Augustus John
Page 117
Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm 119
Tree, Iris 374, 381, 405, 415; ‘To Iris [Tree]’ (Augustus John) 609
Treece, Henry: Dylan Thomas to 523
Truth 261
Turgenev, Ivan 101, 145, 207
Turner, J. M. W. 458
Turner, Percy Moore: Quinn to 491
Tuscany, AJ in (1910) 311–12
Twentieth Century 569
Tyler, Royall 270, 280, 357
Tyrwhitt, Ursula: as Slade student 54; AJ’s first serious girlfriend 60–1; AJ’s portrait of 201; worries about Gwen John 403; likes AJ’s drawings 412; sees Gwen John in England 552, 553; mentioned 118, 163
Augustus John to 41, 42–3, 77, 78, 79, 85, 87, 247, 404, 476
Gwen John to 22, 25, 48, 49, 94–5, 136, 137, 147, 160, 164, 217, 341, 403, 437, 551, 552, 553
Tyrwhitt, Walter 552
United States of America, AJ’s six visits to 487–96; Boston 494; Buffalo 488–9; New York 488, 489–92; Pittsburgh 333, 488
Vanity Fair (US magazine) 488
Van-t-Hoff (Dutch architect of the Mallord Street house) 397–8
Varda, Jean 372–3fn
Vattetot-sur-Mer, France 75–7
Vaucottes, France 76, 77
Velázquez, Diego 73, 124, 279, 292, 435, 484
Venice: Marchesa Casati, decadent queen of 454–5; AJ and Vivien in (1933) 512–13
Vere, Edward de 525
Verlaine, Paul 145, 208
Veronese, Paolo 512
Vers et Prose (journal) 207
Villa Ste-Anne see Martigues, Provence
Villeneuve-lès-Avignon 307
Vivian, Lord 595
Vogue 344, 566
Voluntary Contraception League 560
Vorticists 329, 417, 418, 426, 516, 517
Wadsworth, Edward 402
Wagner, Richard 205
Walden, Lady de 406; AJ’s portrait 393, 394
Walden, Lord Howard de 381, 393–4, 395; AJ’s portraits 426
Wales 26–7; and AJ’s childhood see Haverfordwest; Tenby; AJ’s love of Prescelly Mountains 5, 27; camping trip with McEvoy and Evans 41; with Sampson 126; AJ at Bettws-Gwerfil-Goch with Sampson and the gypsies 289–91, at Nant-ddu with Innes 347, 352, 354–5, 359, 361, 390, 395, 397, 400; at Llwynythyl with Holbrooke and Sime 395, 397, 400; at Laugharne with Dylan Thomas and Caitlin xx, 531–2; Tenby confers Freedom of the Borough on AJ 594; National Library xxvi, xxvii, xxix; National Museum xxiv–xxv, xxx, 527
Walker, Maynard: Edwin John to 571
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 96, 110, 288, 292, 293
Walpole, Hugh 171, 505
Warlock, Peter (Philip Heseltine) 566
Warner, Sylvia Townsend 27, 164, 530
Warren, E. P. 293, 353
Watney, Simon: English Post-Impressionism 336
Watteau, Antoine 36, 54
Watts, G. F. 91, 173, 334, 338
Watts-Dunton, Theodore 283
Waugh, Alec: The Loom of Youth 536
Waugh, Edna see Hall, Edna Clarke
Waugh, Evelyn 546, 580; Vile Bodies 542
Waverley, Lady 501
Weekly Critical Review 295
West, Max 603
Western Daily Press 292
Westminster, Duke of 456
Westminster Gazette 93
Westminster School of Art, London 35, 128
Westray, Grace 47, 135, 635 (n. 29)
Wheeler, Sir Charles: on AJ’s appearance 420; on his work 596; relied on by AJ 597–8; at AJ’s funeral 599
Augustus John to 597
Wheeler, Mavis (née Mabel Wright, formerly Cole) affair with Horace de Vere Cole 524–5; becomes AJ’s mistress 525–6, 527–8; and Tristan’s birth 525; abducts Tristan from Fryern Court 527; marries Mortimer Wheeler 526–7; at Horace’s funeral 550; Jonathan Cape has eye on 568; makes AJ forget his age 581; shoots lover 595
Augustus John to 508, 513, 535, 547
Wheeler, Sir Mortimer: challenged to a duel by AJ 526–7
Whistler, James McNeill: ceases to exhibit at NEAC 92; galvanizes Slade Life Class 56–7; instructs Gwen John in Paris 71, 72, 88, 161; visited by AJ 73; on his own painting 92; lunches with AJ 133; mentioned 37, 66, 257, 292, 328, 495, 563
White, John (AJ’s son in law) 537
White, Vivien (née John) (AJ’s and Dorelia’s second daughter): birth 412; childhood 369, 412, 413, 447, 474, 482, 486, 541; schooling 412, 536; relationship with father 388, 446, 535, 536, 537; at Fryern Court 498, 500, 501; on Gwen John 553; in Venice with AJ 512–13; visits Jamaica with parents 513, 514; another ‘rich occurrence’ in France 522; nurses in war 563; at father’s deathbed 599; helps author xx; mentioned 437, 593
