Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Winifred was now a United States citizen, settled in California and pregnant with her first child, a daughter who was to be born in November 1915. She had begun a new life, but there seemed no more life for Thornton in North America – he hated peddling his fish for money. So he came back, paying a duty call on his father in Tenby, walking in the woods with Gwen at Meudon, seeing Gus at Alderney and in London. ‘The little girl Poppet and I are good friends and I hauled her about the studio on a mat,’12 he wrote to Gwen. This was the one of the few gleams of happiness in his letters. He was to spend part of the war in a munitions factory at Woolwich Arsenal. Working along with conscientious objectors and rejects from the armed services was ‘an abomination, but there is nothing to do but hold on grimly,’ he told Gwen. ‘I try to do as much as I can with as little thought of reward as possible… I know I am not liked.’13 Eventually he found work as a shipwright at Gravesend, and there at last he was in the open air. His boat lay afloat in a basin near by and he managed to work on it nearly every day.

  ‘The war probably makes France impossible for holidays,’14 Augustus had written to Dorelia, whom he advised to plan as if for a siege. After his visit to Gwen he did not return to France for more than three years. ‘I feel the nostalgie du Midi now that there’s no chance of going there,’ he told Ottoline. ‘…I commence the New Year rather ill-temperedly.’15 There was no easy escape from these dark days of civilian incarceration, and he began to develop symptoms around the head and legs that ‘put me quite out of action’.16

  Ireland now took the place of France. He made several visits to Dublin, to Galway and Connemara. ‘John was a good friend of Ireland,’ Christine Longford remembered. ‘We bobbed our hair because Augustus John girls had short hair; and anyone who had red hair, like the picture of Iris Tree in Dublin, was lucky… He knew Galway well, “the shawled women murmuring together on the quays, with the white complex of the Claddagh glimmering across the harbour”.’17 The men were going off ‘to fight England’s battles’, and there was a great wailing on the platforms as their women saw them off. They were consoled by government grants, and ‘the consequence is an unusually heavy traffic in stout,’ Augustus told Dorelia when inviting her over, adding that she ‘would hate it here’. In her absence he was stalked by ‘my double’ who went everywhere spreading legendary rumours. It became all the more important to get himself settled. ‘I have found a house here,’ he wrote to Dorelia from Galway City,18 ‘with fine big rooms and windows which I’m taking – only £30 a year… I had a bad attack of blues here, doing nothing, but the prospect of soon getting to work bucks me up.’ This house was in Tuam Street and owned by Bishop O’Dea, who leased it to John for three years on the understanding that no painting from the nude was to be enjoyed on the premises. John’s plan was to execute a big dramatization of Galway bringing in everything characteristic of the place. He explained this scheme to Dorelia:

  ‘I’m thinking out a vast picture synthesizing all that’s fine and characteristic in Galway City – a grand marshalling of the elements. It will have to be enormous to contain troops of women and children, groups of fishermen, docks, wharves, the church, mills, constables, donkeys, widows, men from Aran, hookers*1 etc., perhaps with a night sky and all illuminated in the light of a dream. This will be worth while – worth the delay and the misery that went before.’19

  He went out into the streets, staring, sketching: and was at once identified as a spy. Bathing – ‘the best tonic in the world’ – was reckoned to be a misdemeanour in wartime; and sketching in the harbour a treason – ‘so that is a drawback and a big one’. In a letter to Ottoline Morrell he complained: ‘There are wonderful people and it is beautiful about the harbour but if one starts sketching one is at once shot by a policeman… It would be worth while passing 6 months here given the right conditions.’

  But the right conditions were elusive. Without disobeying the letter of Bishop O’Dea’s injunction, ‘I had two girls in here yesterday,’ he admitted to Dorelia, ‘but they didn’t give the same impression as when seen in the street. I could do with some underclothing.’ He was anxious not to return to Alderney ‘till I’ve got something good to take away’. Every day he would go out and look, then hurry back to Tuam Street and do drawings or pen-and-wash sketches. ‘I’ve observed the people here enough,’ he eventually wrote to Dorelia. ‘Their drapery is often very pleasing – one generally sees one good thing a day at least – but the population is greatly spoilt now – 20 years ago it must have been astonishing… Painting from nature and from imagination spells defeat I see clearly.’

