Authors: Michael Holroyd
In 1935, Horace Cole died in exile at Ascaigne. ‘I went to his funeral,’ John wrote, ‘which took place near London, but I went in hopes of a miracle – or a joke. As the coffin was slowly lowered into the grave, in dreadful tension I awaited the moment for the lid to be lifted, thrust
aside, and a well-known figure to leap out with an ear-splitting yell. But my old friend disappointed me this time. Sobered, I left the churchyard with his widow [Mavis] on my arm.’
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Shortly afterwards Mavis, in silver fox furs, turned up at 11 Downing Street, the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then Neville Chamberlain, to collect Horace’s belongings from his sister Annie Chamberlain – fighting her way through the crowds that had assembled next door to find out what the Cabinet were doing over the King’s threat to marry a divorced American commoner.
But there was one who refused to die, obstinately, year after year: John’s father. Often he had given notice of doing so; and, summoning his courage, John would journey across to Wales. He liked on these death trips to make use of Richard Hughes’s castle as an advance base, inviting himself to tea, arriving shortly after closing time and stabling himself there for ten days or so. ‘My father’, he would say, ‘is on his death-bed, but refuses to get into it.’ Every morning he set off for Tenby in his ‘saloon’ car with a bottle of rum, stopping on the way to sketch and then, after a telephone call, arriving back at Laugharne. Hughes, watching these forays, concluded that he must fear his father. Then, one day he would finally reach Tenby, find old Edwin John miraculously recovered, and at once motor back to Fryern, his duty accomplished.
‘My father writes of the uncertainty of life and his Will – so I suppose he is thinking of moving onwards,’ John notified Dorelia. That had been in 1925. Shortly afterwards the old man added by way of postscript that ‘he would prefer to wait till Gwen and I have returned.’ No obstacle, John considered, should be put in his way.
Augustus and Dorelia regularly invited Gwen over to stay with them, urging her to come and see, if not her father, then ‘our Siamese cats’ or even the children before they all grew up and went their ways. But when, after seventeen years, Gwen finally returned to England in the summer of 1921 it was to stay with Arthur and Rhoda Symons at their cottage in Kent. ‘I wish you had agreed to stay with us in Dorset – where there is much more room and we would have made you quite at home,’
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Gus wrote on learning that she was coming over.
But there was an exceptional reason for Gwen’s visit to the Symonses. Rhoda Symons was the sister of Gwen’s friend Isabel Bowser, who had died of cancer in 1919. Gwen had often slept in Isabel’s rooms when difficulties arose between Rodin’s furious American lover, the so-called Duchesse de Choisseul, and herself. ‘I adore your devotion for Isabel… for you and me to have known Rodin is a certain link between us,’
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Arthur Symons wrote. He bought three of her drawings in 1919, and the following year Gwen met him and Rhoda in Paris. Isabel had often told
them of Gwen, and Rhoda insisted that ‘I love you… because of your understanding of – & love of – Isabel… are you coming sometime to stay with us?’
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So Gwen made an exception. But it did not seem as if she would travel again to England. In the autumn of 1924 she reminded Gus of a huge portmanteau, miraculously full of her possessions (a dressing case, writing desk, paintbox and pictures), together with some ancient chairs and a chest of drawers, all of which she had left with Charles McEvoy in 1903 to keep for her ‘till my return from Rome’. She wanted Gus to transport everything to her in France. It would, she mysteriously explained, ‘be very useful now’.
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She still lived in the rue Terre-Neuve in Meudon, but in the autumn of 1926 she also bought a derelict shack (which she used as a studio) and a patch of overgrown ground (where she sometimes slept) near by at 8 rue Babie.
One of the reasons she did not tell Gus of this acquisition was probably that he was beginning on her behalf the purchase of Yew Tree Cottage at Burgate Cross, not far from Fryern Court, advancing her most of the purchase money of five hundred pounds. ‘The cottage is yours,’ Dorelia wrote to her in May 1927. ‘So will you send as much money as you can spare to me. What more is wanted Gussie can lend you. I went over the cottage again yesterday… the whole place can be made delightful without much money.’
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By the beginning of May the sale was completed, Dorelia had the keys and was taking measurements for curtains.
