Augustus John (127 page)

American Archives of Art, Detroit, Michigan

C
orrespondence to John Beatty and Homer St Gaudens.

McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma

Correspondence to Cyril Connolly.

Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York

C
orrespondence to William Kent Rose.

University of Delaware Library, Newark, New Jersey

C
orrespondence to Ulick O’Connor.

Library of Congress, Washington, DC

C
orrespondence to Elmer Gertz.

Special Collections, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor

S
onnet to ‘Alick [Schepeler]’.

Division of Special Collections, New York University Libraries

C
orrespondence to Ronald Firbank.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

C
orrespondence to William and Alice Rothenstein (bMS Eng 1148 [772], 1148.1 [151–153]). There are also letters from Ida John and Gwen John to the Rothensteins. One letter from Augustus John to George Reavey (bMS 943.9 [19]).

Widener Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

C
orrespondence to Theodore Spencer.

University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign

Correspondence to Grant Richards.

University of Cincinatti, Ohio

C
orrespondence to Dorothy Brett.

Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

C
orrespondence to Aleister Crowley.

Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles

C
orrespondence to Emery Walker.

Department of Manuscripts, The Huntington, San Marino, California

O
ne hundred and six letters and two poems to Alick Schepeler.

Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, Buffalo, New York State

C
orrespondence to Conger Goodyear.

Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York State

Correspondence to Wyndham Lewis (ninety-eight letters and two from Dorelia), also manuscript entitled ‘The Cerements of Gold’ and one letter headed ‘To Whom It May Concern’). See
Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Catalogue of Manuscript Material in the Department of Rare Books, Cornell University Library,
compiled by Mary F. Daniels (1972).

Bertrand Library, Bucknell University Library, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

C
orrespondence to Oliver St John Gogarty (1917–55) and two letters from Dorelia to Gogarty.

Schlesinger Library of the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts

One letter to Dorothy Ardlow, and one letter to Florence Cary Koehler.

Boston University Libraries, Massachusetts

Correspondence to Catherine and Mikaly Karolyi, and one letter to Stuart Cloete.

Yale University Library, New Haven

Correspondence to John Drinkwater, Norman Douglas, Sylvia Hay and Mr Stewart-Jones (all in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). There is also a letter from John to James Rockwell Sheffield in the Sterling Memorial Library.

C
ANADA

National Gallery of Canada, Ontario

One letter to the gallery concerning copyright (copy, June 1922), and correspondence (1923–71), including letters from Lord Beaverbrook, Vincent Massey and the Hogg Museum at Harvard, regarding John’s cartoon ‘Canadians at Lens’ (charcoal on paper, 12 feet by 40 feet). There are also letters from Caspar John about other pictures (the National Gallery of Canada owns nine oil paintings, fifteen etchings, and sixteen drawings, watercolours and other works by Augustus John).

Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University, Ontario

C
orrespondence to Bertrand Russell.

University of Victoria, British Columbia

L
etter to Herbert Read.

A
USTRALIA

State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

C
orrespondence to and about Basil Burdett.

F
RANCE

Musée Aéronautique, Paris

C
orrespondence with M. Bazin.

N
EW
Z
EALAND

Dunedin Public Art Gallery

O
ne letter to Frank Lewis.

My indebtedness to the many people, galleries, libraries and museums that helped me to write my original biography of Augustus John is recorded in the first edition. In the preparation of this revised edition I have been further assisted by Nicola Beauman; John Beynon and Marion Hutton, Curator and Hon. Art Curator of Tenby Art Gallery; Jane Bond; Michael Bott, Keeper of Archives and Manuscripts at the University of Reading Library; Annette Bradshaw, Deputy Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Sally Brown and T. A. J. Burnett in the Department of Manuscripts and Manuscript Collections at the British Library; Mrs Robin Paisey and Alison Lloyd at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; David Carver, Archivist at the National Gallery, London; Charles Cholmondeley; Honor Clerk and Jonathan Franklin at the National Portrait Gallery, London; Caroline Cuthbert and David Fraser Jenkins at the Tate Gallery; Roy Davids, formerly at the London office of Sotheby’s; Mark Evans, Assistant Keeper (Fine Art) at the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff; Patrick Farndale; Jerome Farrell, City of Westminster Archivist; Susan Flint; Sir Angus Fraser; Cathy Henderson, Librarian at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; Jane Hill; Sara S. Hodson and Mary L. Robertson, Curators of Manuscripts at the Huntington; Francesca John; Rebecca John, who gave me access to the papers of her father, the late Sir Caspar John; John Kelly, who gathered for me all references to Augustus John in the letters of W. B. Yeats; Erika Kruger, Registrar at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Cecily Langdale at the Davis & Langdale Company, New York; Linda Lloyd Jones, Head of Exhibitions and Susanna Robson, Assistant Curator, Special Collections, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Assistant Archivist in the Department of Manuscripts and Records, the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Edward Morris, Curator of Fine Art at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Hayden Proud, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Dr D. M. Pugh, who was for a time Augustus John’s doctor and also for a time my own; Gillian Raffles at the Mercury Gallery, London; Ian Rogerson, who let me see the text of his introduction to a forthcoming edition of John Sampson’s
Welsh Gypsy Folk-Tales
;
Anthony Sampson, who showed me the typescript
of his book on his grandfather, John Sampson; Richard Shone, Assistant Editor of the
Burlington Magazine;
Greg Spurgeon, Head of Documents and Storage and Cindy Campbell, Archivist, at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Mary Taubman; Daphne Todd, President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, London; S. R. Tomlinson, Assistant Librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Joan Winterkorn at Bernard Quaritch Ltd, London.

I would also like to record my gratitude to the late Vivien White, Augustus John’s daughter, who, as owner of the copyrights, renewed the permission first given to me by her mother, Dorelia John, to quote from Augustus John’s writings and reproduce his pictures.

