Augustus John (22 page)

From this time onward a change began to pass over the appearance of the NEAC exhibitions: more drawings and watercolours were seen and the club became, in the words of D. S. MacColl, ‘a school of drawing’.
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Then Roger Fry’s appointment as Art Critic of the
Athenaeum
gained for the New English another platform. The Winter Exhibition of 1904, Fry wrote, was its most important one yet. ‘Mr Sargent, Mr Steer, Mr Rothenstein, Mr John, Mr Orpen, to mention only the best known artists, are all seen here at their best.’ But the older members belonged to a group, he continued, ‘whose traditions and methods are already being succeeded by a new set of ideas. They are no longer
le dernier cri –
that is given by a group of whom Mr John is the most remarkable member.’

There was nothing inimical in Augustus’s work to Sickert’s London Impressionists whose pursuit was ‘life’ and whose object was to draw it feverishly, Quentin Bell has explained, ‘capturing at high speed the essentials of the situation’.
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Between Sickert and himself there developed a respect tinged with irony. Sickert was amused by Augustus’s moody character. ‘I am proud to say’, he boasted, ‘that I once succeeded in bringing a smile to the somewhat difficult lips of Mr Augustus John.’
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Yet he saw the value of his work, describing him as ‘the first draughtsman that we have… the most sure and able of our portrait painters’.
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And in the
New Age
he paid generous tribute to Augustus’s ‘intensity and virtuosity [which] have endued his peculiar world of women, half gypsy, half model, with a life of their own. But his whole make-up is personal to himself, and the last thing a wary young man had better do is to imitate John… [he is] incessantly provisioning himself from the inexhaustible and comfortable cupboard of nature.’
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Perversely, Augustus dismissed Sickert’s writings as ‘elegant drivel’.
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Though he liked Sickert’s work, he felt impatience with his aesthetic intrigues. Augustus seldom interested himself in art politics. While other painters held stormy meetings about New Rules and Old Prejudices, the only record of Augustus intercepting their discussions is in the spring of 1903 when, so Orpen told Conder (2 May 1903), he ‘demanded to know why after accepting Miss Gwendolen John’s pictures – they [the NEAC Committee] had not hung them. But alas this question was out of order...’
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But Gwen was thankful to be free of the New English. ‘I think I can paint better than I used – I know I can,’ she told Ursula Tyrwhitt (8 July
1904); ‘it has been such a help not to think of the N.E.A.C. – and not to hurry over something to get it in – I shall never do anything for an exhibition again – but when the exhibitions come round send anything I happen to have.’

Gwen finally ceased showing her pictures at the club in the winter of 1911. ‘I paint a good deal,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson after the last show (5 December 1911), ‘but I don’t often get a picture done – that requires, for me, a very long time of a quiet mind, and never to think of exhibitions.’

Augustus continued regularly showing his work at the NEAC until the large Retrospective Exhibition of 1925, and intermittently afterwards.
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His attitude to the New English was the same as his attitude would be to the Royal Academy. ‘Over here paltry little clubs & exhibitions agitate the artistic climate,’ he wrote to Gwen in 1904. As for the Royal Academy, it was unthinkable that he would ever belong to an institution whose shows were simply ‘a vast collection of wrong-minded stuff. Sargent, who had joined the Royal Academy in 1897, was he told Gwen, ‘the cleverest of the spoilers, moilers & toilers [who] with infallible judgement leaves out everything that makes a face interesting. His art is merely “the glass of fashion” but hardly “the mould of form”.’

Augustus envied Gwen’s quiet as opposed to his own agitated atmosphere. He wanted her to be recognized and he worried about her neglect, over which he sometimes felt odd sensations of responsibility. But she was almost impossible to help either with gifts of money, which put her awkwardly in his debt, or with offers to manage exhibitions on her behalf, which troubled her as much as the exhibitions themselves. His moods of responsibility came and went, and she was affected both by their coming and their going.

And he was affected by Gwen’s tenuous self-sufficiency. Her attitude, if he could have attained it, would surely have furthered his own talent. But with such a lifestyle, such an entourage, he could never afford it. For she, in her prison-like rooms, was comparatively free; while he, restlessly patrolling here and darting somewhere else, would be encumbered by the claims of voluminous and irregular families.

‘I become more rebellious in Liverpool.’