‘I don’t mind seeing Gus now or that family,’
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Gwen wrote to Ursula. But there were few people she did want to see. For many years Gus had been sending her admiring letters and advice about the sale of her work. ‘Instead of £50 you ought to get at least 3 times as much for a picture, and would easily if you sent some to England where I know several people who are most anxious to possess things of yours. There is no reason why you should have to submit to any discomfort or privation any longer. It can’t be any good for your health or your work. I’m sure Quinn wanted to help you & get your work as long as you’ld let him.’
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After Quinn’s death, Jeanne Foster had volunteered to take his place and send her a retainer from the United States. But ‘I would rather follow your advice,’ Gwen told Gus, ‘and send my paintings to England.’
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Such an arrangement might have surprised anyone who had only read Gwen’s references to her brother in her correspondence to others (‘he is offended by everything I do or don’t do’). Gus had really become something of a scapegoat for her. Whatever the emotional disturbances between them, there also existed an emotional affinity. As a Christmas present in 1925 he sent her some earrings. ‘My ears are pierced but I thought the
time for earrings was over for me,’ she replied. ‘But these are so lovely I must wear them. If you don’t like them on me when you see me I will exchange them for something else.’
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But when would she see him? He wanted her to hold an exhibition of her work at the New Chenil Gallery. ‘Chenil writes that Gus would like a one man show with me if it’s agreeable in the galleries in April,’
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Gwen explained to Ursula Tyrwhitt on 10 November 1925. Ursula and Gwen were still ‘part of each other’s atmosphere’. ‘If you will exhibit with me I will write & say it’s not agreeable,’
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Gwen promised. But Ursula refused to give her friend such an alibi. ‘This exhibition is a nightmare,’ Gwen complained.
‘Paintings and drawings by Gwen John’ was held at the New Chenil Gallery between May and July 1926. ‘My thoughts went back to our youth with its aims and hopes,’ Michel Salaman wrote to her after seeing these pictures, ‘ – and you seemed to be the only one of that eager band who had been utterly faithful to those aspirations, who not only had not failed them but achieved more than we dreamt of.’ The girls had appeared supreme at the Slade, at least in Augustus’s memory. But their advantages ‘for the most part came to nought’, he later wrote, ‘under the burdens of domesticity which… could be for some almost too heavy to bear… “Marriage and Death and Division make barren our lives.”’
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Though he must have been thinking of Ida, this was also largely true of her Slade contemporaries. Edna Clarke Hall’s talent went into decline under her husband’s discouragement. Gwen Salmond had reignited Matthew Smith’s self-confidence, but the failure of their marriage and the bringing up of their two sons had made painting additionally difficult for her – and this had been compounded by the connection between Smith’s success as a painter and other women. Ursula Tyrwhitt also married, but she had altered neither her name (her husband was a cousin called Walter Tyrwhitt) nor her life. ‘Fortunately and by a great piece of luck I’m not at all unhappy,’
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she told Edna Clarke Hall.
Ursula Tyrwhitt was the only friend from the Slade Gwen John consented to see when she eventually came to England for two months during the summer of 1927. ‘
I
count on you not to tell any one,’
she wrote, ‘
I
will not be troubled by people.’
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Her nerve had almost failed, but when she did arrive she was enchanted by Yew Tree Cottage. ‘I looked in through the window & saw a lovely dresser & the ground on one side is bordered by lovely little fir trees!!’ she wrote to Ursula. ‘…My cottage is furnished so far only by a little picture of Gus’s & the dresser… I am going over for a few days to whitewash the rooms.’
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She stayed at Fryern that summer, and so did many other people. ‘As she was extremely shy, this made it necessary for her to have her meals
in her bedroom,’ her thirteen-year-old niece Vivien remembered. ‘…I was terribly struck by her appearance – so very like my father, but very very tiny, like a miniature Augustus, with eyes that filled with tears almost continuously as she talked; very pale, bluey eyes and she wore dark dark clothes.’ She insisted on speaking French to the children, though with a Pembrokeshire accent Gus could not remember her having when they were children. There was much to do at the cottage, but Gwen was always ready to go and look at the sea at Bournemouth. Henry Lamb, who came over to Fryern, found ‘a little old lady in a shawl’ who, sitting beside him in the car, clutched his arm feverishly. ‘He interpreted this gesture as an amorous advance,’ writes her biographer Susan Chitty. ‘It seems more probable that Augustus was driving.’
