Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Ada Nettleship was horrified by Augustus. It is doubtful whether, in her opinion, anyone would have been good enough for her favourite daughter, but Augustus was too bad to be true – she had no use for him at all. The person she saw was no romantic Christ-like figure, simply a lanky unwashed youth, shifty-eyed and uncouth to the point of rudeness, with a scraggy, reddish beard, long hair, and scruffy clothes. She could not understand what Ida saw in him. She was confident, however, that her daughter’s peculiar affection would not last. As for Jack Nettleship, he was more dismayed than horrified. ‘I do wish he’d clean his shoes,’ he kept complaining, ‘ – it’s so bad for the leather.’ But he spoke with little authority, generally going barefoot round the house himself.

  ‘I always felt’, Ida’s sister Ethel Nettleship later wrote, ‘that Gus being so young, & with so much fine feeling, perhaps his breaking into our Victorian family might not have caused such a wreckage!’67 But Augustus was at his worst in Wigmore Street. His love for Ida, combined with her mother’s antagonism, made him wretchedly ill at ease. Max Beerbohm, who saw him there, noted that he was ‘pale – sitting in window seat – sense of something powerful – slightly sinister – Lucifer’. Old Nettleship, though everyone agreed he was the salt of the earth, only added to this embarrassment. With bald head, grey-bearded chin and nose ‘like an opera-glass’,68 he presented an eccentric spectacle within this conventional setting. ‘Years before he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time,’ wrote another visitor to the house, W. B. Yeats. ‘A little whisky would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great deal and he found himself a drunkard.’69 Having put himself into an institution for some months, he emerged completely cured, though still with the need for some liquid to sip constantly. This craving he assuaged by continual cocoa, hot or cold, which he drank from a gigantic jorum eight inches in diameter and eight inches deep. An alarmingly modest man, he would show Augustus his carnivorous paintings, begging for criticism. These pictures left Augustus cold, but if he ventured any criticism, Nettleship would rush for his palette and brushes and begin the laborious business of repainting. It was blasphemy for Augustus to hear him describe Beardsley’s creatures as ‘damned ugly women’. Yet he first met many celebrities here, from the old William Michael Rossetti to the young Walter Sickert, ‘the latter just emerging from the anonymity of élève de Whistler’.70

  In a rough synopsis71 for his autobiography, scribbled on Eiffel Tower Restaurant paper some time during the 1920s, Augustus introduces Ida’s name together with the word ‘torture’. He was violently attracted to her. Her mature body, so chaste and erotic, the muted intensity of her quiet manner, those strangely slanting eyes, that ingenuous mind: all this was throbbingly exciting to him. His happiness seemed to depend upon possessing the secret of her beauty, and he pursued her with unpredictable persistence. One day, for example, he turned up at St Albans, where she had gone to a party of Edna Clarke Hall’s. ‘Ida and I had not seen each other for some time, so, to get away from the others, we climbed up a ladder to the top of a great haystack… We had hardly settled there when up the ladder came Augustus John,’ Edna remembered.

  ‘Ida told John very definitely that we wanted to be alone and he told us no less definitely that he wanted to be there, and to put an end to the matter he gave a great heave and it [the ladder] fell to the ground. And there we were! Ida was extremely vexed and told him so in no uncertain terms. John took umbrage and said that if we did not want him he would go. He flung himself on to the steep thatch and proceeded to slide down head first. We were horrified! The stack was a very high one, and the ground seemed a long way off. Securing ourselves as best we could, we both got hold of a foot – his shoes, then his socks came off, – we frantically seized his trousers. He wriggled like an eel and his trousers began to come off. Then we cried aloud for help and some of the party came running, put up the ladder and rescued the crazy fellow!