Augustus John to Alice Rothenstein (December 1905)

‘We have taken the most convenient flat imaginable in Fitzroy Street,’ Augustus wrote to his sister Winifred a few days after his marriage. ‘It has an excellent studio. The whole most cheap.’

By the time they returned from their honeymoon at Swanage, this flat – three rooms and a huge studio in the top part of 18 Fitzroy Street – had been redecorated and stood ready for them. But no sooner had they got there than Ida fell ill with the Swanage complaint – measles – and returned to Wigmore Street, leaving Augustus alone. It was not a good omen.

Money was now their chief worry. Well though Augustus’s work had sold at his exhibitions, it was not admired by everyone and could scarcely earn him enough to keep a wife, let alone children. He applied for a British Institute scholarship but did not get one. Then, that February 1901, shortly after Ida returned, a new opportunity for making a living suddenly presented itself. Albert Rutherston, having staggered round to deliver his wedding present of a kitchen table, reported that ‘there is just a chance of John going to Liverpool for a year to act as Professor in the school of art there during the absence of the present one – it would be very nice for him as he will get a studio free and at least £300 or £400 [equivalent to £15,500–£20,500 in 1996] for the year.’

What had happened was that Herbert Jackson, the art instructor at the art school affiliated to University College, Liverpool, had gone off to the Boer War. When asked to recommend someone temporarily to fill his place, D. S. MacColl had put Augustus’s name forward;
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and, since there was no time to be lost, his proposal was at once accepted.

Augustus arrived in Liverpool late that winter, ‘a heartening sight’, one student recalled, ‘…striding across the drab quad to the studios in his grey fisherman’s jersey and with golden rings
*2
in his ears’.
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The university staff were rather flustered by this spectacle, enhanced by the beard, long hair and large magnetic eyes, and by the sonorous voice with which he sang his repertoire of ballads romantic and bawdy – rollicking songs from the old troubadours and suggestive ones imported from Parisian
cabarets, little verses from Villon and whining cockney limericks with their cringing refrain:

‘I’m a man as done wrong to my paryents’.

‘Liverpool is a most gorgeous place,’ Augustus immediately wrote to Michel Salaman. He had been warned that it was an ugly city but he did not find it ugly. It enthralled him. Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it had been rising from a ‘black hole’ as Nathaniel Hawthorne, the US Consul there in the 1850s, called it, into a prosperous and dignified Victorian trading city. Its prosperity depended upon its port, one of the largest in the world, which made it a cosmopolitan meeting place ‘full of European enclaves and strange languages, while the steamships and sailing barques brought sailors’ stories, rhymes and riddles from all over the world’.
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Lytton Strachey, who left the university a few months before Augustus John arrived there, had recoiled from the groups of starving children, drunken sailors, beggars with their dingy barrel organs, that infested the stinking slum streets and tenements that lay behind and around Liverpool’s grand façade. The crowds at the docks were ‘appalling’, he noted, and ‘all hideous. It gave me the shivers and in ten minutes I fled.’
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But Augustus revelled in this spectacle of human diversity: the knife grinders, umbrella makers, ship owners, Celtic scholars, soap kings. The only place that gave him the shivers was the Walker Art Gallery – ‘a stinking hole’
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he called it in a letter to Michel Salaman.

‘The docks are wondrous,’ Augustus was soon writing to Will Rothenstein. ‘The college is quite young, so are its professors and they are very anxious to make it an independent seat of learning… The town is full of Germans, Jews, Welsh and Irish and Dutch.’ Everything seemed to delight him. Whatever was new appeared exciting – and there was much that was new to him, much that smelt of adventure here. He explored the sombre district of the Merseyside with its migrant population of Scandinavians on their way to the New World, and reported to Alice Rothenstein, ‘the Mersey is grand – vast – in a golden haze – a mist of love in the great blue eye of heaven.’ He nosed around the Goree Piazza, still faintly reeking of the slave trade; he reconnoitred the Chinese Quarter off Pitt Street and Upper Frederick Street, with its whiff of opium, and looked in on the lodging houses of the tinkers round Scotland Road. Even the art school – a collection of wooden sheds on Brownlow Hill – appealed to him. ‘It is amusing teaching,’ he told Will Rothenstein.

