Authors: Michael Holroyd
24
Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (1907). NLW MS 21459E fols. 21–2.
25
Augustus John to John Sampson, 23 February 1911. NLW MS 21459E fol. 32.
26
Augustus John to John Sampson n.d. (December 1904). NLW MS 21459E fol. 13.
27
John Sampson to Augustus John, 22 November 1930. NLW MS 22785D fols. 42–3.
28
Augustus John to John Sampson, September 1911. NLW MS 21459E fol. 33.
29
Geoffrey Keynes
The Gates of Memory
p. 379.
30
John Sampson to Augustus John, 2 February 1924. NLW MS 22785D fols. 29–30. Sampson had finished the letter R in 1911 and started S. ‘Scanning this new sea anxiously from the mast-head,’ he wrote to Augustus (30 August 1911), ‘I see it simply bristles with rocks not indicated on the charts.’ He sent the completed work to the Clarendon Press in July 1917, and though ‘a little wearied by the severity of Indian phonology’ was confident that the great work should prove ‘a complete guide to sorcery, fortune-telling, love and courtship, kichimas [inns], fiddling, harping, poaching and the life of the road’. NLW MS 22785D fol. 22.
31
W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, 4 October 1907. Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
32
Anthony Sampson ‘Scholar Gipsy. The Quest for a Family Secret’ Chapter 3.
33
Ethel Nettleship was a cellist who, in the First World War, became an ambulance driver and nurse in Italy and Malta and who had such a bad time there that, on her return, she took to lacemaking for her nerves. ‘Untidy and gay,’ Sir Caspar John remembered,’ – always hard up – accessible and directly interested in all our lives.’ Ursula, the third sister, was rather stern and aloof compared with Ethel. An adventurous mountaineer and skier, she became a singer and teacher of singing. She was for a long time closely connected with the Aldeburgh Festival, at which Benjamin Britten dedicated his
A Ceremony of Carols
to her. ‘Her energy, her eagerness, her determination to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, forced those she taught to give of their best, and produced remarkable results,’ wrote Ann Bridge (
The Times,
7 May 1968). ‘Moving about, gesticulating, her greying hair wild, Ursula Nettleship conducting her choir was in fact an inspiring sight – lost in the music, utterly unselfconscious, dragging the sounds she wanted out of, often, very unpromising material.’
34
This building, which has now been destroyed, was between No. 2 Rodney Street and the hospital at the corner of Mount Pleasant.
35
Augustus John to Will Rothenstein. See
Men and Memories
Volume II p. 9.
36
The Sandon Studios Society, of which John was elected an honorary member, was later set up in opposition to the University School of Art, to encourage freer and more vigorous draughtsmanship and a less restrictive attitude to painting. It was officially opened at 9 Sandon Terrace on 5 December 1905,
but ‘any formality intended’, records R. H. Bisson in
The Sandon Studios Society and the Arts
(1965, p. 18), ‘was dissipated by Augustus John, who got very cheerful and fell headlong down the stairs’.
37
Saturday Review
(7 December 1904), p. 695.
38
William Rothenstein
Men and Memories
Volume II (1932), p. 3.
39
Two Liverpool models who later went ‘to breed in the colonies. May they raise many a stalwart son to our Empire!’ John wrote to the Rani.
40
Campbell Dodgson
A Catalogue of Etchings by Augustus John 1901–1914
(1920), pl. 14. (Hereafter referred to as CD, with the number.)
41
One of his subjects, for instance, was ‘A Rabbi Studying’, from a drawing by Rembrandt. CD 73.
42
Some of the plates would have been better if they had been left in the pure etched state, without being carried to a finish by lavish use of drypoint, which sacrificed their original crispness, leaving them soft and veiled. A number of the best ones are incomplete studies or sheets of studies, where the needle has been used like a pencil and the emphasis is on line; where, with a minimum of cross-hatching, the face has been left free from the rubberized pockmarks of dots and dashes intended to suggest variations of surface and of tone. These studies are often less self-conscious than the finished products, picked out more precisely in order to stress a curve or a fold. Some of the series of heads form a natural design on the page, and some of the studies give the impression of a fine watercolour wash. But John is at his best with single figures, and to his Liverpool period belong several good portraits including ‘The Mulatto’; ‘The Old Haberdasher’; ‘The Jewess’ with her shrewd suspicious gaze; and ‘Old Arthy’, where the effect of strong light behind the head creates a silhouette which the dense cross-hatching emphasizes without negating the figure, since the lines become part of the creases of the face and the shadows cast by it.
