Authors: Michael Holroyd
‘…He is tall, erect and broad-shouldered… He is red-bearded and has eyes like those of a bull, doubtless is conscious of being the cynosure of the gaze of all Chelsea and looking neither to the left nor the right strides on with big steps and at a great pace towards Sloane Square, focusing on the distance and following, one imagines, some beautiful creature he is intent on catching...’
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Dorothy Brett, the painter, remembers her first sight of him from a bus in the King’s Road ‘with a large black homburg hat at a slight angle
on his head, some kind of black frock coat. I think I must have been staring with my mouth open at him, he shot me a piercing look, and the bus rolled away.’
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Later on, he would call at the Slade for Brett and two other students, Ruth Humphries and Dora Carrington, and take them to the Belgian cafés along Fitzroy Street, and once to call on a group of gypsies, ‘beautiful, dark-haired men and women and children, in brilliant-coloured clothes’, Brett recalled, in a room full of bright eiderdowns.
Best of all were the parties in Mallord Street. Invitations would arrive on the day itself – a telephone call or a note pushed under the door or a shout across the street urging one to ‘join in’ that evening. Carrington, in a letter to Lytton Strachey (23 July 1917), gives a voluptuous description of one of these events:
‘It had been given in honour of a favourite barmaid of the Pub in Chelsea, near Mallord St, as she was leaving. She looked a charming character, very solid, with bosoms, and a fat pouting face. It was great fun.
Joseph, a splendid man from one of those cafes in Fitzroy St, played a concertina, and another man a mandolin. John drunk as a King Fisher. Many dreadfully worn characters, moth eaten and decrepit who I gathered were artists of Chelsea...
John made many serious attempts to wrest my virginity from me. But he was too mangy to tempt me even for a second. “Twenty years ago would have been a very different matter my dear sir”… There was one magnificent scene when a presentation watch was given the barmaid, John drest in a top hat, walking the whole length of that polished floor to the Barmaid sitting on the sofa by the fireplace, incredibly shy and embarrassed over the whole business, and giggling with delight. John swaggering with his bum lurching behind from side to side. Then kneeling down in the most gallant attitude with the watch on a cushion. Then they danced in the middle of the room, and every one rushed round in a circle shouting. Afterwards, it was wonderful to see John kissing this fat Pussycat, and diving his hand down her bodice. Lying with his legs apart on a divan in the most affected melodramatic attitudes!!’
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The Mallord Street studio was really a wonderful place for parties. All sorts of creatures turned up there. ‘I suppose they were Bohemians,’ Caspar, on leave from the navy, hazarded. With their old songs, new dances, sudden collapses, unexplained disappearances, these crowded gatherings looked to Caspar like complex experiments conducted in the laboratory of this studio. John would stare at it all with his wild eyes as if trying to discover ‘which way life led’, Caspar observed. ‘I think he was experimenting the whole time, trying to find out what the hell it was all
about.’ But despite the activity, it was always the same. ‘How it brought back another world!’ Carrington exclaimed after a later party (2 November 1920
).
‘…Dorelia like some Sibyl sitting in a corner with a Basque cap on her head and her cloak swept round her in great folds, smiling mysteriously, talking to everyone, unperturbed watching the dancers. I wondered what went on in her head. I fell very much in love with her. She was so amazingly beautiful. It’s something to have seen such a vision as she looked last night… I had some very entertaining dialogues with John, who was like some old salt in his transparent drunkenness.
“I say old chap will you come away with me?”
D.C. “But you know what they call that.”
“Oh I forgot you were a boy.”
D.C. “Well don’t forget it or you’ll get 2 years hard.”
“I say you are insinuating,” drawing himself up and flashing his eyes in mock indignation, “that I am a Bugger.”
D.C. “My brother is the chief inspector of Scotland Yard.”
“Oh I’m not afraid of him.” But in a whisper. “Will you come to Spain with me? I’d love to go to Spain with
you.
”
D.C. “This year, next year, sometime.”
John. “Never.” Then we both laughed in a roar together.’
The spirit of artistic London during the war, its spiral of gaiety and recrimination, is well caught by the affair of the Monster Matinée performed on 20 March 1917 at the Chelsea Palace Theatre.
