Augustus John (14 page)

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Round Gwen and Gus there soon gathered a group of talented young artists. A new spirit of comradeship, unknown in Legros’s time, invaded the Slade. ‘The girls were supreme,’ Augustus recalled. Among this ‘remarkably brilliant group of women students’, in what Augustus called
‘the Grand Epoch of the Slade’, were Ida Nettleship and Gwen Salmond,
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the latter a self-possessed and outspoken girl whose ‘Descent from the Cross’ was much admired. But perhaps the most precocious of all was Edna Waugh, very pretty and petite and with long hair down to her waist, who had gone there in 1893 at the age of fourteen, won a scholarship and in 1897 scored a dramatic triumph with her watercolour ‘The Rape of the Sabines’, showing women in traumatic positions being carried off by strange men for ‘purposes unspecified’. She was proclaimed an infant prodigy, another Slade School ‘genius’. The poetic imaginings with which she filled her notebooks particularly impressed Tonks, with whom she was a favourite and who predicted she would be a second Burne-Jones, to which she replied that on the contrary she would be ‘the first Edna Waugh’. But to many people’s dismay she did not long remain Edna Waugh.

For no one, unless it was to be Augustus’s own wife, better illustrated the heavy burdens of domesticity upon artistic endeavour. In the spring of 1896, a young barrister, William Clarke Hall, had written to Edna’s parents formally requesting permission to propose marriage to her. He was more than a dozen years older than she was, but had admired her since she was thirteen – ‘the child for whom of all things in the world I care most’. This was a big shock for Edna. She liked Willie when he used to come and see her father. She was struck by his piercing blue eyes, but could not tell whether or not she loved him. Did she like him simply because he worshipped her so extravagantly? She was so young she did not know what she felt. ‘You occupy more than half my imaginings,’ she assured him. But he, offended by her fractional hesitation, accused her of being ‘completely self-absorbed’; and because he ‘seemed so much more mature than myself, she felt he must be able to ‘understand so truly what is wrong with me’. Her mother considered her to be engaged and so apparently did everyone else. So presumably she was – at any rate it seemed inevitable. ‘Don’t bother your head whether you care for Willie with lasting love,’ her friend Ida Nettleship counselled her, ‘…when you love you will know.’ But Edna did not know, perhaps because, as Ida explained to William Clarke Hall, ‘it’s a child’s love that Edna bears you.’
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In her last year at the Slade, Edna asked Gwen John for advice on oil painting. Gwen had learnt from Ambrose McEvoy the Old Master technique of putting on fluid paint in layers, modifying the underlying colour (a green monochrome wash) with a series of semi-transparent glazes. But Edna found that this ‘was not the right medium for me’, and that ink and watercolour suited her best. Her talent had more in common with Augustus’s. ‘I wanted to draw a subject quickly,’ she wrote, ‘seize it,
convey my impression.’
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The aim of all these students on leaving the Slade was to have their pictures exhibited by the New English Art Club. Early in 1899 Gus and Edna, the two hares in the race, would be the first to get their work accepted. It was the beginning and almost the end of Edna’s artistic life. For, a few months earlier, on 22 December 1898, she became the first of this group of students to be married. William Clarke Hall was thirty-two, Edna nineteen: a confused Victorian adolescent bride desperately missing her artistic friends and feeling ‘in a shadow full of weight and strange lurking despair’.
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Beside these women, according to Augustus, ‘the male students cut a poor figure.’ Chief among them was William Orpen, the son of an Irish solicitor, who arrived at the Slade in 1897 encrusted with prizes from the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. With his arrival, a new force made itself felt in Gower Street. It was the force, primarily, of tireless industry and ambition. Orpen was a gnome-like, slim and active figure, very popular with the other students. His high cheekbones were given prominence by sunken pale cheeks, light grey eyes, and thick brown unkempt hair. He wore a small blue serge jacket without lapels – of a type usually worn by engineers. In 1899, he was to win the Summer Composition Prize with his outstanding ‘The Play Scene in
Hamlet
’,
which uses the open auditorium of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre to depict a rehearsal of Act III with diverse groups of figures, including Augustus embracing Ida Nettleship. But his father had by now had enough of his son’s painting and gave him the alternative of taking up some serious business or being cut off with a hundred pounds. Orpen took the hundred pounds and never looked back. There seemed nothing he could not accomplish. He was a devoted disciple of William Rothenstein, and after a successful proposal of marriage was to become his brother-in-law. Later, while in Ireland working as an art teacher, he met an American patron, a specimen comparatively rare before the transatlantic jet. This was the stylishly beautiful Mrs St George, who became his mistress and the guide to his successful professional career. ‘You are certainly the most wonderful thing that ever happened,’ he acknowledged.
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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,’
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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‘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.’
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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.’
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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.
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‘…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?”’
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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 venturous 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.
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‘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?’
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