  But the peace of our solitude was completely shattered.’72

  Augustus was tortured not by unrequited love but unconsummated sex. Ida loved him, but she refused to commit herself to him. She still hoped that her mother would come to like him. Meanwhile their love affair, for all its passion, seemed to have reached a dead end. Augustus was not faithful. He behaved as nature intended. Sight was mind, and out of sight was sometimes out of mind. On his journey through the Netherlands with Evans and McEvoy he responded to the beauty of the people he saw as much as to the Flemish masters. The two were jumbled together in his letters as if there were no difference. He writes, for example, of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia van Uylenborch:

  ‘She was sweeter than honey, more desirable than beauty, more profound than the Cathedral. And in Brussels lives an old woman with faded eyes who made me blush for thinking so much of the young wenches.

  But there was one in Antwerp I think Rembrandt would have cared for, Gabrielle Madeleine by name. She had azure under her eyes and her veins were blue and such a good stout mask withal, and she spoke French only as a Flamande can. Unfortunately she wore fashionable boots of a pale buff tint. (Besides which her room lay within that of her white haired bundle of a Mama.) You will shrug your shoulders hearing of my aberrations but I feel more competent for them, and that is the main thing.’

  Women continued to inspire Augustus as custodians of a happiness he could divine but never completely enjoy. They symbolized for him an ideal state of being that formed the subject of his painting. Yet his most immediate need was for a physical union that would dissolve his loneliness. But while his body was comforted by these affairs, his spirit lost something. The penalty he paid for being unable to endure isolation was a gradual theft from his artistic imagination of its stimulus. For his ideal concept of ‘beauty’, once divested of its symbolic majesty and enigmatic life, was in danger of becoming sentimental and empty.

  5

  FROM AMONG THE LIVING...

  ‘Wonderful days and wonderful nights these were.’

  William Rothenstein, Men and Memories

  ‘I am taking a studio with McEvoy,’ Augustus had written to Michel Salaman in the summer of 1898. This was 76 Charlotte Street, once used by Constable, and now, over the next two years, to be shared intermittently with Orpen, Benjamin Evans and Albert Rutherston. All of them were desperately poor, but full of plans for future work. Most helpful to Augustus was Albert’s elder brother William Rothenstein. His admiration for Augustus’s work was tireless. To his many artist friends, including Sargent, Charles Conder and Charles Furse, Rothenstein began showing Augustus’s drawings, and a number were sold in this way – though Furse was taken aback at the price of two pounds apiece. It was mainly on this money, together with what he received each quarter through his grandfather Thomas Smith’s will, that Augustus subsisted.

  ‘John – Orpen – McEvoy and myself are going to get up a class,’ Albert Rutherston wrote to his father (20 January 1899), ‘and have a model in John’s studio once a week at night – it will come to about 7d each.’

  Because the studio was small, Augustus spent a good deal of time roaming the streets with his sketchbook. He had been reading Heine’s Florentine Nights and was particularly drawn to a tattered band of strolling players he met in Hyde Park, and eventually succeeded in persuading the principal dancer to pose for him. ‘Those flashing eyes, that swart mongolian face (the nose seemed to have been artificially flattened), framed in a halo of dark curls, made an impression not to be shaken off lightly.’73

  ‘I hate Gus doing replicas’, Ida was to write. Yet he had to paint portraits to make money. His first commission was to paint an old lady living in Eaton Square for a fee of forty pounds (equivalent to £2,140 in 1996), half of which was paid in advance. ‘As the work went on I began to tire of the old lady’s personality,’ he remembered; ‘she too, I could see, was bored by mine, and getting restless. She even spoke rather sharply to me now and then. This didn’t
encourage me at all. One day, having made a date for the next sitting, I departed never to return. I had got her head done pretty well at any rate and the old lady got her picture at half price.’74 Looked at today, the picture seems surprisingly close in style and feeling to some of Gwen John’s portraiture. The colour has been toned down – monochrome with silvery-white flesh tones and slight touches of warm ochre. In the middle of an area of black dress, the old lady holds a red book. An orange frill on the cushion behind her head gives colour to her face and follows the line of her smile. Augustus’s treatment of the face, which is modelled in the yellow-brown against darker brown of Rembrandt, conveys an air of beauty in decay, and the impression is one of restrained sadness. But Augustus could not endure sadness – he had to get away. His ‘tiredness’, like the ‘boredom’ that assailed him during his convalescence in Tenby, was a phobia that would threaten all his loves and friendships, and change the impetus of his work.

