But the game had to be played ‘to the last spasm’. Eve Fleming wanted a child: she must have one.
In March 1925, when John went to Berlin to paint Gustav Stresemann, the German Foreign Minister (and a former Chancellor), Eve, who was a friend of the British Ambassador in Berlin, Lord D’Abernon, went too and stayed with John at the British Embassy. Early that summer she called together the staff at Cheyne Walk, announced that she was closing the house and going on a long cruise. A postcard of snow-capped mountains that December informed John of the birth of a daughter. At the end of the year she returned with her ‘adopted’ daughter wrapped in a shawl – the adoption, she let it be known, having been arranged by the Royal Physician, Lord Dawson of Penn. On 18 June 1926, the child was baptized Amaryllis Marie-Louise Fleming at a private ceremony in Cheyne Walk, the word ‘unknown’ being entered against the parents’ names on the certificate. After a public baptism a fortnight later another certificate was issued identifying Amaryllis as the ‘adopted daughter of Mrs Valentine Fleming’.
Amaryllis’s childhood was very different from Zoë’s, but both girls grew up not knowing who was their actual father. Rumours of their parentage, fanned by John’s intermittent forgetfulness as to its secrecy, blew around them and eventually reached Zoë in her late teens, Amaryllis in her early twenties. After an initial smokescreen of indignation, John was happy to accept them both as part of the tribe. ‘You were found in a ditch,’ he told Amaryllis at the beginning of a dinner in the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square. But at the end of the dinner, he gave her a great slap on the back: ‘So you’re my little girl, are you? Well, don’t tell your mother.’48
Zoë and Amaryllis felt wonderfully at home with Augustus and Dorelia in the country. Once they turned up on the same day, and John, his eyes glinting, airily introduced them: ‘I believe you two are related.’ Amaryllis’s career as a cellist gave him much pleasure. He would listen to her on the radio and write her letters of congratulation on her ‘howling success’. He also turned up at her first promenade concert, where he judged her triumph in terms of the number of people in tears during the slow movement. He felt proud that she with her red hair and the black-haired Zoë were such fine-looking wenches. Each of them sat for him. ‘I could paint you on your back...’ he offered Amaryllis. Zoë, too, who had gone on the stage and was everybody’s understudy, was ‘a first-rate sitter, and useful’, he judged, ‘in other ways too’.49 But neither of them would ever understand the need for so much secrecy, and both despised their mothers for the years of lying.
3
FACES AND TALES
‘You will be a giant again.’
T. E. Lawrence to Augustus John (19 April 1930)
‘I kept procrastinating.’
John to Ottoline Morrell (27 March 1929)
‘Augustus John, whose brain was once teeming with ideas for great compositions, had ceased to do imaginative work and was painting portraits,’ wrote Will Rothenstein of these years between the wars.50 Though he was to return over the next two decades to ‘invented’ landscapes on a large scale, and though he continued to paint at all times from nature, adding, on Dorelia’s instructions, flower pictures to his repertoire in the 1920s, portraits dominated John’s work until the Second World War. He was always ‘dying to get through with them and tackle other things’, but ‘Alas! that seems to be my perpetual state!’51
The most celebrated portrait of this period was of Guilhermina Suggia, the exotic Portuguese cellist under whom Amaryllis Fleming briefly studied in the late 1940s. John began this work early in 1920 and, after almost eighty sittings, finished it early in 1923.52 It took so long and involved her calling at Mallord Street so incessantly that a rumour spread that they were living there together – and Amaryllis was their daughter. The portrait had been begun at the suggestion of the newspaper owner Edward Hulton who was briefly engaged to Suggia and who intended the picture to be a betrothal offering. By the time the engagement lapsed, John was committed to the painting.
‘To be painted by Augustus John is no ordinary experience,’ Suggia allowed. ‘…The man is unique and so are his methods.’53 Throughout the sittings she played Bach, and this forestalled conversation – John continuing to hum the music during lunch. ‘Sometimes’, Suggia noticed, ‘he would begin to walk up and down in time to the music… When specially pleased with his work, when some finesse of painting eyelash or tint had gone well, he would always walk on tiptoe.’54 As a rule she posed for two hours a day, but by the third year she would sit for another two hours in the afternoon.
