Augustus John (10 page)

‘If our mother had lived it would have been different,’ Thornton wrote to Augustus over seventy years after her death (3 February 1959). She had encouraged them to draw and paint and, surrounded by her pictures, Gwen and Gus continued drawing and painting, using the attic at Victoria House as their studio. ‘Wherever they went their sketch-books went with them,’ their father liked to recall.

‘In their walks along the beach… on excursions into the country, wherever they went the sketch-books went too, and were used. They sketched everything they saw – little scenes, people, animals… I can remember when they were a little older, and I sometimes used to take them to the theatre in London, how, even here, the inevitable sketch-books turned up as well. Then in the few minutes interval between the acts they worked feverishly to draw some person who had interested them.’
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Although he conceded ‘it was possible that I was a less keen observer of the boy’s work than his mother would have been’, Edwin took pride in having failed to put a stop to all this sketching. He had left his children’s talent ‘to develop freely and naturally’. But one day on Tenby beach, Gwen, who ‘was always picking up beautiful children to draw and adore’,
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came across Jimmy, a twelve-year-old boy with a pale haunting face and corkscrew curls down to his shoulders, dressed in a costume of old green velvet. Having made friends with him, she invited him back to her attic, and, in the hope of some payment for these sessions, his mother came too – rather to Gwen’s disgust. But Edwin disapproved of strollers, and the sight of this woman wandering into his house was open to misinterpretation. He therefore decided to put his foot down and forbid Gwen inviting ‘models’ home. But already it was too late. He objected; Gwen insisted; and he gave way. It was the pattern of things to come.

In their adolescence the children began to pair off differently, Thornton and Winifred, both small and quiet, spending more time together, and Gwen growing more involved with Gus. They needed someone to replace their mother and displace their father, someone to love and from whom to learn. Gwen appears to have hoped that Augustus might be this person, but his needs were similar to hers and he responded fretfully to Gwen’s attentions, undermining her confidence by making her feel ignorant. She was older, but he was bigger. ‘I suffered a long time because of him,’ she wrote in her early thirties, ‘it’s like certain illnesses which recur in time… I revolted against him at the beginning of each holiday, but he won by telling me horrible things and when I threw myself on him to fight him
and pull his hair… he always won, for of course he was the stronger.’
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Gwen was often in tears over this period, and Gus in angry despair.

Like Gwen, Gus saw life in terms of pictures. ‘Once when we were walking together over the sand dunes and saw a piece of hard perpendicular sand,’ Arthur Morley recalled, ‘Gussie pulled out his penknife and very rapidly carved out an attractive hand and face. On another occasion when he was sitting on my right in class he seized my Latin Grammar book and on the first empty page drew in ink with amazing speed two comic faces very different from each other, face to face.’
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At Greenhill there had been art classes in which the pupils, armed with coloured chalks, copied lithographs of Swiss scenery. But Augustus also practised drawing from life, discovering from among the masters some challenging models. At Clifton he had been given no encouragement and no instruction. ‘Philosophy was eschewed,’ he afterwards wrote, ‘Art apologized for, and Science summarized in a series of smelly parlour tricks.’
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Back at Tenby, while studying at St Catherine’s, he endured a course of ‘stumping’ under the tuition of a Miss O’Sullivan. ‘Stumping’ was a substitute for drawing prescribed by the State Art Education Authorities. The stumps were spiral cones of paper, and the stumping powder a box of pulverized chalk. With these materials, some charcoal, an indiarubber and a sheet of cartridge paper, students would reproduce the objects placed before them by means of a prolonged smudging, rubbing and stippling that gave him a method of representing form without risking the use of line. At first he copied simple cones, pyramids and cylinders, then gradually advanced, via casts of fruit and flowers, to Greco-Roman statuary until he finally arrived at the Life Room, where he spent several months studying a fully clothed model almost as bored as himself. At this stage his work was submitted to the Central Authority, since each successful student received a certificate qualifying him to indoctrinate others in the Theory and Practice of Stumping, while the school received a grant from the Exchequer. Augustus was awarded his certificate and, at the age of sixteen, became a Master Stumper, Third Class.

