Authors: Michael Holroyd
A letter Ida sent Alice Rothenstein about this time gives some of the changes in the John household. From her mother Ida had got a few pieces of furniture, including their bed; on the walls of each room she had put plain white paper, and suspended baskets of roses from the ceiling. To do the cooking she had employed a rabbity young girl named Maggie – tempted by ‘friendly lettuce’ – and a maid called Alice whom David insisted on calling ‘Aunt Alice’.
Ida’s day began at 5.30 a.m. and ended at 7.30 p.m. Between day and night came three delightful hours of idleness: then at 10.30 p.m. the night work began – ‘it is the hardest part,’ she told the Rani. ‘I am breaking the baby of having a bottle at 3 a.m., and it entails a constant hushing off to sleep again – as he keeps waking expecting it. Also he has not yet begun to turn himself over in bed, and requires making comfortable 2 or 3 times before 3 a.m. This is not grumbling but bragging.’ Nevertheless, it was a tremendous relief to her to get rid of the two children for short spells. That summer they went down with Maggie to stay at Tenby with Edwin John, and Ida felt almost guilty at her sense of liberation. ‘It is most delightful without them,’ she admitted to Alice Rothenstein.
As soon as their flat was emptied of children, it filled up again with ‘aunts’ – that is, models for Augustus. Esther, magnificently attired in expensive dresses almost bursting at their fastenings, presented herself and posed, while Ida, who was not Mrs Nettleship’s daughter for nothing, set to work creating clothes for herself so as ‘to have at least one pretty feather to Esther’s hundred lovely costumes. I shall have to come down naked in my fichu [scarf or small shawl], for how can one wear grey linen by her silks and laces?’
But while Ida was anxious at being outshone by Esther, Esther was about
to be eclipsed by another girl. In the same letter to Alice Rothenstein, Ida mentions that ‘Gus and the beautiful Dorelia McNeill are here… Gus is painting Dorelia’. He was, she adds, feeding up Dorelia for her portrait. This is the first mention of the legendary Dorelia, who was to find a place at the centre of the lives of Ida and Augustus and play a short intense part in the life of Gwen John.
Who was Dorelia? Over a period of sixty years, Augustus drew and painted her obsessively. Yet what these pictures convey is not her identity but her enchantment and mysteriousness. The most celebrated portrait of them all, ‘The Smiling Woman’,
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shows what Roger Fry called a ‘gypsy Giaconda’
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whose smile was often likened to that of the ‘Mona Lisa’. Another picture, ‘Dorelia Standing Before a Fence’, is more mellow and depicts her as a dream creature who, on our waking, continues to baffle and beguile us.
In this sense, Dorelia was a creation of Augustus’s. He made her enigmatic; he made her his ideal woman. What he desired from women was at once simple and impossible to achieve; it was the unknown, tunelessly preserved intact; a fantasy blended with reality; a symbol of creativity and nature; mistress and mother. Though he felt a romantic reverence for high birth – ‘you darling little aristocratic love’, he used to call the Rani – he disliked sophisticated women on the whole, and avoided women famous for their intellect. Cleverness he could find elsewhere, if he needed it: he could even occasionally find it in men. But before the inscrutable beauty of a few women he could lose and renew himself, feel his imagination come alive in inexplicable ways.
All that Augustus aspired to is suggested by the fantasies he wove around Dorelia. In his pictures we see Dorelia as tall, with a swan’s neck and well-proportioned head, often the mother-figure seen against a vibrant landscape. In truth she lived in town, was rather short, and no more the conventional mother than Ida. In his paintings he dressed her in broad-rimmed straw hats, their sweeping lines like those of the French peasants; and in long skirts that reached the ground, with high waistlines and tight bodices, like the costumes of the peasant women of Connemara: but she was not a peasant, French or Celt. He laid a false trail across the life of a gypsy girl called Dorelia Boswell, so that many concluded that his Dorelia was probably a Boswell and certainly a gypsy: she was neither. He called her ‘Ardor’; he called her ‘Relia’ and he called her Dorelia, and finally he called her ‘Dodo’: but none of these were her actual names.
Dorothy McNeill had been born on 19 December 1881 at 97 Bellenden Road, Camberwell. Her father, William George McNeill, was a mercantile clerk, a position he held until promoted, through age, to the rank of retired mercantile clerk. Son of the stationmaster at Peckham, he had
married a local girl, Kate Florence Neal, the daughter of a dairy farmer.
