At first Augustus took to Orpen. He was an easy companion, spontaneous, whimsical, high-spirited. But after Orpen became what Augustus called ‘the protégé of big business’, their ways diverged. Orpen himself was modest about his talent. He did not seek to rival John Singer Sargent whose position as England’s pre-eminent portrait painter nevertheless would come to him as next in succession. ‘I am not fit to tie Augustus John’s shoe-laces,’44 he told Robert Gregory in 1910. Yet even in these early days at the Slade, people, it was said, came to praise John’s pictures but went away with Orpen’s.*2 He cut his hair short as a soldier’s, perched on his shaven dome a small bowler hat, encircled his neck with a stiff white collar and worked like a businessman. The artist, Augustus believed, was lost to sight.
Orpen had few prejudices, fewer opinions. His rapid-fire, staccato conversation had about it the suggestion of epigrams but was confined to subjects of triviality. If the talk threatened to turn serious, he would fall into extravagant feats of horseplay. It was not beyond him to get down on all fours at dinner and bark like a dog, or to produce from his pocket some new mechanical toy and set it spinning across the table. He also developed, his nephew John Rothenstein remembers, a ‘habit of speaking of himself, in the third person, as “little Orps” or even as “Orpsie boy”. It would be difficult to imagine a more effective protection against intimacy.’45 He caricatured the collective wish of all these Slade students to stay young forever. Even his professional career was somehow juvenile. Money, fame, success were like delicious sweets to him: he could not resist them.
Orpen and Augustus were often together during these student days, and in 1898 they were joined by a third companion, Albert Rutherston.*3 ‘Little Albert’, as he was called, was the younger brother of William Rothenstein, very pink and small and regarded as rather a rake. ‘Not content with working all day,’ William Rothenstein recorded, ‘they used to meet in some studio and draw at night. They picked up strange and unusual models; but I was shy, after seeing John’s brilliant nudes, of drawing in his company.’46
Above the studio at 21 Fitzroy Street lived their landlady, Mrs Everett, an improbable woman in her forties, fat and vigorous, her cheeks aflame, her eyes intensely blue, unevenly dressed in widow’s weeds and men’s boots. Her son Henry and niece Kathleen Herbert had recently gone to the Slade where she now attempted to join them, arriving with a Gladstone bag containing one large bible, a loaf of bread, Spanish dagger, spirit lamp and saucepan, and a dilapidated eighteenth-century volume on art. Here was a phenomenon unique in Tonks’s experience. In desperation he banished her to the Skeleton Room in the cellar of the Slade. Interpreting this as a privilege, she garishly transformed the place by introducing there various brass Buddhas, stuffed peacocks and a small organ, two grandfather armchairs loosely covered with gold-encrusted priests’ vestments and a slow-dying palm tree, like a monstrous spider, from which she suspended religious texts decorated and mounted on cardboard. Some nights she slept there; some days she entertained her pack of dogs there; often, night or day, her voice could be heard among the skeletons singing lustily: ‘Oh, make those dry bones live again, Great Lord of Hosts!’ – to which the students above would add their refrain, clapping wildly and chanting ribald choruses.
Excommunicated at last from the Slade, Mrs Everett started a ‘Sunday School’ in the converted brothel at Fitzroy Street. Here, and later at 101 Charlotte Street, she encouraged the art students to gather for bread and jam, hot sweet tea and intimate talk of the Almighty. These teas or ‘bun-worries’, as they were called, were lively affairs, especially when Augustus and Orpen turned up, and would last late into the night, culminating in the singing of ‘Are You Washed?’ with its confident refrain: ‘Yes, I’m washed!’ For Augustus the atmosphere was uncomfortably like that surrounding his Salvationist aunts, but Mrs Everett was such a fascinating subject to draw from so many angles that he often came. ‘One lovely day early in May,’ Ethel Hatch remembered,
‘Mrs Everett invited us all to a picnic in the country… she met us with a large yellow farm cart, she herself was wearing a sun-bonnet, and the driver a smock… After lunch we wandered about in the lovely park and grounds, and some of them ran races round the trees; John was a very good runner, and most graceful. I can see him now, chasing a red-haired girl through the trees at the bottom of the lawn.