He was more than ever anxious to leave Tenby. But what was he to do? He no longer thought of becoming a trapper on the Red River, or of leading a revolt of the Araucanian Indians, but dreamed of exploring the exotic possibilities of China. He would join the Civil Service perhaps, if that would carry him to such enchanted lands: he would do
anything
to get far enough away from this stagnant little backwater. He still loved parts of Tenby, the wooded valleys inland and the wild sea coast and rocky country along it, but the meanness of his life at home constricted him unbearably, and his hunger for a larger world grew every day more
acute. His father, who would have preferred to launch him on a barrister’s career, had to acknowledge that he was unfitted by nature to such a profession, and for a short time it was agreed between them that he should join the army. Augustus began his army training locally, and in the evenings the respective merits of the officer-training establishments at Sandhurst and Woolwich were weighed.

Then he changed his mind. He had decided, he said, not to join the army, but to study art. Edwin had never, he later admitted, ‘taken their drawing seriously’. But for some months Augustus had been going to an art school in Tenby run by Edward J. Head, a Royal Academician, who reported very favourably on his progress. Edwin was impressed by these reports. He was an annual visitor to the Royal Academy and had read in
The Times
accounts of various sales and successes in the art world. Pastoral painting and conversation pieces in particular recommended themselves to him as gentlemanly pursuits. These days, it seemed, the artist’s profession might be tolerably respectable, provided it was practised with financial success. Mr Head himself, if not exactly a gentleman, managed to live comfortably. When a number of his pictures had first been hung at the Academy, Edwin’s civic pride vibrated. Here was an example his son might strive to emulate. Naturally he would have preferred Augustus to go for a soldier, but he was such a temperamental fellow, so moody and mutinous and with no head for serious business: art might be just the job for him. One thing still bothered Edwin: had he been sufficiently unenthusiastic? Certainly he had failed to encourage his son, but was that by itself enough? He had no wish to appear irresponsible in the way of putting up difficulties. In his own account of this time, Edwin explained his position by means of paradox:

‘Obstacles put in his [Augustus’s] way would only have strengthened his determination to become an artist… He suggested being allowed to attend the Slade School in London. The earnestness he put into this request made me first think he might after all make an artist… he could display plenty of determination when necessary, and his whole childhood had proved that he could give untiring application to either drawing or painting. This, combined with his obvious eagerness, made me give my consent quite willingly.’
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It was Mr Head who had recommended the Slade. The fees, Edwin discovered, were pretty stiff, but the legacy of forty pounds from Augusta would see to his son’s upkeep – and there was always the possibility of a scholarship. Besides, it would put an end to the rows that were now
breaking out between them. On the whole, things could have turned out worse.

*1
Either he would discover a good partner and no gold, or some gold and a partner who ran off with it. But, except for a brief period when he dreamed of starting a tobacco factory in Ireland, he seemed to have found what he really loved – mountains, prairies, horses and empty spaces. Among the trappers, cowboys and prospectors he earned the title of ‘the rider from away back’, and, in company with a band of them, crossed Canada on horseback, fording rivers and bathing in hot springs till his skin turned dark orange. Above all he relished solitude and for some years before 1914 went to live beside an Indian encampment, whose inhabitants would appear outside his tent, sit for hours smoking their long pipes, then vanish. He also travelled through Montana ‘and always on horseback’; he wrote: ‘I used to make my bed on the ground without a tent, and the dawn was the most important part of the day.’ He married late in life a woman who had had two previous husbands and whom he discovered after her death to have been twenty years older than he thought. He had no children, but one foster daughter. He died in British Columbia on 19 March 1968, aged ninety-two.