I am grateful to Alison Samuel, my editor at Chatto & Windus, for passing her critical eye over the old and new portions of my text and helping me to harmonize them. I am also indebted to Toby Buchan for his valuable policing of my typescript. I have retained what Willa Cather called ‘the irregular and intimate quality of things made by the human hand’, and I owe much to Sarah Johnson for transferring my prehistoric manuscript on to post-modernist disks.

Finally I must pay tribute to my wife, who propped me up and pulled me through when I fell ill, enabling me to complete this book.

MICHAEL
HOLROYD

Porlock Weir, September 1995

PREFACE

1
  Stephen Spender
World Within World
(1951), p. 76.

2
  Mary Taubman to the author, 6 March 1995. See also her introductions to the Gwen John exhibitions organized by Faerber and Maison Ltd (1964), the Arts Council of Great Britain (1968) and Anthony d’Offay (1976). Her
Gwen John
was published by the Scolar Press in 1985.

3
  Now in the National Library of Wales. NLW MS 22802D.

4
  
Portraits by Augustus John: Family, Friends and the Famous
(National Museum of Wales 1988), p. 11.

5
  Romilly John to David Fraser Jenkins, 3 March 1979. National Museum of Wales.

6
  ‘Photocopy and be damned: literature and the libraries’,
Sunday Times
(2 September 1984).

7
  Philip Larkin
Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982
(1983), p. 99.

8
  Some John and Nettleship papers were purchased from Caspar John’s daughter Rebecca John in October 1988, and two small groups of correspondence and drafts of Augustus John’s autobiographical writings for the
Sunday Times
were bought at Sotheby’s in April and December 1989. All these were incorporated into the main archive, but other odds and ends of correspondence acquired since then have been catalogued separately.

9
  NLW MS 22305C fols. 5–6.

10
  Richard Shone
Augustus John
(1979), p. 3.

CHAPTER I: LITTLE ENGLAND BEYOND WALES

1
  This lodging house was Corporation property owned by Ancient Grant. Its lease was assigned to William John on 23 October 1877. Two years later, on 17 December 1879, the lease was devised to William Willams.

2
  After Augustus John’s death in 1961 a plaque commemorating the place where he spent his early years was fixed by the Haverfordwest Council at No. 5 Victoria Place. On neither his brother’s nor his sisters’ birth certificates had any number been given. Winifred, who was still alive in the United States, could not remember the number; Thornton, nearing ninety and living in Canada, appears to have copied down the number 5 from the address (5 Tower Hill) of the solicitor who wrote to him asking after his birthplace.

No. 7 Victoria Place is now part of Lloyds Bank. The John family leased it from a Mr Joseph Tombs, and the number is confirmed by several directories of the period. No. 7 Victoria Place is also given on the birth certificate of Augustus’s youngest uncle Frederick Charles John, born on 20 September 1856. In 1995 the Civic Society Guild of Freemen put up a plaque marking the birthplace of Gwen and Augustus on Lloyds Bank, a few yards from the rogue plaque on the Victoria Bookshop next door.

3
  The dates of their births were: Thornton, 10 May 1875; Gwendolen Mary, 22 June 1876; Winifred Maud, 3 November 1879.

4
  Until 1850 the abominable crime of ‘associating with gypsies’ was punishable by hanging.

5
  Winifred John to Gwen John, 10 July 1910 (National Library of Wales MS 22307 fols. 119–23).

6
  
Horizon
Volume III No. 14 (February 1941), pp. 98–9.

7
  This house, though altered and precariously named ‘Rocks Drift’, still stands. It has a large entrance hall and stairwell, drawing-room, dining-room and six bedrooms. It was built using the stone from Settlands, the next bay.

8
  Besides being a labourer, William John was a violin player. ‘I am hoping that the musician will turn out to have been a wandering minstrel,’ Augustus wrote to H. W. Williams on discovering this fact (16 May 1952). ‘…His musical gifts reappeared in one or two of my descendants.’ Perhaps the most celebrated musician among these descendants is the cello player Amaryllis Fleming. Augustus’s sister Winifred played the violin, and her daughter Muriel Matthews is a respected cellist in America. Augustus’s son David was for many years an oboist in the Sadler’s Wells orchestra, and another son, Edwin, played the flute.

9
  His obituary in the
Haverfordwest and Milford Haven Telegraph
(9 July 1884) notes that ‘The funeral was largely attended by the principal professional men, as well as the leading tradesmen of the town and neighbourhood.’

10
  Joanna (b. 1840), Emma (b. 1842), Alfred (b. 1844), Edwin, and Clara Sophia (b. 1849).

11
  William John used to describe Alfred as a solicitor, though in fact he never passed the law exams, and probably acted as managing clerk, a position he could hold without legal qualifications.

12
  Alfred John, with his haggard good looks and air of impoverished innocence, came to fulfil Augustus’s ideal of a Bohemian English gentleman. Visiting his nephew one hot summer day, he accidentally revealed by a spontaneous gesture that, underneath his mackintosh, he wore no clothes at all. With equal transparency, he added to his family name a ‘St’ and, as Alfred St John, was rewarded with a very fine funeral service, free of charge, by the clergy of St David’s Cathedral.

13
  It was not until the removal of the Sex Disqualification Act in 1919 that women were permitted to qualify as solicitors. The first woman was admitted in 1922.

14
  Benjamin died on 12 January 1856 of hydrocephalus and convulsions, aged two months; William had died six days earlier from the same cause, aged one year and eleven months; Sydney died after fourteen days of diarrhoea on 13 August 1861, aged five weeks; and Thornton died on 15 May 1861, aged eleven years, of congestion of the brain, fever and debility.