…afterwards a photograph was taken of the party in the wagon, with John sitting astride a horse. I shall never forget the journey home in the train, when John and Orpen entertained us by standing up in the carriage singing all the latest songs from Paris, with a great deal of action.’47
At another of her gatherings, Mrs Everett, drawing on her artistic knowledge, extolled John’s great talent and informed him: ‘God loves you.’ But Augustus, suddenly embarrassed, mumbled: ‘I don’t think he has bestowed any particular favours on me.’ He was overwhelmed during this period by avalanches of flattery. When Tonks declared that he would be the greatest draughtsman since Michelangelo, he replied simply: ‘I can’t agree with what you said.’ It was this modesty that helped to endear him to his fellow students. One summer big baskets of roses were imported to decorate the gaunt walls of the Slade. ‘Several of us were standing about outside the Portrait Room with baskets of festoons,’ Edna Clarke Hall remembered.48 ‘…We were considering a pedestal, from which the statue for some unknown reason had been removed, when Profesor Tonks came suddenly out of the Portrait Class. He stopped and from his height looked down on me, and with one of his sardonic smiles and indicating the empty pedestal asked “Is that for John?”’49
Excelling au premier coup, Augustus went on collecting certificates and prizes at the Slade; and Gwen, too, was successful, most notably winning the Melville Nettleship Prize for figure composition.50 When Sargent, the American portrait painter then at the height of his fame in London, visited the Slade, he said that Augustus’s drawings were beyond anything that had been done since the Italian Renaissance. ‘Not only were his drawings of heads and of the nude masterly,’ wrote William Rothenstein, ‘he poured out compositions with extraordinary ease; he had the copiousness which goes with genius, and he himself had the eager understanding, the imagination, the readiness for intellectual and physical adventure one associates with genius.’51
After leaving the Slade in the late afternoon, Gus and his friends McEvoy and Salaman, Ursula Tyrwhitt and Edna Waugh, would go back to his rooms and continue drawing and painting and acting as one another’s models. ‘Their faces, seen through one another’s eyes,’ wrote Mary Taubman, ‘and especially through the eyes of Augustus John, are part of our consciousness of that famous epoch in the Slade’s history.’52 On one famous occasion when Augustus lost his key, he leapt on to the railings in front of the house and then, like a monkey, scaled up the outside of the building to the top floor. Having got through an attic window, a minute later he was opening the door to the other students standing there amazed by his acrobatics.
In 1897, when Augustus was nineteen, Tonks offered his students a prize for copies after Rubens, Watteau, Michelangelo and Raphael. Augustus won it with a charcoal study after Watteau. His dexterity was dazzling. Whatever style he adopted, he did it supremely well and his work seemed to act on the other students as a catalyst. Before joining the Slade he had studied reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in magazines and been enormously impressed by them. Now this influence was passing. Gainsborough had become his favourite British artist; but he had also developed an admiration for Reynolds, in particular his power of combining fine design with psychological insight. The more he saw, the more he admired. He would, he told William Rothenstein, have given ‘five years to watch Titian paint a picture’. But at the same time he claimed that ‘J. F. Millet was a master I bowed before.’ But Watteau was probably still the chief influence upon him, though he was about to be introduced by William Rothenstein to the work of Goya whom he later considered superior to all these. Rothenstein’s book on Goya opened up for Augustus a v
enturous world on which he would have liked to model his own career.
He was contemptuous of convention but admired tradition. ‘We may say that the whole of art which preceded it has influenced the work of John, in the sense that he has continued a universal tradition,’ wrote the critic T. W. Earp. But although he was an amalgam of so many Old Masters, he was beginning to produce unmistakable ‘Johns’. After years of anecdotal Victorian pictures, his lightning facility was extraordinarily refreshing. He wanted to register the mood of a passing moment in a fit of seeing. His drawings were less analyses of character than aesthetic statements. Draughtsmanship was not primarily for him an intellectual exercise, but a matter of passionate observation involving the co-ordination of hand, eye and brain.53 ‘Does it not seem,’ he once asked, ‘as if the secret of the artist lies in the prolongation of the age of adolescence with whatever increase of technical skill and sophistication the lessons of the years may bring?’54
But while his drawings and pastels improved, his paintings remained uncertain. He found it difficult to control his palette. The Slade had taught him little of the relation of one colour to another and he had no natural sense of tone. Sometimes he would ruin a picture for the sake of a gesture which took his fancy.
