Authors: Michael Holroyd
His next stop was Cambridge, where he secured a commission to paint a portrait of the classical anthropologist Jane Harrison, ‘a very charming person tho’ a puzzle to paint’.
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Yet it was a puzzle he solved beautifully. He had been offered this job on the recommendation of D. S. MacColl, who described him as ‘the likeliest man to do a really good portrait at present’, and who gave him preference over Wilson Steer ‘whose tastes lie in the direction of young girls’. With this opinion Jane Harrison appears to have agreed, writing to Ruth Darwin, the promoter of the portrait: ‘I personally should take his advice… he [Augustus John] seems to me to have a real vision of “the beauty of ugliness”… What I mean is that he gets a curious beauty of line: character, I suppose it would ordinarily be called, that comes into all faces however “plain” that belong to people that have lived hard; and that in the nature of things is found in scarcely any young face. Now this interests some people – I don’t think it ever did interest Steer. If I were a beautiful young girl I should say Steer...’
Augustus’s painting, ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ as David Piper described it,
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pleased its sitter, in particular because Augustus used Steer’s ‘Yachts’, which Jane Harrison owned, as part of the background. To D. S. MacColl she wrote (15 August 1909) in praise both of the picture and the artist.
‘Thank you for finding Mr John. He was delightful. I felt spiritually at home with him from the first moment he came into the room: he was so quiet and real and sympathetic too… He was perfect to sit to; he never fussed or posed me, but did me just as I lay on the chair where I have mostly lain for months. I look like a fine distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it… it seems to me beautiful, but probably as usual I am wrong!’
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Augustus and his retinue had encamped in a field by the river at Grantchester, and every day he would drive to Newnham, ‘working away in utter oblivion’,
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while Jane Harrison smoked cigarettes and chatted with Gilbert Murray. ‘Although a complete dunce,’ he recalled, ‘I enjoyed their learned conversation while I was painting, for in no way did it conceal the beautiful humanity of both.’
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Even so, he was not tempted to advance further into Cambridge and, apart from a visit to James
Strachey at King’s to spread the word of Dostoevsky, he made little contact with the university. ‘The atmosphere of those venerable halls standing in such peaceful and dignified seclusion seemed to me likely to induce a state of languor and reverie,’ he wrote in
Chiaroscuro
,
‘excluding both the rude shocks and the joyous revelations of the rough world without.’
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He was already providing a rude shock to Cambridge life. ‘John is encamped with two wives and ten naked children,’ Maynard Keynes inaccurately reported from King’s College (23 July 1909). ‘I saw him in the street to-day – an extrordinary spectacle for these parts… He seems to have painted Jane Harrison at a great rate – 7 sittings of 1½
hours each. She is lying on a sofa in a black dress with a green scarf and a grey face on cushions of various colours with a red book on her lap.’ Two days later Keynes was writing to Duncan Grant: ‘All the talk here is about John… Rupert [Brooke] seems to look after him and conveys him and Dorelia and Pyramus and David and the rest of them about the river… According to Rupert he spends most of his time in Cambridge public houses, and has had a drunken brawl in the streets smashing in the face of his opponent.’
Brooke excitedly invited them all over for meals at Granchester and took them up the river in punts. Augustus John was, he reminded Noël Olivier, ‘the greatest painter’, and ‘the chief wife’ Dorelia ‘a very beautiful woman’, and the boys ‘brown wild bare people dressed, if at all, in lovely yellow, red or brown tattered garments… They talked to us of an imaginary world of theirs, where the river was milk, the mud honey, the reeds and trees green sugar, the earth cake, the leaves of the trees (that was odd) ladies’ hats… To live with five wild children in a caravan would really be a very good life.’
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Brooke was soon leading special parties from the colleges to the Johns’ field to catch a glimpse of Dorelia making a pair of Turkish trousers, or the children gnawing bones for their supper then falling asleep on straw round the camp fire – and other marvels. ‘We cause a good deal of astonishment in this well-bred town,’ Augustus observed.
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The resurrection of the ‘two wives’ legend seems to have arisen not only because of Edie McNeill, but because of the more improbable presence of Ottoline Morrell who, dressed in her finer muslins, had hesitantly accepted an invitation to join them. ‘Come any day,’ Augustus had wired. ‘…In case of any mistake our field is at Grantchester...’ And he sent her a photograph of some wild-looking people.