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They were an unremarkable couple given the collective nickname ‘Mr and Mrs Brown’. But all their seven children (of whom Dorothy was the fourth) were extraordinarily handsome – mostly small with dark complexions, prominent mouths curving downwards, voices gentle and low, black hair and large brooding eyes.
Each of the four daughters had been taught some profession. Dorothy learnt to type. Her first job, at the age of sixteen, was for the editor of a magazine called
The Idler.
Then, for a short time, she worked for a writer. By 1902 she had become a junior secretary copying legal documents in the office of a solicitor, G. Watson Brown, in Basinghall Street. She did not appear discontented, but since her personality was very passive and she was not communicative, it was difficult to know what she felt. Another young typist in the office, Muriel Alexander, remembers that Dora, as everyone there called her, always dressed ‘artistically’ in a style entirely her own, wearing long full-skirted dresses and having her hair parted in the middle and drawn in a knot at the back of her head. Everyone liked her; no one knew much about her. On the surface, it seemed, she had accepted a secretarial career, to be followed in the ordinary way by one as housewife. She was not ambitious in the usual sense; but she felt certain another kind of life awaited her, and that she belonged to the world of art. How this was she could not say; nor did she speak about it. But instinctively she felt it to be her destiny. This was her secret, the source of her patience, her means of emancipation. It was Dorothy who typed each day; but it was Dorelia who dreamed.
And it was Dorelia who, in the evenings after the office closed, went off to the late classes at the Westminster School of Art. Here she got to know a number of artists and began to be invited to their parties, at one of which she met Gwen John. Gwen was then using a ‘most exquisite looking pupil of about 15 years old’ as a model in exchange for drawing lessons. ‘Gwen makes her draw the most hideous and wicked of the Roman emperors in the British Museum,’
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Ida reported. Dorelia had already seen Gwen’s brother at an exhibition of Spanish paintings at the Guildhall near her office, but they had not spoken and he did not see her. Yet she remembered this first glimpse of him as if, without words or contact of any kind, she had chosen him as the vehicle of her destiny.
There are many stories of how they met. A popular one was that Augustus overtook her wearing a black hat in Holborn one day, looked back, and was unable to look away. They must have met early in 1903 while she was living in a basement in Fitzroy Street. By the summer he was already writing her passionate letters:
‘The smell of you is in my nostrils and it will never go and I am sick for love of you. What are the great beneficent influences I owe a million thanks to who have brought you in my way, Ardor my little girl, my love, my spouse whose smile opens infinite vistas to me, enlarges, intensifies existence like a strain of music. I want to look long and solemnly at you. I want to hear you laugh and sigh. My breath is upon your cheek – do you feel it? I kiss you on the lips – do you kiss me back? Yes I possess you as you possess me and I will hear you laugh again and worship your eyes again and touch you again and again and again and again… your love Gustavus...’
She was hypnotically beautiful – almost embarrassingly so: ‘one could not take one’s eyes off her,’ Will Rothenstein remembered.
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In his portraits of her, Augustus gave her a sultry look, with high rounded cheek-bones, slanting eyes and an air of devastating refinement.
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A painting entitled ‘Ardor’
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shows a full dimpled face, eyes that solicit, pink cheeks and mouth. It is the portrait of a seductress, a comparable subject technically to ‘Merikli’. In his portraiture, Augustus was like a stage director, assigning his subjects a variety of short dramatic roles. Dorelia, it seemed, acquiesced in them all. She sprang from the natural and the mythic world. She became all things to him; she was Everywoman.
It was not by her looks alone that she dazzled him. Beauty is not so scarce. What was uncommon about Dorelia was the serenity that gave her beauty its depth – a quality he so conspicuously lacked. She was not witty or articulate; and certainly not sentimental. It was her
presence
that was so powerful, her vitality and above all her magical peace-giving qualities. People who were miserable could come to her, relax, absorb something of her extraordinary calm. All manner of disasters, tragedies, crises appeared to shrivel up within the range of her personality. She guarded her secrets well, like a cat.
