Augustus John (88 page)

It was agreed that she should wear the same clothes – a blue blouse, black stockings, red skirt – and that he would pay her a pound for each sitting: handsome wages. She came at five, carrying as a weapon and badge of her sophistication a long cigarette holder.

As a sitter she was frightful. She chattered all the time, while John’s expression darkened dreadfully. She could not understand why he seemed so ‘terribly ratty’. One afternoon he interrupted her by demanding to know whether she would take off her clothes. She agreed, provided there was somewhere private to undress. Then she came back into the studio wearing a dressing-gown. He began to work – and after a few minutes, while she lay there nakedly chattering, he pounced. She remembered him being so old, the coarse beard, smell of whisky and tobacco, no words, just grunting and snorting…

Later, on discovering she was pregnant, Chiquita approached Dorelia. It seemed the natural thing to do. They arranged that she should have an abortion, but Chiquita did not take to the specialist and eventually refused to go through with the operation. ‘It was a very drastic time in my life but I was too young to be unhappy,’ she remembered.
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The atmosphere at Alderney where she went was wonderfully comforting. ‘It was a lovely summer,’ she wrote, ‘and we slept outside in the orchard in the communal bed there… We used to light a little bonfire down our end… it was fun – there weren’t any strict rules, one could get in through the window without being nagged at.’ Pigs and red setters stalked the garden; there were picnics, rides in the pony cart and, under a sign that read ‘Bathing Prohibited’, there was bathing. Dorelia was always near ‘and she always looked pretty super especially when she wore her sun bonnet and picked currants’.
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Dorelia never referred to her pregnancy, suggesting, after a few months, that Chiquita wear a cloak ‘because she would look so fine in one, and they were becoming very fashonable’.

At the beginning of March they took her to a nursing home where, on 6 March 1923 she gave birth to a daughter whom she called Zoë. John
arrived bringing masses of flowers, but when Chiquita came out he tactfully withdrew to Spain.

She had a little money, and quickly got some jobs as a photographer’s model. Zoë meanwhile was fostered in Islington by a policeman and his wife whose own daughter, ‘Simon’, was later to marry Augustus’s eldest son David. One day Chiquita received an invitation to call on Mrs Fleming. The meeting was not easy. Eve Fleming’s imperious manner brought out everything that was rebellious in Chiquita, and when she offered to adopt the baby, provide it with a good home and education, Chiquita refused – though accepting some clothes and the assistance of a nanny. It seems that Mrs Fleming hoped to increase the pressure of her persuasion, but before she had any opportunity a row broke out over the clothes, all of which were marked ‘Fleming’. From this time on the two women were enemies. ‘If she [Chiquita] had a million pounds a year, I still should not alter my opinion that she ought not to have the bringing up of that baby or of any other,’ wrote Mrs Fleming.
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Each weekend Chiquita would call at Islington and pick up Zoë. One Saturday the baby was collected early – by Mrs Fleming, who rushed her off to North Wales in the hope that Chiquita would not trouble to pursue them. Over the crisis lawyers soon began to circle. John, innocently returning from Spain, was horrified. He had supported, in his absence, Mrs Fleming’s plan and arranged anonymously through her and a solicitor to offer Chiquita twenty pounds down and a pound a week thereafter in exchange for the baby. What could be fairer? But instead of this quiet ‘baby agreement’ he was confronted with a
cause c
é
l
è
bre.
There was no alternative but to return the baby.

Chiquita had various allies, in particular Seymour Leslie (‘a grinning society microbe’ John called him) to whom she blurted out her story one evening at the Eiffel Tower. She was determined to ‘fight like a tiger’ to keep Zoë, she insisted. ‘I trust no one with Zoë’s happiness as I do myself. I am waiting for Mrs Fleming to return. I would like to kill her...’ Vowing indignantly to help, Seymour Leslie called for pen and ink and drew up a contract, signed by the proprietor Stulik and the head waiter Otto, undertaking to pay for Zoë provided Chiquita agreed to live with him as his mistress. This settled, they hurried off to Paris for four days of celebration.

The agreement lasted some six months. ‘I used to lead him a pretty good dance,’ she recalled, ‘…tho’ he made me happy in a strange sort of way.’ He let her have fun, but what she really wanted was marriage. When Seymour Leslie returned from a visit to Russia in the autumn of 1923, he found her married to Michael Birkbeck, a friend of John’s, and living with him and Zoë in the country.

Mrs Fleming was not used to being worsted. ‘My dreams of a happy home’, she wrote, ‘…have fallen to the ground.’ In place of dreams she was surrounded by clouds of ‘reprehensible gossip’. ‘It seems to be a mistake to be the good Samaritan or to feel things,’ she complained to Seymour Leslie. ‘People don’t seem to understand either, and only to imagine the worst motives for one’s actions.’ The deplorable affair had made her ill. ‘I have done my best,’ she declared, ‘and have had to retire to bed, really exhausted with this worry.’ At night she would dream ‘of drowned babies with dead faces and alive eyes looking at me’. She had sons, but she wanted a daughter: John’s daughter. It should all have been so easy. John himself felt exasperated. ‘There’s no peace for a
man
at all,’ he complained to the Rani. Had Ida lived, he sometimes thought, it might have all been different. ‘Failing her, one simply tries all the others in rotation – I’ve nearly reached the limit.’

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.’
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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’.
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But neither of them would ever understand the need for so much secrecy, and both despised their mothers for the years of lying.

‘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.
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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!’
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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’.
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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,
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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.’
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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.