  About the same time, through the mediation of a fashionable lady in Hampstead, Augustus was commissioned to do some drawings in the west of England. His first destination was a large mausoleum of a house set in parkland that resembled a cemetery. On arriving there, he was struck by the good looks of his young hostess, which seemed, after a cocktail or two, very visibly to increase. After the drawing was done she took him upstairs to show him her home-made chapel fitted into the attic. Her husband was away shooting, she explained – he often was – and during the dull days she would seek consolation here. Within the wall, Augustus spied a recess – perhaps a confessional, or a boudoir… But soon he had to be on his way for the next assignment. Here, too, there was much architectural magnificence. His new hostess, unencumbered with religiosity, was as amiable as the first. There seemed to be an epidemic of ‘shooting’ in the district, for her husband also had been carried off by it. When the drawing was done, Augustus returned to London with two cheques in his pocket, and richer in more ways than one.

  Perhaps because of the emotional deprivation of his mother, Augustus seemed to be missing a source of self-esteem. He was like a leaking vessel that needed continual attention. But now, to his surprise and delight, other people were beginning to find him to be a marvellous proper man. He sensed some of the power he could exert. So much that he had missed at Tenby, even at the Slade, seemed within his possession. It was dangerous knowledge. Such was the charm of his presence that old ladies on buses, it was rumoured, would get up blushing to offer him their seats; and young girls at the Café Royal fainted when he made his legendary entrances there.

  The letters that Augustus and his friends wrote at this time show them drawing and painting all day. In the evening they would hurry off to the Empire to listen to Yvette Guilbert sing, or go to the Hippodrome to see a splendid troupe of Japanese acrobats, tightrope walkers, nightingale-clowns and high-diving swimmers. Best of all, Augustus loved the Sadler’s Wells music hall in Islington, London’s oldest surviving theatre. He went almost every week, taking there for a shilling a box from the front of which he would fling his hat in the air whenever he approved of a turn. The crowd in the stalls, believing him to be a tremendous swell, nicknamed him ‘Algy’. One night, when their teasing became too personal, Augustus rose and delivered a drunken speech. The crowd, after listening for a minute, went for him, but he emptied his beer over them and, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, escaped.

  After such breathless entertainments, whenever they could afford it, Augustus and his friends would go to the Café Royal, eat sandwiches, drink lager beer and sit up late gazing at the celebrities. Orpen, Albert Rutherston and Augustus were together so much of the time that they became known as ‘the three musketeers’; but on less rowdy evenings they would be joined by McEvoy and Gwen John, Ida Nettleship and some of her special friends. Sometimes, too, by Mrs Everett, her hair decorated with arum lilies, anxious to spirit them away to Salvationist meetings where men with sturdy legs and women with complexions joined in brass and tambourine choruses.

  On 14 September 1898 Ida and Gwen Salmond crossed over to Paris, Gwen to stay there for six months, Ida for three. They put up temporarily at what Ida called a ‘very old lady style of pension’ at 226 boulevard Raspail on the outskirts of the Latin quarter; ‘such a healthy part of Paris!’ she reassured her mother (15 September 1898) who was worried by their proximity to the bars and restaurants of the boulevard Montparnasse. They had invited Gwen John to join them, but when she mentioned the plan to her father, Edwin automatically opposed it. She was, however, undeterred; went round the house singing ‘To Paris! To Paris!’; and wrote to Ida in the third week of September announcing that she was on her way. ‘Gwen John is coming – hurrah,’ Ida told her mother. ‘…We are so glad Gwen is coming. It makes all the difference – a complete trio.’75 Gwen arrived carrying a large marmalade cake, and the three of them set off to look at flats – ‘such lovely bare places furnished only with looking-glases’76 – soon finding what they wanted on the top floor of 12 rue Froideveau, or ‘Cold Veal Street’ as Ida called it. In a letter to her mother she described the moral architecture of the place, which was