In the autumn of 1898 he set off with Evans and McEvoy for Amsterdam, where a large Rembrandt exhibition was being held at the Stedelijk Museum. ‘This was a great event,’ he recorded. ‘As I bathed myself in the light of the Dutchman’s genius, the scales of aesthetic romanticism fell from my eyes, disclosing a new and far more wonderful world.’55 They slept in a lodging house, wandered by the canals of old Amsterdam, lived off herrings and schnapps, and every day went to the galleries and museums. It was now that the last wraiths of Pre-Raphaelitism, the spell of Malory’s dim and lovely world, faded in his imagination and began to be replaced by the poetry of common humanity. Not long afterwards, he travelled through Belgium with the same companions, immersing himself in the Flemish masters for whom he also felt an affinity. ‘Bruges, Anvers, Gand, Bruxelles have seen me and I have beheld them,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘Rubens I have expostulated with, been chidden by, and loved. Jack Jordaens has been my boon companion and I have wept beside the Pump of Quinton Matzys.’
He returned to Tenby. Edwin had recently moved from 32 Victoria Street to a house round the corner in South Cliff Street. Southbourne, as it was called, was almost identical to Victoria House: a similar narrow, dark, cube-like prison. Augustus felt all the old sensations of claustrophobia, the panic and emptiness. ‘An exile in my native place I greet you from afar and tearfully,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein.
‘Rain has set in and I feel cooped up and useless. What we have seen of the country has been wonderful. But it is ten minutes walk to the rocky landscape with figures.
Pembrokeshire has never appeared so fine to me before, nor the town so smugly insignificant, nor the paternal roof so tedious and compromising a shelter. Trinkets which in a lodging house would be amusing insult my eye here and the colloquy of the table compels in me a blank mask of attention only relieved now and then by hysterical and unreasonable laughter.
The great solace is to crouch in the gloom of a deserted brick kiln amongst the debris of gypsies and excrete under the inspiration of lush Nature without, to the accompaniment of a score of singing birds.
I hope to quit this place shortly and come home to London where I can paint off my humours.’
In a letter to Michel Salaman of about the same date Augustus wrote: ‘I intend coming up to London in a week or so when I shall start that Holy Moses treat.’ He had chosen, from among the alternatives set for the Slade Summer Competition that year, Poussin’s theme ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’. The bustling bravura composition he now produced, five feet by seven feet, was by far his most ambitious painting as a student. Heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance, the composition is very obviously an exercise – ‘an anthology of influences’ Andrew Forge described it – and, though not wholly imitative, it lacks the originality of, say, Stanley Spencer’s prize paintings at the Slade a few years later, ‘The Apple Gatherers’ and ‘The Nativity’. Built up from individual life studies and showing Augustus’s debt to Wilson Steer, its dramatic effect resembles a sixteenth-century mannerist painting. ‘It is a competition style in which the figures are drawn in particularly difficult poses,’ writes A. D. Fraser Jenkins, ‘and in many of them are pastiches, no doubt unintentionally, of figures by Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Raphael and other old masters.’56 This tour de force of eclecticism won Augustus the Summer Prize and he left the Slade in glory.