  Imagination meant memory. His imagination was kindled instantly: then the good moment went. He had to catch it before it began to fade, rather than recollect it in tranquillity. Yet now there seemed no alternative to a retrospective technique – what he called ‘mental observation’.20 He had found himself painting portraits of the Ladies Ottoline Morrell and Howard de Walden while they were ‘safely out of sight’. But this was not why he had come to Galway. After vacillating for weeks between the railway station and the telegraph office, he left. ‘It was in the end’, he explained to Bernard Shaw, ‘less will-power than panic that got me away.’21

  He had been at Galway two months. After his return to Alderney he began to work feverishly at a large cartoon, covering four hundred square feet in a single week. Once again he was racing against time. He wanted to bring all those one-good-things-a-day together in a composite arrangement of the ideal Galway: a visionary city locked deep in his imagination.

  War gives some painters an opportunity to record and interpret the extremities of human behaviour. Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts and Stanley Spencer were among the artists who grasped this opportunity. Others, such as McEvoy, succumbed to fashionable portraiture. John, like William Nicholson, also painted commissioned portraits to earn money; but they were erratically fashionable. By 1914, in a hit-or-miss fashion, he was still painting in his best vein. ‘Of course painters as good as John will always sell,’ Sickert assured Nan Hudson, ‘war or no war.’ But the war put pressures on him. ‘I’m afraid we are in for thin times over here,’ he explained to Quinn. ‘No one will want luxuries like pictures for awhile.’22 Nevertheless he continued painting those large decorative groups, such as ‘Galway’, for which, he felt, his talent was best suited: also, for a year or two, those bold and glowing landscapes with figures, often on small wooden panels, sometimes with children, which were inspired by private affections, and which show his talent at its most direct and engaged. In the past he had sold such work better than any of his contemporaries, but after 1914 this was no longer possible. Partly for financial reasons, but also because he did not want his work to be wholly irrelevant to the contemporary business of this war, he began to paint a different sort of picture. ‘I am called upon to provide various things in aid of war funds or charities connected with the war,’ he told Quinn.23 Among his sitters were several staff officers and, in 1916, the bellicose Admiral Lord Fisher who brought in tow the Nelsonically named Duchess of Hamilton24 (‘You won’t find as fine a figure of a woman, and a Duchess at that, at every street corner’), to whom John transferred part of his attentions, while Fisher explained how to ‘end the war in a week’.25 When this portrait was shown at the NEAC, Albert Rutherston noted that it was ‘careless and sketchy’,26 and The Times critic observed that John had really painted a zoo picture of Fisher as a ‘Sea-Lion… hungering for his prey’.27 Yet it has lasted better than the formal portrait by Herbert von Herkomer and the Epstein bust. John’s depiction of Fisher’s face ‘shows it looking wryly over the viewer’s left shoulder,’ wrote Jan Morris,28 ‘its eyebrows raised in irony, its round eyes alert, its mouth mocking, cynical and affectionate, all at the same time. It is a quirky and highly intelligent face.’

  But on the whole these public portraits of war celebrities are not satisfactory, perhaps because John could not match his public sentiments to private feelings. In his cor
respondence he is often approving of these statesmen and soldiers; but when he actually came face to face with them he felt unaccountably bored. He did not think it proper to caricature them as he had done the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. Some satire, in a muted form, does come through: but seldom convincingly.

  Perhaps the most biographically interesting of these war pictures was that of Lloyd George, who had ‘introduced himself to me’ at the Park Hotel in Cardiff in the early summer of 1914. Towards the end of 1915, having recently been appointed Minister of Munitions, he agreed that John should paint him. A suitable canvas had been bought by Lieutenant-General Sir James Murray, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in aid of Red Cross funds, the arrangement being that John would paint whomever Murray designated. Like a marriage broker, Murray settled the agreement between them, then discreetly retired, confident that the two Welshmen would hit it off like fireworks. In fact they seem to have had just the wrong things in common and did not take to each other. The poetry of their natures was rooted in Wales: England had magnetized their ambitions. But their ambitions were different. Happy as a child, pampered by his family, Lloyd George was greedy for the world’s attentions. John in his childhood had felt deprived of love, and now grasped at it while seeking to evoke a romantic world set in those places of natural beauty politicians call the wilderness. ‘I feel I have no contact,’ Lloyd George told his mistress Frances Stevenson. John too had no contact by the end: but he had been reaching for other things.