  ‘on the 5th floor – overlooking a large open space [the Montparnasse cemetery] – right over the market roof. It has 3 good rooms, a kitchen and W.C. and water and gas – and a balcony. Good windows – very light and airy. Nothing opposite for miles – very high up. The woman (concierge) is very clean and exceedingly healthy looking. The proprietress is rather swell – an old lady – she lives this end of Paris and we went to see her. She asked questions, and especially that we received nobody – ‘Les dames oui. Mais les messieurs? Non! Jamais!‘…She wants to keep her apartments very high in character. All this is rather amusing, but it will show you it is a respectable place. It is over a café – but the entrance is right round the corner – quite separate… We want all the paper scraped and the place whitewashed… It is near the Louvre and Julian’s – and is very open.’77

  Gwen Salmond had sixty pounds and wanted to study at the Académie Julian under Benjamin Constant. Ida had thirty pounds and thought of going to either Delécluze or Colarossi, both of which were less expensive. Gwen John had less money still and could not afford to attend any school. But by a fortunate chance another studio was just opening in Paris that autumn – the Académie Carmen at 6 passage Stanislas. It was to be run by a luxuriant Italian beauty, Carmen Rossi, the one-time model of Whistler who, it was announced, would himself attend twice a week to instruct the pupils. Such was Whistler’s reputation that many students came from the other schools, the carriages of the more wealthy ones blocking the narrow entrance. The price was the same as Julian’s – too expensive for Ida: but Gwen Salmond, changing her mind at the last moment, decided to go there. ‘Whistler has been twice to the studio – and Gwen finds him very beautiful and just right,’ Ida wrote to her mother. ‘…[he] is going to paint a picture of Madame la Patronne of the studio, his model, and hang it in the studio for the students to learn from. Isn’t it fine? He’s a regular first rate Master and, according to Gwen, knows how to teach.’ So enthusiastic was Gwen Salmond that she insisted that Gwen John accompany her, smuggling her in as an afternoon pupil and helping her financially.

  The rules of the Académie Carmen were stricter than those of the Slade. Smoking was outlawed; singing and even talking prohibited; charcoal drawings on the walls forbidden; studies from the nude in mixed classes banned – and the sexes segregated into different ateliers. Whistler himself insisted on being received not as a companion in shirtsleeves, but as the Master visiting his apprentices. What Gwen John learnt from him was the ‘good habit’ of orderliness. He offered no magical short cuts: on the contrary he would have liked to teach his students from the very beginning, even the grinding and mixing of the colours. Tintoretto, he reminded them, had never done any work of his own until he was forty, and that was the way he wished them to work for him. His larks, which always contained some serious matter, often bewildered them. The palette, not the canvas, was the field of
experiment, he told them, and he would sometimes ignore their pictures altogether, earnestly studying their palettes to detect what progress was being made. His monocled sarcasms and the need which his rootless nature felt for a band of dedicated disciples, antagonized the men. But many of the women students adored him, understanding the poignancy and hidden kindness of his character and responding to his courtesy and wit. ‘Whistler is worth living for,’ Gwen Salmond declared simply in a letter to Michel Salaman. At any criticism, she and the others rushed to Whistler’s defence. ‘I hear there is a blasphemous letter about Whistler’s teaching in one of the English papers,’ Ida fulminated to her mother. ‘It is very stupid and unkind.’78

  In Augustus, too, Whistler inspired the veneration due to one who has been a famous rebel victorious against the social conventions, and a dedicated Master in his own right. With the money he had won for ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’,*4 he followed the three girls to Paris that autumn, and in the Salon Carré of the Louvre the two painters met formally for the first time: Whistler a small, neat, erect old gentleman in black, with crisp curly hair containing one white lock, and a flashing monocle; Augustus tall, dishevelled, trampish. After some ceremony and a contest of compliments on behalf of Gwen, Augustus ventured to suggest that his sister’s work showed a sense of character. ‘Character? What’s character?’ Whistler demanded. ‘It’s tone that matters. Your sister shows a sense of tone.’