After three months in London entertaining her mother-in-law, who had recently been converted to Catholicism, it would be refreshing, Ottoline thought, to be with these ‘scallywags’, as Virginia Woolf called them. She
took the train to Cambridge and was met by Augustus with a horse and high gig. ‘Directly I climbed up into the cart the horse, which was a huge ungainly half-trained animal, began to back, slipped and fell down,’ Ottoline recalled.
‘John rapidly descended from our high perch; he stood calmly smoking a cigarette, looking at the great brute kicking and struggling, but made no attempt to help. However, station loafers came to the rescue, and we adjusted the horse and harness. Up we got again, and slowly trotted through Cambridge to a meadow...
How damp and cold and cheerless and dull it seemed. John was morose, with a black eye, the result of a fight… Dorelia and her sister, absorbed in cooking and washing… made no friendly effort to make me feel at home. But after all it would have perhaps been a difficult task to be at home in a melancholy, sodden meadow outside a caravan.’
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The boys, it was true, crowded round ‘Ottofat’ enthusiastically – she was excellent ballast for their kite-flying. But Dorelia, ‘very Leonardo’s Mona Lisa’, Ottoline recalled, ‘very passive, almost oriental –
very
inarticulate’, left her alone. There was nothing to do but walk up and down in the damp trying to get warm until dinner, which was a crust of bread and some fruit. ‘We did treat her badly,’ Dorelia remembered. ‘We couldn’t imagine what to give such a grand lady to eat, so all she got was an apple. Heard after that the poor dear’s favourite dish was kippers.’ So Ottoline called it a day and hurried back to London ‘chilled and damp and appreciative of my own home and Philip’.
Augustus’s famous fight had been with Arthur, the groom, who had been flung into a pugnacious attitude by the notion of leaving Cambridge. It fell to Augustus to correct him, and between pub and trap they rained blows on each other, Augustus eventually carrying the day. Once recovered he led his troupe off and gained a piece of waste ground near Norwich, where he suddenly abandoned them for an urgent appointment in Liverpool. ‘I hope to camp near the sea near Liverpool,’ he had written to Mrs Nettleship, ‘and ride up to the Town Hall to paint the Lord Mayor.’
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But calculating from recent experiences, ‘it’ll take me 3 weeks to get to you by road,’ he told the Rani (July 1909), ‘so I fear I must give up the plan and come by train.’ So, leaving his women and children with instructions ‘to come on steadily’ or not at all, he walked into Norwich and caught a train on his way to paint one of the most notorious portraits of his career.
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It was the custom in Liverpool for members of the city council to raise a
private subscription of one hundred guineas and to present the retiring Lord Mayor with a ceremonial portrait. The Mayor in 1908–9 had been Augustus’s friend Chaloner Dowdall. Usually the Chairman of the Walker Gallery was invited to choose the artist, but Dowdall had so often collected the money for previous incumbents that when the deputation came to see him he at once asked it to let him handle the matter, ‘and you will have the biggest gate the Autumn Exhibition has ever had – and I shall have a picture worth five hundred guineas within five years time.’ He then offered the commission to Augustus, who willingly consented: ‘I’ld like very much to stay with you,’ he wrote to Dowdall’s wife, the Rani. ‘…Don’t let Silky [Chaloner Dowdall] worry any more. Tell him I’m coming… ’
Augustus was full of notions for this portrait. He proposed to Dowdall, as they went together to buy the canvas, painting not only the Lord Mayor but his whole retinue of attendants which went with him on state occasions. Dowdall, slightly alarmed, demurred on the grounds that his house, though large, could hardly contain so monumental a masterpiece. Augustus, while nodding his head in agreement, nevertheless bought the biggest canvas available. ‘I was an ass not to agree,’ Dowdall afterwards claimed.
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That afternoon Augustus made a rapid watercolour sketch, about twenty-four inches by eighteen, and next morning when the canvas had arrived he set to work, beginning with the two lines – the wand and the sword – on which the design was based. By lunch it was all drawn in. ‘He worked like a hawk on the wing,’ Dowdall observed, ‘and was white, sweating and exhausted.’