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From Paris, Winifred crossed the Atlantic while still in her early twenties. By the summer of 1905 she had reached Montana, living some months with Thornton surrounded by Indians, ‘rattlesnakes and all sorts of wild animals’. The two of them planned to travel to Mexico by boat along the Mississippi. ‘The idea of orange groves and sunlight is
enchanting
,’
Augustus wrote to her, ‘– but too remote from
my
experience to be anything but a lovely dream. But depend on it, you have only to perjure yourselves to its reality to bring this family at any rate helter skelter on your tracks… I can
see
you and Thornton installed on the top of some crumbling teocalli with the breath of the Pacific in your nostrils.’ Eventually this plan was abandoned, and Winifred journeyed instead to Vancouver where ‘the weather was perfect: it rained every day’, and to San Francisco, ‘a beastly town’. For a number of years she gave violin lessons in California, and on 30 January 1915 married one of her pupils, Victor Lauder Shute, a failed painter who had turned engineer and worked mostly for the railroads. They had three children, Dale, Betty and Muriel, a fourth child being still-born in 1924. Although she claimed to have developed ‘such strong nerves I have played to a room full of people and forgot everybody’, she remained shy.

She never returned to Wales or England, but died in Martinez (California) on 12 April 1967, aged eighty-seven.

‘What a brood I have raised!’

Henry Tonks

On his first day at the Slade, in October 1894, Augustus was led into the Antique Room, presided over by Henry Tonks – and almost at once a rumpus broke out. Some of the new students, who had already worked for several months in Paris, were objecting at not being allowed straight into the Life Class. Professor Tonks, however, was adamant: the students’ taste must first be conditioned by Greco-Roman sculpture before it was fit to deal with the raw materials of life. And against this judgement there was no appeal.

Augustus was not one of those who objected. To him the absence of stumping was in itself wonderful enough. Far from having been to Paris, he had scarcely been to London and he felt his immense ignorance of everything. To the others he appeared a rather spruce and silent figure, white-collared, clean-shaven, guarding his dignity. Tonks placed him on one of the wooden ‘donkeys’, next to another new student, Ethel Hatch. ‘I found myself sitting next to a boy about sixteen’, she recalled, ‘with chestnut hair and very brown
[sic]
eyes who had the name “John” written in large letters on his paper… He was very neatly dressed, and was very quiet and polite, and on the following mornings he never failed to say good morning when he came in.’
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He seemed out of the ordinary in so far as he was quieter than other students, and perhaps more timid. But one of them, Michel Salaman, noticed that, when he called for an indiarubber one day and someone threw it to him, he caught it and began rubbing out in a single movement. He was supremely well co-ordinated.

Every student had been instructed to provide himself with a box of charcoals, some sheets of
papier Ingres,
and a chunk of bread. Their first task was to make what they could of the discobolus. Augustus fixed it with a stare, then using a few sweeping strokes, polished it off, as he
thought, in a couple of minutes. Tonks, however, thought differently. It was bold, certainly, but far too summary. Yet he was interested by Augustus’s sketch.

Everything at the Slade dazzled Augustus. The spirit of dedication by which he felt himself to be surrounded, thrilled and abashed him. He hardly knew where to look. The girls were so eye-catching and the men apparently so self-assured that whatever imperfections he observed in their work he attributed to his own lack of understanding.

The teaching of Tonks gave Augustus the sense of direction he had so far lacked. In such a place he seemed to know who he was and the part he had to play. Whatever successes he gained later in his career, he remained to a certain extent a Slade student all his life. In its strengths and limitations, this was the single most important influence on him.

*

When Augustus John came to London, the Slade School was twenty-three years old, and about to enter one of its most brilliant phases. Its tradition was founded upon the study of the Old Masters, and laid special emphasis on draughtsmanship – on the interpretation of line as the Old Masters understood line, and of anatomical construction. ‘Drawing is an explanation of the form,’ Augustus was told. This was the Slade motto, and he never forgot it.