Augustus John (76 page)

‘I would much rather just do the things I want to do and leave people to buy if they want… I am not likely to make a success of fashionable people even if I tried to,’ John later wrote to Quinn (29 September 1913). But Chirk Castle witnessed John’s beginning as an erratic portrait painter of fashionable sitters, and his last phase as a brilliant symbolist painter. ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ he asked Lady Howard de Walden. This was Derwent Lees. Recently John’s opinion of Lees had risen. He had been active at the Chenil Gallery where Orpen had apparently aimed a gun at Knewstub and shot a hole through one of his own pictures. Then Lees, despite his wooden leg, had climbed up the outside of the gallery and entered into combat with Knewstub: it was impossible to think badly of such a man even when, to everyone’s surprise, he suddenly got himself married to a model. ‘I too was astonished by the Lees marriage,’ Innes admitted to John (4 August 1913). ‘…I think I felt rather jealous of him. Well they looked very happy and so good luck to them.’ A year later Lees looked lost and white when John brought him to Chirk during a smart weekend party. He was under the impression he had arrived at a chic lunatic asylum. At night he would stand rigid in the corridors, a helplessly pyjama’d figure, whispering: ‘Frightened. Can’t sleep.’ He had developed a shorthand method of speaking, like a child. ‘Want to go for walk,’ he would say. But when Lady Howard de Walden offered to accompany him, Lees objected: ‘Can’t. No gloves.’ He did not feel safe without gloves. His illness put an end to his career as a painter, and eventually to his life.

For his security John needed plans; but he also needed to avoid the implications of these plans unless they were to become prisons for the future. He had not grasped the trick of saying no. He was impelled to say yes even when no one had asked him anything. He said yes now to the prospect of Lord Howard de Walden becoming a new patron. The difficulties that might follow with Quinn or even with Hugh Lane, whom
he had similarly elected, were of little account. He would need a new house – somewhere close to Chirk. On his first visit he had been introduced to the composer Joseph Holbrooke, ‘an extraordinary chap… funniest creature I’ve ever met’.
88
With Holbrooke’s friend, the illustrator and editor of
The Idler
Sidney Sime, they had set off on a number of wild motor rides around Wales, knocking up Sampson at Bala, descending on Lees at Ffestiniog, resting a little with Innes at Nant-ddu ‘where I always keep a few bottles of chianti’; then scaling the park gates at Chirk at three o’clock in the morning. ‘The country round Ffestiniog was staggering,’ he reported to Dorelia (September 1912), ‘…I have my eye on a cottage or two… I feel full of work.’

Having exhausted the possibilities at Nant-ddu, John decided to throw in his lot with Holbrooke and Sime, and the three of them took Llwynythyl, a ‘delightful’ corrugated-iron shanty with a large kitchen and ‘great fireplace’, living-room and four small cabins containing bunks, the upper ones reached by wooden ladders. Dorelia had disliked Nant-ddu and would not visit Chirk Castle; but Llwynythyl, John told her, was ‘not half a bad place’. On the inside it was lined with tongued-and-grooved pinewood planking, lightly varnished but otherwise left its natural colour. Into this bungalow above the Vale of Ffestiniog Holbrooke, who was collaborating with Lord Howard de Walden on an operatic trilogy, imported a piano with all the bass notes out of tune, and John imported Lily Ireland, a model of classic proportions who had never before strayed beyond London. The bungalow, which was reached by a steep climb from Tan-y-grisiau up an old trolley shaft with a broken cable-winch at the top, stood on a plateau looking across the valley to the range of mountains above which the endless drama of the sky unfolded itself.

The place was almost ready, and John prepared himself for a long stint of painting. In December he set off: for France. The weather was so gloomy he had suddenly veered off south ‘with the intention of working out of doors’.
89
At the New Year, Epstein reported him passing through Paris ‘in good spirits’.
90
He planned to link up with Innes and Lees in Marseilles. From the Hôtel du Nord there he wrote to Dorelia:

‘Innes came yesterday morning. He looks rather dejected. Lees doesn’t appear to be well yet. He is going back to London. We have been wandering about Marseilles all day. When you come we might get another cart and donkey. I have advised Innes to go to Paris and get a girl as he is pretty well lost alone and must have a model… I don’t know who you might bring over. Nellie Furr, that girl you said one day might be a bore although she has a good figure and seems amiable enough. It could of course make a lot of difference to have several people to pose.’
91

Marching off each day into the country to ‘look about’, John would return late at night to Marseilles – and to Innes who, though invariably talking of his departure, would not leave. ‘He is insupportable – appears to be going off his head and stutters dreadfully,’ John complained.