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This jumbo pantomime had been organized in aid of Lena Ashwell’s Concerts at the Front. ‘It was to be a sort of history of Chelsea,’ Lady Glenavy wrote, ‘with little plays about Rossetti, Whistler and others, with songs and dances ending up with a grand finale in praise of Augustus John.’ Everyone in the polite world was soon elbowing his way and hers into this charity rag; a committee of duchesses gave birth to itself; and sub-committees proliferated through many smart houses. During rehearsals fashionable ladies gathered in groups for gossip about the notorious John, vying with one another to tell the most succulent story of his dreadful deeds. But when he appeared, ‘Birdie’ Schwabe noticed, such was his presence that they would all stand up to greet him with their best smiles. The last scene of the show featured ‘Mrs Grundy and the John Beauty Chorus’,
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in which a band of Slade girls – Dorothy Brett, Carrington, Barbara Hiles and others – shouted out:
John! John!
How he’s got on!
He owes it, he knows it, to me!
Brass earrings I wear,
And I don’t do my hair,
And my feet are as bare as can be;
When I walk down the street,
All the people I meet
They stare at the things I have on!
When Battersea-Parking
You’ll hear folks remarking:
‘There goes an Augustus John!’
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But not everyone was approving. Peering out from the jungle of the art world, Epstein spied a plot within the matinée, with John its Machiavelli. At the start of the war Epstein had written to Quinn: ‘Everybody here is war-mad. But my life has always been war, and it is more difficult I believe for me here to stick to the job, than go out and fight or at least get blind, patriotically drunk.’
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He seemed determined to be disliked: ‘As an artist I am among the best-hated ones here,’ he boasted, ‘and the most ignored.’
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Perhaps through negligence, John and he seem nevertheless to have remained on good terms. In January 1917 Epstein finished a sculptured head of John. ‘I wanted to capture a certain wildness,’ he explained, ‘an untamed quality that is the essence of the man.’
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Seen from one angle, this head has the aspect of a devil; and this, a little later that year, was what John became. Compulsory conscription had now been introduced and Epstein found himself called up. He saw immediately that it was the result of this monster pantomime.
‘My enemies have at last succeeded in forcing me into the army… John has been behind the whole nasty business ever since the war started, but I first found it out when in a theatrical show got up for charity, he had me caricatured on the stage; he was one of the chief organizers of this dastardly business and ever since then I understand the low, base character of the man. This so-called charity performance was the work of our “artists” mostly hailing from Chelsea, and I was chief butt, partly on account as I take it, of the great public success of my exhibitions.’
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The conspiracy, to the extent that it existed, was a conspiracy of one – the professional joker Horace de Vere Cole. Making a tour of rival sculptors, he had guided their hands in the drafting of some extraordinary letters to the
Sunday Herald
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opposing Epstein’s military exemption.
Walter Winars, a sculptor of horses, wrote from Claridge’s; Derwent Wood went on record as disliking Epstein personally, and John Bach came up with the notion that there were too many artists in the country anyway. In a sane world, such a correspondence could have done no harm to Epstein. But the world was not sane, it was at war; and this anti-Epstein conspiracy was now rampant. The deeply laid pantomime revealed its leader to be the most popular artist of the day, Augustus John. Nothing less would satisfy Epstein.
Though John was certainly capable, when the mood was on him, of doing ugly things, he had no part in Cole’s joke, and his letters show that he wanted Epstein to escape conscription. Quinn, who gave generous support to Epstein’s fantasy, calling John ‘malicious, for what you describe is pure malice and meanness and dirt’, failed to tell Epstein that John had written to him on 18 August 1916: ‘I saw Epstein lately: he is in suspense about being taken for the army. I sincerely hope they’ll let him off.’
Friends did bring the two artists together and a reconciliation was arranged at a hotel in Brighton. Unfortunately a parrot belonging to the hotel exploded with some abusive remarks just as Epstein entered the restaurant, and he rushed out swearing that John was up to his tricks again.
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Epstein objected to John’s untroubled exemption from conscription. While in Ireland with Gogarty, John had injured his knee jumping a fence. Despite months encased in plaster of paris, the knee had not mended. In exchange for a portrait or two, he consulted Herbert Barker, the specialist in manipulative surgery. ‘The celebrated “bone-setter” having put me under gas… carrying my crutches, I walked away like the man in the Bible.’
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Not long afterwards, with another insufficient leap, he damaged the other knee – ‘bang went the semi-lunar and I nearly fainted.’ Again he sought out Barker, this time at a remote village in North Devon.