Those who visited the studio during these years were aware that a terrific struggle was taking place. John was attempting to paint again: that is, not simply draw with the brush. From week to week the picture would change: sometimes it looked good, sometimes it had deteriorated, and at other times, in spite of much repainting, from gold then to white then to red, it appeared almost unchanged. As with a tug of war, tense, motionless, no one could tell which way it would go.
Suggia herself was ‘more delighted with the result than I should have thought possible’. It is a rare, full-length profile portrait which shows her holding the cello between her legs, like a male player, instead of in the side-saddle position women were then expected to use. Not being a commission, it had been painted for exhibition and sale, and as Andrew Wilton writes, ‘to create a striking image, and to cause a stir that would promote both sitter and artist’. In these aims it was immediately successful. It was bought for three thousand guineas (equivalent to £80,600 in 1996) from the Alpine Gallery by an American collector in 1923, shown in 1924 at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition, where it won first prize, and the following year acquired by Lord Duveen who presented it to the Tate Gallery in London.
It was to be a popular painting. Though it does not possess the overwhelming power of ‘The Smiling Woman’, painted in John’s prime, with which it has sometimes been compared, it is nevertheless a spectacular essay in painterly rhetoric, and catches very memorably the exotic image of a performer who, during her residence in England between 1912 and 1923, often lifted audiences – including even such a reputedly cold fish as Lytton Strachey – into ‘a state of ecstasy’.55 With her head so erect, her eyes closed in concentration, her right arm theatrically extended to form a dramatic V-shape (the echo of which in the sitter’s neck, the background drapery and long ruby-red skirt gives the composition its aesthetic unity), Suggia embodies the romantic idealization of musicianship. In the emphasis which John throws on the visual drama of her performance, in its very excess, there is an agreeable suggestion of irony. For though Suggia looked every inch a prima donna and gave an impression of romantic boldness her playing was actually ‘calculated, correct and classical’, her accompanist Gerald Moore remembered,56 and her bow-hold, clearly to be seen in John’s portrait, could not deliver the power her attitude proclaimed.
Even in this accomplished big work, six feet tall and almost as wide, the painting of the long train of the skirt is uneven. This was a result of his impatience of which he tried to make a virtue – the virtue of concentrating on essentials. ‘There are coarse passages to be found even in those pictures generally reckoned to be among his successes,’ wrote the art critic Richard Shone. ‘The shoes of William Nicholson, for example, are more like Sargent at his worst, and John seems to make very little of the draperies in the background.’57
Something seemed to have snapped in John as a result of the extended effort he put into this picture. Never again did he seriously attempt anything so ambitious. The portrait of Thomas Hardy, for example, done some six months after the completion of ‘Suggia’, is a dry impasto laid straight on to the canvas, which is barely covered in parts (the hairs of the moustache are attached to a piece of unprimed canvas). In treatment and colour scheme it is reminiscent of his three emphatic studies of Bernard Shaw.
John had met Hardy at Kingston Maurward on 21 September 1923 and, after several visits to Max Gate, the house in Dorset t
hat Hardy had designed himself, polished off the portrait by the middle of the following month. Hardy was then eighty-three. ‘An atmosphere of great sympathy and almost complete understanding at once established itself between us,’ John recorded.58 They did not talk much, but John felt they were of a kind:59 ‘I wonder which of the two of us was the more naïve!’ He painted Hardy seated in his study, a room piled to the ceiling with books ‘of a philosophical character’. Hardy wears a serious, querying expression; he looks stiff, but is bearing up. It is the portrait of a shy man, full of disciplined emotion. ‘I don’t know whether that is how I look or not,’ he said,60 ‘but that is how I feel.’ The picture was painted at the suggestion of T E. Lawrence and bought by Sydney Cockerell for three thousand pounds on behalf of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. ‘If I look like that the sooner I am under the ground the better,’ Hardy remarked to Cockerell. But in fact ‘the old man is delighted, & Mrs Hardy also,’ T. E. Lawrence told his mother. ‘It is seldom that an artist is so fortunate in his sitter’s eyes.’61 After his death in 1928, Hardy’s widow Florence reported him as having said to her that he would rather have John’s portrait in the Fitzwilliam than ‘receive the Nobel Prize – and he meant it’.