It was now Dorelia’s turn to come south, bringing with her money, underclothing, handkerchiefs, a paintbox, some hairwash – but no model: and the three of them moved, in some dejection, to the Hôtel Basio at St-Chamas. ‘It is a beautiful place,’ John reassured Mrs Nettleship, ‘on the same lake as Martigues but on the north side.’ No sooner had they settled in than Innes fell seriously ill. ‘He had had a very dissipated time at Perpignan and was quite run down,’ John explained to Quinn (2 February 1913). ‘Finally at St Chamas… he was laid up for about a week after which we took him back to Paris and sent him off to London to see a doctor… The company of a sick man gets on one’s nerves in the end.’

Though he spent part of August in Paris in the company of Epstein, J. C. Squire and Modigliani (from whom he bought two prodigiously long and narrow stone heads which ‘affected me deeply’),
92
John did use his new Welsh cottage during the summer of 1913, passing all July there and all September. The paintings he completed in these two months were exhibited during November in a show at the Goupil Gallery. He was working in tempera, a technique of painting that put him in closer contact with the fifteenth-century Italians from whom he sought inspiration, and his own recipe for which he passed on to younger British artists such as Mark Gertler.
93
‘I have been painting in tempera to my infinite delight,’ he told Michel Salaman early in 1912. This quick-drying, hard-setting medium made possible the building up of a picture in superimposed masses. He was also attempting to work on a larger scale than before. At the end of 1911 his adventurous ‘Forza e Amore’ had been hung at the New English Art Club to the bewilderment of almost everyone. At the end of 1912 he showed his first major essay in tempera, the controversial ‘Mumpers’. ‘The N.E.A.C. has just been hung,’ he wrote to John Hope-Johnstone (20 November 1912). ‘I suddenly took and painted my cartoon of Mumpers – in Tempera, finished it in 4½ days, and sent it in.
94
In spite of the hasty workmanship, it doesn’t look so bad on the whole. I have also an immense [charcoal] drawing of the Caucasian Gypsies [‘Calderari’].’ Again, in the late New English show of 1913, he exhibited another huge cartoon, ‘The Flute of Pan’, with three female figures, four male and a boy, all life size. ‘Some say it is the best thing I’ve done,’ he told Quinn (26 January 1914), ‘and some the worst.’ All these years, too, he had been struggling with Hugh Lane’s big picture, subsequently called ‘Lyric Fantasy’. On 28 October 1913 he was writing to Ottoline Morrell:
‘I am overwhelmed with the problems of finishing Lane’s picture.’ He had hoped to show it at the next New English. On 29 December he confided to Quinn that it ‘will soon be done’; and again on 16 March 1914 he is ‘actually getting Lane’s big picture done at last’. So it went on until, in May 1915, Lane was drowned on board the
Lusitania
when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat, at which opportunity John ceased work on ‘Lyric Fantasy’. Had it been Quinn who died, there seems every likelihood that his big picture ‘Forza e Amore’ would not have been painted into oblivion.
95

In these years before the war, John was producing his best work. This was often achieved as preliminary studies for larger decorations, panels knocked off while on holiday, or pictures done as designs for Dorelia’s embroidery. He held shows almost every year at the Chenil, sometimes covered whole walls at the New English, struggled on with his private commissions, and regularly sent work in to the Society of Twelve and the National Portrait Society of which, in February 1914, he was elected President. What caused the muddle in his life was also a stimulus for his best work – a sense of urgency, often assisted by financial pressure. John made a habit of externalizing his problems. But what he grappled with was some phantom rather than the problem itself. Whenever he felt dull or ill he fixed the blame on people and places, and would demand a change. These changes often brought with them an immediate lifting of his spirits, but would rapidly lead on to still worse complications.