43
Introduction to
Augustus John: Fifty-two drawings,
Lord David Cecil (1957), p. 12.
44
The Walker Gallery was soon to return this compliment. When, in 1902, a group of subscribers gave William Rothenstein’s portrait of John to the gallery, it was catalogued anonymously as ‘Portrait of a Young Man’. When offered John’s official portrait of Chaloner Dowdall as Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1918, the gallery refused it. The first example of his work it bought was ‘Two Jamaican Girls’, in 1938.
45
To Will Rothenstein, 9 March 1902.
46
To Will Rothenstein n.d.
47
Ida John to Ada Nettleship, 16
October 1901. NLW MS 22798B fols. 38–9.
48
Ida John to John Trivett Nettleship, 24 December 1901. NLW MS 22798B fols. 72–4.
49
These included a rather military portrait of Oliver Elton, the English Literature don; a curious King Lear impression of Edmund Muspratt, Pro-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, emerging from the shadows of a dark background; a sombre Victorian impression of Sir John Brunner, the radical plutocrat, with mother-of-pearl flesh tones, a white beard and a moustache slightly ginger on one side; a likeness of Sir John Sherrington, the scientist and a special friend of Ida’s, a timid, gauche figure, his eyes distrustfully peering through weak spectacles; and a comfortable spongy portrait of the architect Charles Reilly, rather sadly wrapped in a black-and-white scarf. ‘I took great pride & pleasure in painting Elton & shall look forward to documenting you with equal zest,’ Augustus wrote to Sir Charles Reilly on 15 May 1931, recording his wish to ‘keep up my old Liverpool associations’. Twenty-six years earlier he had written to Reilly, ‘I don’t remember Mr Muskpratt
[sic]
but crossed eyes are always good to paint as Raphael knew.’
The portrait of Chaloner Dowdall (1909) is now at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; of Kuno Meyer (1911) at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; those of Mackay, Elton, Muspratt, Brunner and Sherrington at the University College Dining Club, Liverpool; and that of Reilly at the School of Architecture in Abercrombie Square, Liverpool.
50
Ida John to Michel Salaman n.d. (July 1902). NLW MS 22788C fols. 69–70.
51
In his preliminary synopsis for an autobiography, 1923.
52
One impression, at least, is dated 1902. CD 47.
53
‘I would subscribe to make Augustus John Director of a Public House Trust,’ Walter Raleigh wrote to D. S. MacColl (27 May 1905). John’s time at Liverpool was later commemorated by a new public house, The Augustus John, which was erected next to the postgraduate club.
54
Augustus John to Michel Salaman, July 1902. NLW MS 14928D fol. 57.
55
Unpublished diaries of Arthur Symons.
56
Ethel Nettleship to Sir Caspar John, 27 June 1951. NLW MS 22790D fols. 34–9.
57
Unpublished diary of L. A. G. Strong, in the possession of B. L. Reid, biographer of John Quinn.
58
Augustus John to Michel Salaman, 1902. NLW MS 14928 fols. 52–3, 67–8.
59
Osbert Sitwell
Laughter in the Next Room
(1975 edn), p. 29.
60
Men and Memories
Volume II p. 4.
61
‘I Speak for Myself’, recording for BBC Far Eastern Service, 10 September 1949.
62
Ibid.
63
Chiaroscuro
p. 100.
64
Walter Pater
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
(1873).
65
In January 1903 John did two etchings of Lewis, and in the same year an excellent drawing and one of his very best oil portraits ‘full of Castilian dignity’, as John Russell described it, ‘ – displayed in a moment of repose’. Lewis did a drawing of John that is reproduced in the former’s volume of memoirs,
Blasting and Bombardiering
(1937).