Two years before, while he was at work in the Life Class, Augustus had seen Brown usher in a jaunty little man in black, wearing a monocle: James McNeill Whistler. ‘It is difficult to imagine the excitement that name aroused in those days,’ he recalled.57 They had all heard and read so much about this miniature Mephistopheles; had spent so many hours in the Print Room of the British Museum studying his etchings of the Thames and of Venice; had seen in the galleries from time to time some reticent new stain from his brush – the image of a tired old gentleman sitting by a wall, or a young one obtruding no more than cuffs and a violin; or of a jeune fille poised in immobility, or some dim river in the dusk, washed with silver. ‘An electric shock seemed to galvanize the class: there was a respectful demonstration: the Master bowed genially and retired.’ A few years later Augustus himself would be an idol of the Slade. The students loved him for his good, bad and indifferent drawings, for his undiscriminating vitality, his willingness to destroy so much that he did and his challenge to them to take risks. For those in need of a hero, he was the obvious choice, and his entrance into the Slade Life Class at the beginning of the twentieth century was as exciting to the next generation of students as that of the fin-de-siècle butterfly with his famous sting. ‘When I first saw this extraordinary individual was while I was a student at the Slade school,’ Wyndham Lewis later wrote:
‘…the walls bore witness to the triumphs of this “Michelangelo” …A large charcoal drawing in the centre of the wall of the life-class of a hairy male nude, arms defiantly folded and a bristling moustache, commemorated his powers with almost a Gascon assertiveness: and fronting the stairs that lead upwards where the ladies were learning to be Michelangelos, hung a big painting of Moses and the Brazen Serpent…
…One day the door of the life-class opened and a tall bearded figure, with an enormous black Paris hat, large gold ear-rings decorating his ears, with a carriage of the utmost arrogance, strode in and the whisper “John” went round the class. He sat down on a donkey – the wooden chargers astride which we sat to draw – tore a page of banknote paper out of a sketch-book, pinned it upon a drawing-board, and with a ferocious glare at the model (a female) began to draw with an indelible pencil. I joined the group behind this redoubtable personage… John left as abruptly as he had arrived. We watched in silence this mythological figure depart.’58
4
FLAMMONDISM
‘And women, young and old, were fond
Of looking at the man Flammonde.’
Edward Arlington Robinson
Augustus’s growing renown in the late 1890s and early 1900s was partly based upon his extreme visibility. In a uniform world of braced and tied, well-waistcoated, buttoned-down men, it was impossible to overlook him. His shoes, created specially to his own design, were unpolished; the gold earrings he was soon to pin on were second-hand; he wore no collar and was contemptuous of those who did – in its place he fastened a black silk scarf with a silver brooch; he did wear a hat but it was of gypsy design, patina’d with age; his eyes were restless, his hair alarmingly uncut. ‘We are the sort of people’, he told another Bohemian Welsh artist, Nina Hamnett, ‘our fathers warned us against.’
He walked the streets with a terrific stride, as if raising his own morale, protecting himself against other people. One day a gang of children fell in behind him shouting: ‘Get yer ’air cut, mister
.’ He halted, turned on them, and growled: ‘Get your throats cut!’
His reputation seemed to depend on deliberate neglect. He neglected to shave; he neglected caution and convention and common sense. There was no telling what he would say or do next – though very often he said and did nothing. The barometer of his moods shot up and down with extraordinary rapidity. Periods of charm, even tenderness, would vanish suddenly before convulsions of temper; days of leaden gloom suddenly dispersed, and he would glow with geniality. There seemed nothing to account for these alterations, or to connect them.
Wherever he went he struck sparks of romance. William Rothenstein remembered him at the age of twenty-one, looking like ‘a young fawn. He had beautiful eyes, almond-shaped and with lids defined like those Leonardo drew, a short nose, broad cheek-bones, while over a fine forehead fell thick brown hair, parted in the middle. He wore a light curling beard (he had never shaved) and his figure was lithe and elegant. I was at once attracted to John… A dangerous breaker of hearts, he would be, I thought, with his looks and his ardour… [He] was full of plans for future work; but he was poor and needed money for models.’59
Augustus was indeed ambitious. He felt eager to develop his talent as a means of fixing his identity. His world was full of echoes and reflections. He saw himself in other people’s looks, heard himself in their replies, recognized himself through their attitudes. Many of his portraits, such as ‘The Smiling Woman’, were in this oblique fashion autobiographical.
Augustus John Page 11