In a letter to Hardy, John suggested that this portrait was ‘merely preparatory to another & more satisfactory picture which I hope to do with your help, later on’.62 It was only by labelling his paintings as preliminary studies for more elaborate compositions that he could decide to stop working on them. Where there was infinite time there was infinite delay, infinite painting out and indecision. Some critics interpreted this dissatisfaction as a quest for perfection. But he painted without premeditation, asking his sitters sometimes what background colour they would like, at other times whether they thought he should introduce a flower or a bowl of fruit, or simply demanding: ‘Tell me what’s wrong with this arm.’ When Lord David Cecil inquired what aesthetic motive there had been for making the colour of his tie darker than it actually was, John replied that some black paint had accidentally got mixed into the red, and he thought it looked rather good. He liked, starting perhaps with an eye, to exaggerate the figure as he worked downwards, as El Greco or Velazquez might, for grand manner. His unfinished work is often better in these later years because it manages to convey powers, latent in him, on which he could no longer call. It must be ‘hard’, T. E. Lawrence sympathized (9 April 1930), ‘to paint against time’. But time was a false friend to John – a substitute for concentration. It remained to Dorelia and close brave friends to rescue, by one subterfuge or another, what pictures they could before they were painted into oblivion.
The longer he worked the more difficult it became to persuade him to stop. With commissioned portraits there was often some limitation that imposed a discipline, though it afforded little pleasure. Of all these ‘boardroom’ portraits, his favourite was of Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England. Begun on 1 April 1930, it was completed a year later, Norman’s hair subsiding in the interval from grey to white. To John’s mind he was ‘an almost ideal sitter’, taking apparently no interest whatever in the artist or his picture. ‘It was in a spirit of severe reserve that we used to part on the doorstep of my house,’ John recorded, ‘whence, after looking this way and that, and finding the coast clear, Mr Norman would venture forth to regain his car, parked as usual discreetly round the corner.’63 What John did not know was that, on arriving back at his office, Norman was transformed, regaling everyone with descriptions of the Great Artist at work. ‘It’s marvellous to watch him scrutinizing me,’ he would rhapsodize, ‘…then using a few swift strokes like this on the outline and dabbing on paint like lightning. What a heavenly gift!’64
John represents the two of them as sharing a sense of isolation. Though the banker seemed ‘troubled with graver problems than beset other men’, it was not difficult, John recalled, ‘to offset Mr Montagu Norman’s indifference to my activities by a corresponding disregard of his’.65 At rare moments ‘our acquaintance seemed to show signs of ripening’, and then, so he told Michael Ayrton, a curious attraction would rise up in him for this dry, preoccupied, semi-detached figure. To John Freeman he later remarked: ‘It seemed to give him pleasure.’ But he was referring to the sittings, not the portrait itself which, with its hard eyes, nervously taut mouth and haunted expression, shocked Norman so much that he refused to let it hang either in his home or at the Bank of England – where, nevertheless, it now hangs.
‘Sometimes’, John recalled, ‘Lord D’Abernon would come to chat with my sitter. The subject appeared to be High Finance. I was not tempted to join in these discussions.’66 D’Abernon, a trustee of the National Gallery in London, was another of John’s subjects; his portrait, completed after Montagu Norman’s, had been started early in 1927. As the second ceremonial portrait of John’s career, it invites comparison with ‘The Lord Mayor of Liverpool’ but falls incomparably short. It is neither caricature nor straight portrait study: it is a false creation. John himself affected to believe it a finer painting than ‘Suggia’, but this judgement rested on the greater time it had taken him, and on his wish to obtain for it the same price – three thousand pounds (equivalent to £79,500 in 1996). Sometimes, during this five years’ marathon, he was tempted to give up: then another cheque, for five hundred or a thousand pounds, would arrive and he was obliged to paint wearily on. ‘I hope’, he wrote rather unconvincingly to Dorelia, ‘old D’Abernon won’t peg out before the portrait is done.’67 To gain wind it was necessary for him to puff enthusiasm into the ordeal. On 18 December 1927 he writes to D’Abernon that the portrait is ‘too fine a scheme’ to take any ‘risks’ with. Since Lady D’Abernon had a villa in Rome, might it not be ‘a practical plan’, John wondered, ‘for me to come to Rome in February where I could use a studio at the British School’?68 Two years later, on 8 December 1929, Lord D’Abernon notes in a letter to his wife: ‘The Augustus John portrait at last improving – the face less bibulous. Seen from five yards off – it is a fine costume picture.’69 John had brought in a stalwart Guardsman to stand wearing the British Ambassador’s elaborate uniform, but eventually this soldier collapsed and John fell back on a wooden dressmaker’s dummy, the character of which is ‘well conveyed in the completed work’. By the autumn of 1928 he is begging Dorelia to ‘undress that awful dummy and put d’Ab’s clothes in his trunk’.70 But still the work went lamely on. Like Macbeth, he had reached a point from which it was as tedious to retreat as to go on. He put the best face he could on it: ‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.’