66
Wyndham Lewis to Augustus John n.d. (April 1910). NLW MS 22783D fols. 28–31.
67
‘I called you poltroon for not daring to let me know before in what contempt you held me – when I had admitted you – fondly – almost to my secret places, for not honouring me so far as to be frank in this,’ John wrote (June 1907) in a letter that gives the flavour of their explosive friendship. ‘I called you mesquin [shabby] for jesting at my discomfiture, for playing with words over the stricken corpse of our friendship, ever sickly and now treacherously murdered at a blow from you, poor thing! And I called you bête for so estimating me as to treat me thus – cavalierly – for though my value as a friend has not proved great, it is neither nil nor negligible. And I say this from the very abysm of humility. Nor am I one to be dismissed with a comic wave of the hand...
‘The wall you think fit to surround yourself with at times might be a good rampart against enemies, but its canvas bricks cannot be considered insurmountable to friends, and indeed (imagining them detachable) it would be an impertinence to level them in all seriousness at one’s devoted head. I am as little inquisitive by habit as secretive by nature… I have never committed the indecency of trespassing on the privacy of your consciousness, of which you are rightly jealous. But in a
friendly
relationship I expect, yes, I expect, a frankness of word and deed as touching that relationship – an honest traffic – within its limits – a plainness of dealing, which is the politeness of friends.
That
we have never practised – you have never – it seems to me – given the Index of friendship a chance. It would appear that
you live in fear of intrusion and can but dally with your fellows momentarily as Robinson Crusoe with his savages before running back to his castle...’
68
‘Now, as for your recent drawings of which you sent me photostats, I must at once admit my inability to discover their merits, qua drawings,’ John wrote to Lewis (undated). ‘They lack
charm
,
my dear fellow (from my point of view that is).’ In
Blast,
No 2 (1915), Lewis wrote an article called ‘History of the Largest Independent Society in England’, in which he called John ‘a great artist’, adding that he was lacking in control and prematurely exhausted – ‘an institution like Madame Tussaud’s’. He also credits John with bringing some exotic subject matter into English painting, before going on to describe his gypsy cult as hothouse and
fin de siècle.
Shortly after this article appeared the two painters met one night at a restaurant. John, all smiles at first and with a ‘woman-companion’, invited Lewis to join them, but later in the evening, when the talk turned to
Blast,
he lost his temper.
Next day John wrote to apologize. ‘I must have been positively drunk to assume so ridiculously truculent an attitude upon such slender grounds. Your thrusts at me in “Blast” were salutary and well-deserved, as to the question of exact justice – any stick will do to rouse a lazy horse or whore and the heavier the better. I liked many of your observations in Blast if I don’t feel the particular charm of those designs which last night I characterized as “pokey”. Probably “charm” is quite the last thing you intend. I think pokiness is an excellent and necessary element of design and I understand and admire your insistence on it. But I deplore your exclusion of all the other concomitants provided by an all too lavish creation – and with which I imagine none is better able to deal than you.’
69
Rebecca John
Caspar John
(1987), p. 17.
70
Finishing Touches
p. 26.
71
The painting was bought by Charles Rutherston and now belongs to the Manchester City Art Gallery.
72
Modern English Painters
(1976 edn) Volume I p. 179. The picture is in the Manchester City Art Gallery.
73
Called simply ‘Esther’. CD 1903.
74
Tate Gallery, London, Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Catalogue no. 3171.
75
The Burlington Magazine
(May 1909).
76
They were married on 31 August 1870 at the Register Office in Camberwell when he was twenty-two and she eighteen.
77
Ida John to Michel Salaman n.d. (September–October 1902). NLW MS 22788C fols. 79–80.
78
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society
Volume XLIX 3rd Series parts 1–2.
79
‘Miss McNeill’, Manchester City Art Gallery.
80
Now in the Manchester City Art Gallery.
81
Malcolm Easton
Augustus John
(1970), p. 43.
82
Arthur Ransome
Bohemia in London
(1907; 2nd edn, 1912), p. 89. See also Malcolm Easton
Augustus John.
83
Charles McEvoy (1879–1929), the brother of Ambrose McEvoy, a village playwright and gifted clown.