For a short time early in 1913 he populated a bewildering number of houses acquired through this process of change. There was Alderney, which he shared with Dorelia and his family; Nant-ddu, which he shared with Innes; Llwynythyl, which he shared with Holbrooke and Sime; the Villa Ste-Anne at Martigues which he shared with the birdman Bazin; and 181A King’s Road, Chelsea, which he shared with Knewstub. Yet somehow he felt unaccommodated. Entering a public house in Chelsea, he demanded to know whether there was an architect present, and then commissioned a Dutchman who happened to be drinking at the bar to design a new house and studio for him in London. The simple part of the business was now over.

The house was to be built in Mallord Street, a new road which had recently been created parallel to and north of the King’s Road, over the waste ground where the John children used to play cowboys and Indians when they lived at Church Street. Van-t-Hoff, as this architect was called, ‘takes the studio very seriously’, John promised Dorelia. ‘…He is going back to Holland to
think hard.’
96
After an interval of slumbering thought, John was obliged to summon him back by cable. By 13 May 1913 he confidently reported to Quinn: ‘My Dutch architect has done his designs
for my new studio with living rooms – and it will be a charming place. They will start building at once and it’ll be done in 6 months. How glad I shall be to be able to live more quietly – a thing almost impossible in this studio. My lawyer strongly urges me to try and find the money for the building straight away instead of saddling myself with a mortgage. The building will cost £2,200 [equivalent to £98,000 in 1996].’ John would have liked to offer the responsibilities for this property to others – looking in occasionally to pass, over the rising pile, his critical eye. But lawyers, estate agents, builders and decorators were constantly importuning him. ‘I can’t be rushing all over London and paint too, not having the brain of a Pierpont Morgan,’ he complained to Dorelia. Nor was it just his time for which these people were so greedy. ‘I shall want all my money and a good deal of other people’s,’ he explained to John Hope-Johnstone (8 September 1913). His letters to Quinn are congested with money proposals, the nicest of which is a scheme to save costs by building two houses, the second (at some considerable distance from the first) for his patron. ‘The materials will be of the best,’ he assures him, ‘and I think it will be a great success.’ His own house continued to rise, his funds to sink and his spirits to oscillate between optimism and despair. By late summer he had decided that Van-t-Hoff’s house was ‘very good and amusing’. But was the amusement at his expense? He had decided to move in during the autumn, but when autumn came the house still had no roof. ‘It’ll be ready in January,’ he declared: adding with some desperation, ‘I feel rather inclined to try another planet.’
97
By early January it was ‘getting on well’; by late January it was ‘rising perceptively [
sic
]’.
By February 1914 he had not retreated an inch, or advanced. It ‘will be done in three weeks Van-t-Hoff thinks’, he informed the silent Dorelia.
98
By the middle of March it was still ‘nearly done’ and even being ‘much admired’. By April John is again ready to move – but to Dieppe where he aims to hold out until the house is equipped to receive him. After what turns out to be a fortnight round Cardiganshire and, in June, one week at Boulogne he returns to Chelsea and, though the house is certainly incomplete, decides to occupy it and hold a party ‘to baptize my new studio’.
99
This party, a magnificent affair in fancy dress, lasts from the first into the second week of July.

‘The company was very charming and sympathetic, I thought,’ wrote one of the guests, Lytton Strachey,’ – so easy-going and taking everything for granted… John was a superb figure. There was dancing – two-steps and such things – so much nicer than waltzes – and at last I danced with him [John] – it seemed an opportunity not to be missed. (I forget to say I was dressed as a pirate). Nini [Euphemia] Lamb was there, and made effréné love to me. We came out in broad daylight.’
100

It was like a dolls’ house. Steep steps led up to the front door, behind which the rooms were poky and, in spite of the sun streaming in from the south over the market gardens, rather dark. The windows were long and thin and well proportioned; yet when children appeared behind them, they looked like iron-barred cages. The best feature was the staircase, which was copied from Rembrandt’s house. In the drawing-room Boris Anrep designed a superb mosaic, a pyramid of wives and children with John at its apex, glowing a dull green as if from the depths of the sea. At the back lay the great studio. With its sloping ceiling, deep alcove, and two fires burning at opposite corners, ‘The studio looks fine,’ John told Quinn on 24 June 1914. But even in these early days he recognized the prison-like atmosphere of the place. ‘It is quite a success I think. It has nearly ruined me,’ he wrote to John Hope-Johnstone. ‘…It certainly is rather Dutch but has a solidity and tautness unmatched in London – a little stronghold. I hope I shall find the studio practical.’ The studio was perhaps the most practical area – an excellent place for parties.