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The two of them repaired for ‘a good lunch’ which was served by Smith, the Lord Mayor’s footman. Noticing that Smith and Dowdall got along very well, Augustus suggested that the footman should be included in the picture, and to this Dowdall and Smith jovially agreed. ‘The whole thing was drawn in on the canvas at a single sitting,’ Dowdall recalled, ‘and painted with extraordinary rapidity’
What struck Dowdall as being so remarkably rapid lasted an eternity for Augustus: which was to say a fortnight. Initially it went ‘without a hitch’. ‘It’ll be done in a few days,’ he promised Dorelia. ‘It’s great sport painting jewels and sword hilts etc. My Lord sits every day and all day and I’ve been working like a steam engine.’ The town hall itself made ‘a devilish fine studio’, and he reckoned that the portrait would be ‘a shade better than Miss Harrison’s’.
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His only trouble was the background, ‘which I didn’t have the foresight to arrange first’. After a week this trouble had advanced to the foreground, mainly because Dowdall would assume ‘such an idiotic expression when posing’. This spirit of idiocy seemed to fill the town hall during his second week. ‘It was frightful there,’ he complained to Ottoline (9 September 1909), ‘made all the more impossible by his lordship’s inability to stand at ease. No more Lord
Mayors for me. I used to be so glad to get out of the town hall that I roamed about the whole evening not returning till very late. I had but one desire: to submerge myself in crude unceremonious life.’ The formality of it all was soon ‘taking the sawdust’ out of him. Instead of cruising the Chinese opium dens with a notorious character called Captain Kettle, Augustus was expected to spend every evening and night with the Dowdalls, and to voyage back and forth with his subject in an official carriage and pair with two footmen. The Liverpool police had appealed to Dowdall never to let Augustus out of his sight lest his excursions after dark be made a ‘subject of comment in the town, and… be held to prejudice in some way the dignity of his Office’.
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After tasting the freedom of the road, Augustus found this confinement intolerable. He bubbled with impatience, and the result was a curious inspiration: the portrayal of Dowdall as a civic Don Quixote attended by his doubtfully obsequious Sancho Panza, Smith.
Towards the end of the portrait, the municipal strain becoming too much for him, Augustus absconded to Wales. His friend Sampson had recently rediscovered the celebrated gypsy storyteller and great-great-grandson of Abraham Wood, King of the Gypsies: one Matthew Wood who, since 1896, had vanished from the face of the earth. To Sampson he was invaluable, being the last of his race to preserve the ancient Welsh Romany dialect in its purity. Like some hedgehog, he had been quietly grubbing along in a village ‘at the end of nowhere’
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and seven miles from Corwen, called Bettws-Gwerfil-Goch. It was vital to get a haul of his lovely words, ablatives and adverbs ending in ‘ –
od’,
sense riddles, folk tales spoken as pure Indian idiom, a veritable mother tongue. Having triumphantly tracked him down, like an ‘old grey badger to his lair’, Sampson resolved not to lose such a valuable creature again till he had got to know him ‘as well as his own boots’. He therefore rented a couple of hideous semi-detached Welsh suburban villas set on the hillside overlooking the village from the spur of Bron Banog, and having knocked them into one, moved in two imposing pantechnicons full of chattels, together with Margaret his wife, a dwarf maid named Nellie, their sheepdog Ashypelt, and three children, Michael, Amyas and Honor in the charge of two young ‘secretaries’, the fair Kish and the dark Dora. And Augustus.
He arrived one evening ‘in the best of spirits’, determined to profit by his freedom from Liverpool town hall, and signed the visitors’ book with a flamboyant sketch of himself. The waterfalls and streams, the luxurious green woods below, the three shining peaks of Aran to the south, and the distant sight of Snowdon, delighted him. ‘Matthew Wood with his fiddle
and I with my voice entertained the company till late – and there was great hilarity,’ he wrote to John Quinn (September 1909).
‘There were two young ladies present, secretaries of the Rai. After going to bed I became possessed of the mad idea of seeking one of them – it seemed to me only just that they
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should do something in the way of entertaining
me.
I sallied forth in my socks and entered several rooms before I found one containing a bed in which it seemed to me I discerned the forms of the two girls. I lay down at their sides and caressed them. It was very dark. Suddenly a voice started shrieking like a banshee – it might have been heard all over Wales. I thought then I had stumbled upon Sampson’s boys instead of them I sought. I told the voice not to be silly and went away. On the landing appeared the two girls with a candle and terror in their eyes. I scowled at them and returned to bed.’