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‘It is nice here,’ Gwen decided. She liked the Dorset country more than Gus did, and ‘the cottage has very much beauty… It is quite a big house too, but it looks small outside.’ Dorelia and she bought furniture together, and Ursula gave her a carpet and a counterpane. But it took longer to get settled there than she expected. ‘I have been sleeping here a few days,’ she told Ursula.
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But the workmen bothered her. She planned to stay until 19 September, but ‘I don’t want Gus to know I shant be there this winter.’ She intended to return after she had finished some paintings at Meudon. ‘I cant say how long they will take.’
They took a year. She returned to her cottage in 1928 and seems to have narrowly avoided her father who, she feared, might want to stay with her. ‘Of course we will put up your father [at Fryern] if he will only consent,’ Dorelia assured her. ‘…Do come & I want to invite your Da.’
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She came to England once more, briefly in May 1931, to see the dying Edith Nettleship – Ida’s cousin.
‘I sometimes want to be there very much,’ Gwen had written to Ursula Tyrwhitt. Augustus and Dorelia kept on urging her to come. ‘Are you ever coming again?’ Dorelia asked at the beginning of 1933. ‘…Would you like to have a show in London? Augustus’s agents are anxious to have one & I think you ought to, you have many admirers over here.’
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But Gwen had by then given up painting which she likened to housework – more tiring than it used to be and not much pleasure. Never again would she waste time promising pictures for exhibitions. For she had rather more money now. In 1930, after the death of the last surviving child of her maternal grandfather Thomas Smith, master plumber of Brighton, it had been decided to wind up the estate and dispose of the properties at auction. Over the next year Gwen received nine hundred and fifty pounds (equivalent to £26,600 in 1996) of which she transferred two hundred pounds to Dorelia for Yew Tree Cottage.
Some more family income became available later in the 1930s.
Old Edwin John still kept in remorseless communication with his children. His letters showed an unyielding devotion to the weather. ‘What is the weather like in Paris?’ he would ask urgently. News of its behaviour in parts of the United States and Canada were passed anxiously on to France. ‘The climate is very hot,’ he instructed Gwen of conditions in Jamaica while Augustus was there, ‘ – but usually tempered by a breeze from the sea.’ At home he often found himself dramatically overtaken by some ‘nice breeze’, afflicted with ‘unbearable heat waves’, or ‘in the grip of a fierce blizzard’. ‘Typical November weather’ did not go unobserved, nor the curious fact that ‘the cycle of time has brought us to the season of Christmas again.’ As he advanced into his young nineties, so the climate hardened, ‘the present weather being the worst I think I have ever experienced in my life’. ‘How’, he demanded, ‘is it going to end?’ After each winter, with its unexampled frosts and snows, he revived. ‘I am making good progress to recovery of health,’ he assured Gwen on 28 March 1938 after an attack of bronchitis. ‘I eat and sleep well and take short walks daily… How near Easter has become has it not? I must really purchase some Easter cards...’ On the afternoon of 7 April, while he was resting in bed, his housekeeper heard him call out: ‘Good-bye, Miss Davis. Good-bye.’ When she went up to see him, he was dead.
They buried him in the cemetery at Gumfreston, a tiny damp grey church two miles from Tenby where he had played the hymns on Sundays. After some delay, an inscription, suggested by Thornton and considered to be definitive, was cut upon his gravestone:
Edwin William John
1847–1938
With Long Life will I satisfy
Him and show Him my Salvation
Augustus, Caspar and the housekeeper attended the funeral; Thornton and Winifred were too far off; and Gwen did not come. She seldom went anywhere now. Besides, Gus only sent her the news a few days after the funeral. ‘I am writing to tell you of Father’s death,’ he announced on 16 April.
‘I, Thornton & a solicitor of Haverfordwest are appointed executors & Trustees of the Estate which is of the value of some £50,000 [equivalent to £1,400,000 in 1996]. I am sending herewith a copy of the Will. As far as I can make out we, his sons & daughters, are entitled to an equal share of the Income from the Estate, which at the death of the last survivor will
be divided equally between the two families of grandchildren which now or shall exist, irrespective of their numbers.’
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