Augustus John to 557
Henry John to 542
Whitman, Walt 41; Leaves of Grass 37
Whitney, Mrs Harry Payne 488
Wigmore Street, London (n. 58) 65, 66, 74, 105
Wilde, Constance 61
Wilde, Oscar: a character 45; meets AJ 78; describes Arthur Symons 295; AJ mimics 500; quoted 518; mentioned 322, 353
Wildenstein Gallery, Bond Street 558, 571
Wilkinson, Louis: John Cowper Powys to 593–4
Williams, Emlyn: AJ to 563
Williamson, Henry 568
Wilson, George 61
Wilson, President Woodrow 441
Wilton, Andrew 279
Wimborne, Lady 360
Wimborne, Lord 386
Winars, Walter 423–4
Winchester, 16th Marquis of 595
Winstedt, Eric Otto (‘Old Mother’) 283, 310
Wood, Abraham, King of the Gypsies 289
Wood, Christopher 342, 446–7, 484
Wood, Derwent 424
Wood, Matthew 289–90
Wood, T. Martin 292
Woodbury, Charles 494
Woolcombe, Rev Canon K. J. 548, 685 (n. 154)
Woolf, Leonard 505–6
Woolf, Virginia (née Stephen): on Euphemia Lamb 205, 248; on Ottoline Morrell 262, 264; shocked by AJ’s 1929 exhibition 480; and Dr Maurice Wright 505; mentioned 268, 286, 327, 331, 347
Roger Fry to 349
Woolsey, Gamel 538
Wright, Alfred 27
Wright, Dr Maurice 505–6
Wright, Captain Peter 434, 437
Yates, Dora (‘Romani Rawnie’): at scattering of John Sampson’s ashes 549; correspondence with AJ xxvi, 560–1; author meets xix
Augustus John to 561, 569–70, 580, 582, 595
Yeats, John Butler (‘Jack’) 61, 245
Yeats, W. B.: ‘poet of the twilight’ 121; ‘won-derful man!’ 210; AJ’s portraits of 208, 242–5, 509, 510; on AJ 1, 242, 245–6, 355, 517; on Jack Nettleship 66; on ‘artistic camps’ in England 334; sculpted by AJ 592; mentioned 280, 299, 516
Lady Gregory to 410
Yellow Book 36, 93
Young, Mrs (landlady’s friend) 80, 81
Yport, France 77
ABOUT AUGUSTUS JOHN
This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd’s two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers.
John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigour and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signalling the end of a distant era.
REVIEWS
AUGUSTUS JOHN
“An entertaining, essentially comic story.. Holroyd tells it with great skill and elegance.”
&nbs
p; Sunday Telegraph
“One of the most entertaining lives ever written... Very funny... thought-provoking.”
Mail On Sunday
“A wonderfully engrossing, entertaining and even moving book.”
Daily Telegraph
LYTTON STRACHEY
“Holroyd’s prose... is as elegant as ever. He is one of the few biographers who has retained a pronounced sense of humour.”
The Times
“Masterly: full of new insight.”
Sunday Express
“You will be won over by Strachey’s originality, independence and humanity; by his hatred of humbug and prudery; by his life-saving gift for comedy.”
Evening Standard
BERNARD SHAW
“A masterly exercise in biographical magic.”
Spectator
“This elegant volume gives the quintessence of Shaw...[it does] justice to a great Irishman.”
Irish Independent
“A man whose art rested as much upon the exercise of intelligence could not have chosen a more intelligent biographer.”
The Times
BASIL STREET BLUES
A subtle, courageous book…
Sunday Telegraph
[Holroyd] has written an original, unforgettable book
Daily Telegraph
Tense, fraught, uneasy, but mining that unease to poignant effect, Basil Street Blues is an extraordinary piece of work
TLS
I have no hesitation in awarding Basil Street Blues the full five stars. In the genre of autobiography, it is right up there in my personal pantheon...[a] haunting and beautifully understated tragi-comedy.
Mail on Sunday
A BOOK OF SECRETS
“A subtle paean to the art of biography. It is a biographical experiment, but a deeply humane and sensitive one. It glows with the energy of lives investigated, restored, reanimated and celebrated.”
Sunday Times
“Here, he has given us the distilled essence of biography and a fitting end to what he evokes as ‘the comedy of life’.”
Observer
“As is always the case with Holroyd, the reader comes away equally inspired, equally curious, and lavishly entertained by a story-teller of the first rank.”