The portrait, now in the Tate Gallery, is dated 1932, in which year it was finally handed over to Lord D’Abernon. ‘There are only two styles of portrait painting,’ says Miss La Creevy in Nicholas Nickleby: ‘the serious and the smirk’. ‘Lord D’Abernon’ is not smirking and he is not serious. He is nothing. A photograph of Lord D’Abernon posing for the picture ‘shows how unlike him the “parade” portrait was and is’, his wife noted on the back.
On other occasions, when his soul revolted against such formal work, John could be less accommodating. After finishing the portrait of the Earl of Athlone, he agreed to show it the following day to the sitter’s wife. She arrived with her husband and went into his studio. Two minutes later they burst out, looking furious. John stood in the doorway quietly lighting his pipe as they drove off. Egerton Cooper, who had watched the incident from his studio near by, hurried over to ask what was wrong. ‘I tore the painting to pieces,’ explained John. ‘I suddenly couldn’t bear it.’
Another time it was the sitter who dismantled a portrait. During part of the summer of 1920, John had been at work on ‘His Margarine Majesty’, the fish and soap millionaire Lord Leverhulme. Although ‘strongly inclined’ to have his portrait done by John, Leverhulme had begun the first sitting by warning him he could spare little time and that he was an almost impossible subject, no artist (excepting to some degree Sir Luke Fildes) having done him justice. When the time was up, gre
at praise was lavished on the picture: by John. It seemed, he said, to breathe with life and self-satisfaction and only lacked speech. Leverhulme himself did not lack speech, and finding the portrait very ‘humbling to pride’ and a ‘chastening’71 reflection, argued that neither the eyes, nor yet the mouth, nor even the nose were his, though it was probably the bloated face and grasping fingers that hurt him, if not the informality and small size for ‘under a thousand pounds’ commission. Whatever the deficiencies, John, proffering his palette, invited His Lordship to make the amendments himself. This offer was declined and the picture, with all its alleged faults intact, paid for and dispatched.
John had then gone down to Tenby. Returning to Mallord Street late in September he discovered the portrait had been returned to him – at least, that part representing Lord Leverhulme’s stomach, shoulders, arms, hands and thighs, though not his head, which had been scissored out. That evening (31 September 1920) John sat down and wrote: ‘I am intensely anxious to have your Lordship’s explanation of this, the grossest insult I have ever received in the course of my career.’
Leverhulme’s reply four days later shone with friendliness. He felt ‘extremely distressed at the blunder that has occurred’, but added: ‘I assure you it is entirely a blunder on the part of my housekeeper.’ He had intended hanging the painting in his safe at Rivington Bungalow, but overlooked ‘the fact that there were internal partitionings and other obstacles that prevented me doing this’. After a bold prognosis, he settled on a surgical operation, removing the head, ‘which is the important part of the portrait’, and storing it safely away. This letter, culminating with an urgent request to keep the matter dark, was succeeded by an invitation to ‘dine with my sister’. To his surprise, John appeared dissatisfied with this answer, and the correspondence between them persisted in lively fashion over the next ten days until suddenly appearing in full on the front page of the Daily Express.72 It was a case of the Baronet and the Butterfly in reverse. ‘I actually frightened him into violence,’ John told T E. Lawrence.73 Leverhulme insisted that he had a right to deal with his own property – a little trimming here or there – as he chose. Even the copyright, he hazarded, belonged to him. As for the publicity, it was not of his choosing: ‘all that I am impressed by is that Mr John can get his advertising perfectly free… whereas the poor Soap Maker has to pay a very high rate for a very bad position in the paper.’
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