Augustus did not conceal from Ida his sudden flaring infatuation for Dorelia: concealment did not come easily to him – it was something he would learn, rather inadequately, later on. Besides, he might as well have tried to hide a forest fire. He presented Ida with the facts; he introduced her to Dorelia; and he left her to decide what should be done. Of the three of them, Ida was the most likely to take a positive decision about the future. Augustus and Dorelia acted on impulse in a way that might appear decisive, but which was often a simple reflex.
The upheaval of Ida’s feelings was painful. Upon the decision she had to make depended the future of their marriage. She knew Augustus better than anyone – ‘our child-genius’ as she was soon to call him – and she had to accept that she could not hope to confine his incendiary passions
within the grate of married life. He maddened her, but she loved him. And she
liked
Dorelia. When the two women were together – it was strange – Ida’s difficulties seemed less acute and she was almost happy. Reason therefore told her that, if Augustus’s feelings persisted, some form of
ménage-à-trois
was the only practical solution. Reason told her this; but sometimes a violent jealousy would surge through her, drowning reason. She felt ugly. She felt useless. Marriage, which had imprisoned her, left Augustus free, since her love for him excluded other romantic and sexual feelings, while his for her did not. The quasi-religious advice she had poured forth in earlier days on her aunts and sisters she now turned upon herself. Her moral duty was to accept these awkward complications as a part of her love. Whatever happened she must fight against jealousy, since that was the voice of the devil. So, for the time being, she appeared philosophical: ‘Men must play,’ she wrote, improving the quotation from Charles Kingsley, ‘and women must weep.’
With Ida apparently raising no objections, Dorelia began moving into their married life. At first the part she played, though a vital one, was intermittent. She never lived in their flat, though she visited Augustus most weeks to be drawn and painted by him. He loved to dress her up, buying her bright petticoats down to her knees, gay ribbons to tie in her hair, and he relied on Ida to help him choose the costumes. ‘Don’t forget to come on Sunday,’ he reminded Dorelia. ‘I want to get a new dress made for you, white stockings and little black boots and lots of silly little things for your hair… Sleep well Relia and don’t forget me when you go to sleep.’ But sometimes, without warning, she did forget him. ‘In the devil’s name! Why did you not come? Are you ill?… or did you dance too much the night before, so you were [too] tired to come up here… A true young wife and a lady you are… Are your new clothes made [yet]? I should like to see you on the high road all dressed in fire-red. Are you coming next Sunday?’ But already by Monday he found he could not wait till next Sunday.
‘I went last night down to Westminster to find you but you were not there. When are you going there again? as I would like to see your pretty eyes again. If you’ll believe me my girl, I liked more than I can say sitting with you on the grass on the ferns. As you say, you are a young wild tree, my Relia. I love to kiss you just as I love to feel the warmth of the sun, just as I like to smell the good earth. One gets used to the afterwards, my girl, and then they need not be so very damned. My wife and I have been ransacking shops to find a certain stuff for your picture… I am getting excited over the picture. I will do it better now after I have kissed you several times.’
He longed to paint her in the nude, but she was unwilling. ‘Why not sit for me in your soft skin, and no other clothes – are you ashamed? Nonsense! It is not as if you were very fat.’ But still she would not.
At each point his excitement was matched by her imperturbability; his passion by her elusiveness; his doubts and speculations by her compliance. She had cast a spell on him, and he began to weave one for her. ‘How would you like yourself as a Romany lady?’ he asked. To Dorelia, who was rather dismissive of her anonymous parents, here was an intriguing question. Under Augustus’s tuition she began learning the language. All these early letters he sent her were written in Romany,
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mixed with odd English words, and with word-lists attached. Whatever Augustus learnt from Sampson he passed on to Dorelia – and Ida picked up some of the words too, though she never dared write to Sampson in Romany as Dorelia was soon doing. Romany became their secret code, as the
Jungle Book
language had once been for Ida’s friends. But Ida was not at the centre of this Romany conspiracy as she had been in the recreated world of Kipling. That centre was for Augustus and Dorelia alone. He was delighted how swiftly she learnt, how eager she was to enter this make-believe. ‘Sit and write down another letter for me,’ he urged her. ‘Put in it all the Romany words you know, then a little tale about yourself, and send it to me.’ She wrote and told him about an old woman who drank whisky and had fallen in love with her – and he was enchanted.