Scotsman
“A small gem of humanity, curiosity and observation with a wonderful, rolling undercurrent of comedy”
Sunday Telegraph
“Scintillating... Holroyd’s book is a sly, inconclusive and utterly bewitching dance through the elusive narrative echoes that make up the biographer’s art”
Metro
MOSAIC
“A lovely blend of mirth and melancholy… this memoir ranks with the finest records of the period”
Waterstones Books Quarterly
“An absolute tour de force of brilliant writing.”
Telegraph
“Holroyd is a marvellously sour wit and an observer who never misses a good detail, even in extremis.”
Sunday Times
“Mosaic is restless, interrogative, hungry for knowledge and resolution.”
Guardian
ABOUT MICHAEL HOLROYD
Besides the biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He was president of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003–2008 and is the only non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.
BIOGRAPHIES BY MICHAEL HOLROYD
Bernard Shaw
Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian and charmer, Bernard Shaw was a controversial literary figure, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions.
This is Michael Holroyd’s essential biography of George Bernard Shaw for the general reader, with its pace and verve, its comedy, drama and politics, it shows a provocative and paradoxical figure sympathetically and movingly portrayed.
Bernard Shaw is available here.
Lytton Strachey
When Michael Holroyd’s life of Strachey first appeared in the late 1960s, it was hailed as a landmark in contemporary biography. Drawing on new material, published and unpublished, Holroyd completely revised and rewrote his masterwork in 1995 to tell the full story of this complex man and his world as it could not be told while many of Strachey’s friends and lovers were still alive.
At the heart of the story is the poignant liaison between Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington. A panorama of the social, literary, political and sexual life of a generation, Lytton Strachey reverberates in the mind like a great novel.
Lytton Strachey is available here.
Augustus John
This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd’s two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers.
John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigour and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signalling the end of a distant era.
Augustus John is available here.
MICHAEL HOLROYD’S MEMOIRS
1 – Basil Street Blues
Michael Holroyd – the most famous biographer in Britain – turns his attention upon himself and his own family in Basil Street Blues (the title comes from the Basil Street Hotel where the author was conceived in the 1930s.) Born into a family rich in eccentricity, Holroyd was largely brought up by his grandparents in Maidenhead because his exotic Swedish mother and reserved English father couldn’t stand living together. (His grandparents’ marriage provided no better model – his grandfather having had a four-year affair with a woman he met at a bus stop before coming back to his grandmother). Towards the end of Holroyd’s parents’ lives he persuaded them to write their own stories and using the results, plus his own memories and researches he has written this moving and self-revealing book.
Basil Street Blues is available here.
2 – Mosaic
‘This is a book about surprises – at any rate, it has surprised me.’ In 1999, Michael Holroyd published Basil Street Blues, in which one of our finest biographers turned his attentions to something more personal – his own family. But rather than the story being over, in fact it was just beginning. For as the letters from readers started to arrive, the author discovered an extraordinary narrative that his own memoir had only touched upon. Mosaic, then, is Michael Holroyd’s piecing together of these remarkable stories: some of which are pleasant surprises, other more startling. There is the death of the fearsome headmaster at his school, who was murdered by one of the boys after he left: the discovery that his Swedish grandmother was the mistress of the French anarchist writer Jacques Prevert; and a letter from Margaret Forster about the beauty of his mother, that leads to his remarkable account of a decade-long affair. A love story, a detective story, a book of secrets, Mosaic is both a beautifully written journey into a forest of family trees, and a fascinating insight into the workings of genealogy.
Mosaic is available here.
3 – A Book of Secrets
A Book of Secrets is a masterfully atmospheric treasure-trove of hidden lives, uncelebrated achievements and family mysteries. Acclaimed biographer Michael Holroyd peers into dusty corners to bring a company of unknown women into the light; Alice Keppel was the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales; Eve Fairfax was Lord G
rimthorpe’s abandoned fiancée and sometime muse of Auguste Rodin; and the novelist Violet Trefusis was the lover of Vita Sackville-West. Taking the reader on a journey of discovery from Ravello to Paris, from Kirkstall Grange in Yorkshire to Vita Sackville-West’s home at Knole, A Book of Secrets lucidly gives voice to fragile human connections.
A Book of Secrets is available here.
A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
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The story starts here.
Augustus John: A Biography by Michael Holroyd was originally published in two volumes, Volume 1: The Years of Innocence and Volume 2: The Years of Experience, by William Heinemann Ltd in 1974 and 1975. The two volumes were published together as one volume in the USA by Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc. in 1975 as Augustus John: A Biography. A revised one-volume edition was published in paperback by Penguin Books Ltd in 1976
This present edition combines the contents of all previous editions, revised, rearranged and cut, and with substantial new material added by the author
This edition first published in the Great Britain in 1997 by Chatto & Windus
This eBook edition first published in the Great Britain in 2015 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Michael Holroyd, 1974, 1975, 1976
This edition copyright © Michael Holroyd, 1996
The moral right of Michael Holroyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.