‘I invited him to my private sitting-room and examined his knee,’ Barker records. ‘It was swollen, bent to a considerable angle and both flexion and extension were painful even to attempt. It was a typical case of derangement of the internal semi-lunar cartilage.’
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This time there was no anaesthetic and the knee snapped back into place while John smoked a cigarette. ‘I feel rather like a racehorse come down in the world and pulling a fourwheeler must feel,’ he wrote afterwards (18 August 1916) to Quinn. ‘But both knees will get strong again in time.’
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They were not strong enough for the medical authorities who examined him later that year at the barracks in Dorchester and who, while insisting that he be re-examined periodically, rejected him for military service. There followed a year in limbo, with the constant threat of being compelled
to do office work – a prospect more alarming than trench warfare. On the bright surface of things he was enjoying a brilliant career in London, admired by the young and pursued by the wealthy. But below this surface, despair was forming. He was petted and flattered; he still roared, but he had been coaxed into a cage and the door was closing behind him. All the sweetmeats poked through the bars he gobbled up at once: he liked them, but they did not satisfy him, so he ate more until they began to sicken him. He was painting less well, and though he could blink away this fact he could not blind himself to it. ‘I wish it were not necessary to depend so much on rich people,’ he confessed to Handrafs O’Grady. ‘They don’t really buy things for love – or rarely’ He had developed a technique of ‘boldly accelerated “drawing with a brush”’.
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Once he had mastered this, he could almost never unlearn it because anything else was slower.
In November 1917, at the Alpine Club, he held the largest exhibition of his pictures ever assembled. He was now, in the words of
The Times
, ‘the most famous of living English painters’.
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But he had reached a watershed in his career. He did not paint to please the public nor wholeheartedly to please himself, but as if he were simply passing the time. ‘He seems to have, with the artistic gifts of a man, the mind of a child,’ wrote one critic of this show.
‘…Life to him is very simple; it consists of objects that arouse in him a
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childish curiosity and delight; but he has been artistically educated in a modern, very unchildish, world, and has learnt very easily all the technical lessons that the world has to teach. The consequence is that he is too skilful for his own vision, like those later Flemish Primitives who were spoilt by acquiring the too intellectual technique of Italy. Constantly one feels the virtuoso obtruding himself into a picture that ought to be as
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in execution as it is on conception; and often, where there is no conception at all, one sees the virtuoso trying to force one.’
The change in his painting may be measured by a differing quality of interest it excited. Shortly before the war Osbert Sitwell had visited the Chenil Gallery,
‘…and saw a collection of small paintings by Augustus John: young women in wide orange or green skirts, without hats or crowned with large straw hats, lounging wistfully on small hills in undulating and monumental landscapes, with the feel of sea and mountain in the air round them… By these I was so greatly impressed that I tried to persuade my father to
purchase the whole contents of the room… Alas, I did not possess the authority necessary to convince him...’
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This new exhibition in the autumn of 1917 was also impressive, like a cocktail party with windows on to past countries; the west of Ireland, South of France, North Wales, Cornwall and the Aran Islands. Next to Dorelia in a yellow dress or orange jacket and the children (one of which, of Ida’s Robin, was bought for the Tate Gallery) were allegorical groups of gypsies, tinkers, ‘philosophers in contemplation’; the familiar faces of old friends such as Ambrose McEvoy and Arthur Symons; smart old buffers who appeared indifferently on donated canvases in aid of the Red Cross; the more formal shapes of titled ladies and gentlemen such as Lady Tredegar, Sir Edwin Lutyens and the two somewhat unfinished Howard de Waldens; and various servicemen ranging from the fat artilleryman to a colonel and an admiral. It was an admirably democratic group, a sociological record of types and individuals that would have been invaluable before the age of photography. ‘If you will go to the Alpine Club on Mill Street off Conduit Street you will see an unprecedented exhibition of paintings of Augustus John,’ wrote Lord Beaverbrook (then Sir Max Aitken) to F. E. Smith (28 November 1917). ‘Every picture in the room is painted by John. If you judge for yourself you will conclude that John is the greatest artist of our time and possibly of any time. If you refuse to follow your own judgement you must listen to the comments of your fashionable friends who are flocking to John’s Exhibition. I saw some of the female persuasion there to-day gazing on John rather than on his pictures.’