Over the first few weeks he and Ida put up at 9 St James’s Street, and it was here that Augustus’s one complaint lay. ‘It has been impossible to
do much work yet – living as a guest in somebody’s house – a great bore.’ He was hungry for work, especially since there was soon to be another show of his pictures at the Carfax Gallery. But already by April they had found ‘very good rooms’, he reported, ‘in the house of an absent-minded and charming Professor, one Mackay’.

‘Some of the College professors are charming men,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman. John MacDonald Mackay, Rathbone Professor of Ancient History, was ‘the leading spirit of the College’, he assured Will Rothenstein shortly after moving to his house at 4 St James’s Road. ‘He avoids coming to the practical point most tenaciously – when arranging about taking these rooms he refused to consider terms but referred us to the Swedish Consul – who was extremely surprised when Ida spoke to him on the subject.’

Mackay combined two qualities that appealed to Augustus’s divided nature: comedy and idealism. With his right hand raised, half to his audience, half to the sky visible through the window, a faraway look in his eyes, he would discourse in a weird moustachioed chant, interrupting himself with bursts of sing-song laughter or rhetorical indignation, often abandoning the line of his argument, yet always struggling back to First Principles. Within the chemistry of his strange, broken-back eloquence, Liverpool was transformed into a new Athens destined to save the country from materialism by the luminescence of its thought, the excellence of its work, the beauty of its art and architecture. Whatever nominal positions others may have held, Mackay was the patron of the university while Augustus lived there.

Mackay was important to Augustus in two respects. First, he became the subject of one of his strongest portraits. He had a magnificent head, with fair unkempt hair, a powerful jaw and square chin, and the broad shoulders and torso of someone altogether larger. Augustus’s ‘official’ portrait – a three-quarter view of him decked out in his red academic robes – catches the spiritual energy of the man.
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Secondly, he introduced Augustus and Ida to people whom, in their peculiar shyness, they might otherwise never have known. A number of these Augustus drew and painted, and a few became close friends. ‘We are to dine with the Dowdalls on Friday which I dread,’ Ida wrote to her mother. ‘They are very nice, but I would rather hide.’ A little later she is writing: ‘We had a nice little dinner with the Dowdalls on Saturday. He is a lawyer, I think, with a taste for painting – and he has a little auburn-haired wife who spends most of her time being painted by different people. Gus is to draw Dowdall’s mother.’

Harold Chaloner Dowdall, later to become a County Court judge and, as Lord Mayor of Liverpool, the subject of one of Augustus’s most
controversial portraits, was a pompous good-natured barrister, very loyal to the Johns but with a tendency to dilate, perhaps for an entire day, on the extreme freshness of that morning’s eggs at breakfast. His wife Mary, nicknamed ‘the Rani’, was ‘the most charming and entertaining character in Liverpool’, Augustus asserted. She soon became Ida’s most devoted confidante. ‘The Rani has beautiful browny-red hair and is quite exceptional, and reminds me of the grass and the smell of the earth,’ Ida wrote. As always with those she admired, she likened the Rani to an animal in its natural surroundings. ‘Certainly you belong to the woods and where creatures start and hide away at any alien sound.’

As the daughter of Lord Borthwick, the Hon. Mrs Dowdall was Liverpool’s aristocrat. But she shocked Liverpool society dreadfully. Respectable people were put out by her habit of walking barefoot through the mud – ‘the gentle stimulant of cold mud welling between one’s toes is a clarifier of thought’, she informed them, ‘after a day’s perfect irresponsibility’. They were dismayed when, at the fashionable hour, she was to be seen swinging her stockingless legs from the back of a gypsy caravan trundling down Bold Street. They disliked her involvement with the repertory theatre which gave theatrical performances on Good Friday, her frequent modelling for dubious artists such as Charles Shannon, her awful wit, her sheer attractiveness, her unaccountable failure to take Liverpool society seriously. Above all, Liverpool was appalled by the books she wrote – novels they were, with such titles as
Three Loving Ladies
and, most notoriously,
The Book of Martha,
which, embellished with a frontispiece by Augustus, dealt with tradesmen and servants. She was also the author of
Joking Apart,
and her jokes, delivered in the mock-magisterial tones of her husband, were introduced by: ‘All virgins will kindly leave the Court.’ No wonder she emptied the drawing-rooms of Edwardian Liverpool.