had been in Guy’s Hospital for an operation. ‘I have written to Dodo to know if she can pick me up… It all depends on whether J[ohn] will be gone: his temper not being considered good enough to stand the strain of a visit from me,’ Lamb had explained to Lytton Strachey (15 January 1915). After his visit, he wrote (31 January 1915): ‘They have been discussing the moral effects of being in hospital, saying that one’s sensitiveness is apt to become magnified. I wonder if that is the reason why I was miserable at Parkstone.’

  66 Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 13 September 1916.

  67 Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (31 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fols. 48–9.

  68 Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 10 May 1916.

  69 John to Quinn, 26 January 1914. See also John’s Foreword to Cecil Gray’s Peter Warlock, A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (1934), pp. 11–12.

  70 John to Evan Morgan (Lord Tredegar) n.d.

  71 Frida Strindberg to John n.d. NLW MS 22785D fols. 150–3.

  In Chiaroscuro John records: ‘I received a letter from her, written on the ship. It was a noble epistle. In it I was absolved from all blame: all charges, all imputations were withdrawn: she alone had been at fault from the beginning: though this wasn’t true, I was invested with a kind of halo, quite unnecessarily. I wish I had kept this letter; it might serve me in an emergency.’ The letter, written from the RMS Campania, has since come to light. In it she writes: ‘The chief fault others had, who interfered with lies and mischief. The rest, I take it, was my fault – and therefore I stretch out my heart in farewell… You are the finest man I met in this world, dear John – and you’ll ever be to me what the Sun is, and the Sea around me, and the immortal beauty of nature. Therefore if ever you think of me, do it without bitterness and stripe [sic] me of all the ugliness that events have put on me and which is not in my heart… Goodbye John. I don’t know whether you know how awfully good at the bottom of your heart you are – I know. And that is why I write this to you – Frida Strindberg.’

  72 See Finishing Touches, pp. 84–5.

  73 ‘To the Eiffel Tower Restaurant’, in Sublunary, pp. 93–5.

  74 Constantine FitzGibbon The Life of Dylan Thomas (1968), p. 163.

  75 Ibid., loc. cit.

  76 Charles Wheeler High Relief (1968), p. 31.

  77 Letter from Dorothy Brett to the author, 7 August 1968.

  78 See Carrington, Letters and Extracts from her Diaries (ed. David Garnett 1970), pp. 74–5, where this letter is incorrectly dated 25 July 1917.

  79 And repeated on 29 July at the Lyric Theatre. It had been organized in conjunction with the Ladies Auxiliaries Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association. See the Enthoven Collection at the Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum, Covent Garden.

  80 See Appendix Five.

  81 Epstein to Quinn, 12 August 1914.

  82 Epstein to Quinn, 4 September 1914.

  83 Epstein. An Autobiography (1955), p. 89.

  84 Epstein to Qµinn, 20 July 1917.

  85 See, for example, Sunday Herald (10 June 1917).

  86 Information from Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. Later in life, while not seeing much of each other, Epstein and John remained friendly. Kathleen Epstein remembered that they met once in a street and, in answer to a question, Epstein said he was doing good work but could not sell it and was very poor. John at once took out a chequebook and wrote him a cheque ‘which we will never refer to again’. This was in the 1930s.

  87 Chiaroscuro p. 125.

  88 Sir Herbert A. Barker Leaves from My Life (1927), pp. 263–5.

  89 By way of payment John offered to ‘do a head’ of Barker. ‘If you will rattle my bones, I should be more than repaid!’ This portrait, the first of two painted during the war, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Barker, who often slept during the sittings, nevertheless observed: ‘It was a wonderful thing to watch John at work – to note his interest and utter absorption in what he was doing… The genius of the born craftsman was apparent in every look and movement. He had a habit when most wrapped up in some master-stroke or final touch of running backwards some feet from the canvas with his critical eyes bent upon the painting. Once when doing this he tripped and almost fell heavily over the stove near by.’ The portrait used to hang in Barker’s waiting-room to encourage the patients. Variously described as ‘Satanic’ or like ‘a Venetian Doge’, it was, Barker bravely maintained, one of John’s ‘best male portraits’: adding ‘I look upon John as one of the greatest portrait painters who has ever lived.’ John himself described the pain
ting, in a letter to Hope-Johnstone, as ‘just like him, stuffy and good’. Early in March 1932 John saw Barker again, this time in Jersey. ‘You have always done me good, and I feel it is high time I put myself in your hands again,’ he had written (17 September 1931). During this visit he began a third portrait. See Reginald Pound Harley Street (1967), pp. 80, 123–4. Also unpublished correspondence at the Royal College of Surgeons.

  90 The phrase is Malcolm Easton’s. See his The Art of Augustus John (1974).

  91 The Times (27 November 1917).

  92 Osbert Sitwell Great Morning! (1948), p. 248.

  93 In the Burlington Magazine (April 1916). See also his article for February 1916 on the New English Art Club.

  94 Burlington Magazine (December 1940), p. 28.

  95 John to Evan Morgan, December 1914.

  96 December 1914.

  97 ‘You are too much like the popular idea of an angel!’ John wrote to her (5 October 1917), ‘(not my idea – which is of course the traditional one).’ This portrait (oil 34 by 25 inches) was bought in 1933 from Arthur Tooth and Sons for £1,400 (equivalent to £44,500 in 1996) by the Art Gallery of Ontario. ‘At the time of purchase we were requested to hang it as Portrait of a Lady in Black,’ the Curator wrote, ‘and not refer to the fact that it was a portrait of Lady Cynthia.’ In 1968 it was reproduced as the frontispiece to Cynthia Asquith’s Diaries.

  98 In Chiaroscuro John reveals that Lawrence, despite his eagerness to have Cynthia Asquith portrayed disagreeably, protested that he himself was ‘too ugly’ to be painted. ‘I met D. H. Lawrence in the flesh only once,’ John wrote, and adds that Cynthia Asquith ‘treated us to a box at the Opera that evening’. In fact he and Lawrence met twice, the visit to Aida taking place twelve days later, on 13 November – a meeting Cynthia Asquith describes in Haply I May Remember and Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod.

  Of John’s portrait Lawrence remarked that it had achieved a certain beauty and had ‘courage’. In 1929, when Lawrence’s pictures were seized from the Warren Gallery and a summons issued against him, John added his name to the petition in Lawrence’s support and stated that he was prepared, if it came to trial, to go into the witness box.