  In public, John admired Lloyd George. He was ‘doing good work over Munitions’ and would surely have made a better business than Asquith, then the Prime Minister, of leading the country to victory. ‘One feels that what really is wanted is a sort of Cromwell to take charge,’ he told Quinn, ‘having turned out our Parliamentarians into the street first.’29 The Welsh wizard who was to play the part of Cromwell had agreed ‘to sit for half an hour in the mornings’ but, John complained, was ‘difficult to get hold of’.30 The portrait lurched forward in short bursts during December, January and February. On 16 February 1916 John wrote to Quinn: ‘I have finished my portrait of Lloyd George. He was a rotten sitter – as you say a “hot-arse who can’t sit still and be patient”.’ It was a restlessness that consumed them both. Lloyd George may not have appreciated being placed, in order of priority, behind the actress Réjane whom John was then also painting, and indiscriminately shoulder to shoulder with ‘some soldiers’. According to Frances Stevenson, ‘the sittings were not very gay ones.’31 Lloyd George was ‘in a grim mood’, suffering, in addition to toothache, from the latest Serbian crisis. Nevertheless, this cannot wholly account for the ‘hard, determined, almost cruel face,’ Frances Stevenson noted angrily in her diary, ‘with nothing of the tenderness & charm of the D[avid] of everyday life’.32 ‘Do you notice what John says about pictures which he does not like?’ Lloyd George had asked her. ‘Very pleasant!’ He was ‘upset’, she realized, ‘for he likes to look nice in his portraits!’ Another worry was Frances herself. Though professing to find John ‘terrifying’, she acknowledged him to be ‘an uncommon person… extraordinarily conceited… nevertheless… very fascinating’. Lloyd George persuaded her not to have her own portrait painted by John and, to her disappointment, prohibited her from going to his parties. Confronted by John’s ‘unpleasant’ portrait he reverted to nursery tactics, gathering his family round him (much to John’s irritation) in a chorus of abuse over the object, and drawing from ‘Pussy’ Stevenson her most maternal protectiveness. To account for the cunning and querulous expression, he suggested calling the picture ‘Salonika’. Then he affected to forget about it.33 But John remembered. Announcing his first portrait to have been ‘unfinished’, he caught up with Lloyd George nearly four years later in Deauville,34 drew out his brushes and began a second canvas. Under his fierce gaze Lloyd George grew restless again, hurried back to London and, wisely, did not honour his promise to continue the sittings at Downing Street. For John this was a foretaste of how his career as a professional portrait painter would proceed.

  In Winston Churchill, whom he drew after the Second World War, John was to observe the same inability to keep still. Under his scrutiny, Churchill seemed reduced to the condition of a child. His concern was for his ‘image’. How else to explain, John wondered, ‘these fits and starts, these visits to the mirror, this preoccupation with the window curtains, and the nervous fidgeting with his jowl?’

  A less quick-footed target was Ramsay MacDonald, whom John vainly attempted to paint on a number of occasions. The difficulty here seems to have been that the sitter proved too dim a subject to illuminate the romantic interpretation of a ‘dreamy knight-errant, dedicated to the overthrow of dragons and the rescue of distressed damsels’ which John insisted upon trying to fix on him. ‘I have fallen into troubled waters and I do not know when on earth I shall be able to see you,’ MacDonald wrote from Downing Street on 8 April 1933, two days before the Labour Party moved a vote of censure on the all-party government of which he was Prime Minister over unemployment. A fortnight later, MacDonald admitted in a letter to Will Rothenstein that ‘John’s portrait was a melancholy failure. It really was a terrible production, and everybody who saw it turned it down instantly. He wants to begin again, but I am really tired. The waste of my time has been rather bad. He made two attempts and an earlier one some time ago. In all I must have given between 20 and 30 sittings of 1½ hours’ average, and I cannot afford going on unless there is some certainty of a satisfactory result… ’

  The most satisfactory of John’s Prime Ministers was achieved at the expense of A. J. Balfour, who appeared to fall asleep. His philosophy of doubt, which always appealed to John, seemed to reach a culmination in his slumbering posture. ‘I set to,’ John records, ‘and completed the drawing within an hour.’

  He relished the prospect of meeting the famous. But invariably the prospect was better than the experience – except in the case of artists and writers. These portraits, especially of writers, comprise a separate section of his work – not private in the same way that ‘Washing Day’ or ‘Woman Knitting’ or ‘The Red Feather’ or ‘The Mauve Jersey’ are private, but not to be classed among what Quinn fretfully described as his ‘colonels and fat women, and… other disagreeable pot-boilers’.35 Among the writers who sat to him in these war years were W. H. Davies,36 Ronald Firbank, the gregarious Gogarty and the ailing Arthur Symons. Perhaps the most celebrated was Bernard Shaw, of whom, during May 1915, he did three rapid portraits in oil.

  Shaw was staying at Coole over Easter with Lady Gregory when his industry was suddenly halted by an atrocious headache. ‘Mrs Shaw was lamenting about not having him painted by a good artist,’ Lady Gregory wrote to W. B. Yeats, ‘and I suggested having John over, and she jumped at it, and Robert [Gregory] is to bring him over on Monday.’37 In the event John seems to have travelled more erratically, catching ‘a kind of cold’38 in Dublin, falling into convivial company and arriving ‘in a contrite and somewhat shattered condition’39 a week late. His symptoms deepened on discovering that Lady Gregory (who ‘is just like Queen Victoria] only uglier’) had used Shaw as bait for a portrait of her grandson ‘little Richard’40 whom, until now, he had successfully avoided. Although John made no secret of his preference for little Richard’s sister, Anne Gregory, ‘a very pretty little child with pale gold hair’, Lady Gregory insisted that it must be the son of the house who was honoured. So he began this ‘awful job’, producing what both children found ‘a very odd picture… [with] enormous sticky-out ears and eyes that sloped up at the corners, rather like a picture of a chinaman...’41,42

  Meanwhile, in his bedroom, Shaw was preparing himself. He had recovered from his headache to the extent of having his hair cut, but in the excitement, Lady Gregory lamented, ‘too much was taken off’.43 Despite Shaw’s head and John’s cold, both were at their most winning by the time the sittings began.

  Each morning John would strip off his coat, prop his canvases on the best chairs and paint se
veral versions at one sitting. But at night he would, ‘like Penelope’, undo the work of the previous day, washing the canvas clean and then starting another portrait in its place. ‘He painted with large brushes and used large quantities of paint,’ Shaw remembered.44 Over the course of eight days he painted ‘six magnificent portraits of me’, he told Mrs Patrick Campbell.45 ‘…Unfortunately as he kept painting them on top of one another until our protests became overwhelming, only three portraits have survived.’

  Between sittings John went off for ‘some grand galloping’46 with Robert Gregory, or, more sedately, would row Mrs Shaw across the lake. ‘Mrs Shaw is [a] fat party with green eyes who says “Ye-hes” in an intellectual way ending with a hiss,’ he divulged to Dorelia. Over thirty years later, in Chiaroscuro, John described Shaw as ‘a true Prince of the Spirit’, a fearless enemy of cant and humbug, and in his queer way, ‘a highly respectable though strictly uncanonical saint’.47 In his letters to Dorelia at the time he refers to him as ‘a ridiculous vain object in knickerbockers’ and describes the three of them – Lady Gregory and the Shaws – as ‘dreadful people’. Such discrepancies were odd notes played by John’s violently fluctuating moods, which were agitated at Coole Park by the fact that, though there was plenty to eat, nobody smoked or drank. ‘I smoke still,’ he reassured Dorelia, ‘but only touch claret at meals. In Ireland claret is regarded as a T[emperance] drink.’48 His admiration of Shaw, whom he intermittently thought ‘very pleasant company’, was qualified by the extreme awe radiated towards GBS from the women in the house. This veneration combined with John’s hearty silence to stimulate in Shaw the kind of brilliant intellectual monologues which put John in the shade, and which may have prompted him to paint over the portraits (a sort of silencing) so many times.