Augustus John (15 page)

But while his drawings and pastels improved, his paintings remained uncertain. He found it difficult to control his palette. The Slade had taught him little of the relation of one colour to another and he had no natural sense of tone. Sometimes he would ruin a picture for the sake of a gesture which took his fancy.

In the autumn of 1898 he set off with Evans and McEvoy for Amsterdam, where a large Rembrandt exhibition was being held at the Stedelijk Museum. ‘This was a great event,’ he recorded. ‘As I bathed myself in the light of the Dutchman’s genius, the scales of aesthetic romanticism fell from my eyes, disclosing a new and far more wonderful world.’
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They slept in a lodging house, wandered by the canals of old Amsterdam, lived off herrings and schnapps, and every day went to the galleries and museums. It was now that the last wraiths of Pre-Raphaelitism, the spell of Malory’s dim and lovely world, faded in his imagination and began to be replaced by the poetry of common humanity. Not long afterwards, he travelled through Belgium with the same companions, immersing himself in the Flemish masters for whom he also felt an affinity. ‘Bruges, Anvers, Gand, Bruxelles have seen me and I have beheld them,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘Rubens I have expostulated with, been chidden by, and loved. Jack Jordaens has been my boon companion and I have wept beside the Pump of Quinton Matzys.’

He returned to Tenby. Edwin had recently moved from 32 Victoria Street to a house round the corner in South Cliff Street. Southbourne, as it was called, was almost identical to Victoria House: a similar narrow, dark, cube-like prison. Augustus felt all the old sensations of claustrophobia,
the panic and emptiness. ‘An exile in my native place I greet you from afar and tearfully,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein.

‘Rain has set in and I feel cooped up and useless. What we have seen of the country has been wonderful. But it is ten minutes walk to the rocky landscape with figures.

Pembrokeshire has never appeared so fine to me before, nor the town so smugly insignificant, nor the paternal roof so tedious and compromising a shelter. Trinkets which in a lodging house would be amusing insult my eye here and the colloquy of the table compels in me a blank mask of attention only relieved now and then by hysterical and unreasonable laughter.

The great solace is to crouch in the gloom of a deserted brick kiln amongst the debris of gypsies and excrete under the inspiration of lush Nature without, to the accompaniment of a score of singing birds.

I hope to quit this place shortly and come home to London where I can paint off my humours.’

In a letter to Michel Salaman of about the same date Augustus wrote: ‘I intend coming up to London in a week or so when I shall start that Holy Moses treat.’ He had chosen, from among the alternatives set for the Slade Summer Competition that year, Poussin’s theme ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’. The bustling bravura composition he now produced, five feet by seven feet, was by far his most ambitious painting as a student. Heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance, the composition is very obviously an exercise – ‘an anthology of influences’ Andrew Forge described it – and, though not wholly imitative, it lacks the originality of, say, Stanley Spencer’s prize paintings at the Slade a few years later, ‘The Apple Gatherers’ and ‘The Nativity’. Built up from individual life studies and showing Augustus’s debt to Wilson Steer, its dramatic effect resembles a sixteenth-century mannerist painting. ‘It is a
competition style
in which the figures are drawn in particularly difficult poses,’ writes A. D. Fraser Jenkins, ‘and in many of them are pastiches, no doubt unintentionally, of figures by Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Raphael and other old masters.’
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This
tour de force
of eclecticism won Augustus the Summer Prize and he left the Slade in glory.

Two years before, while he was at work in the Life Class, Augustus had seen Brown usher in a jaunty little man in black, wearing a monocle: James McNeill Whistler. ‘It is difficult to imagine the excitement that name aroused in those days,’ he recalled.
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They had all heard and read so much about this miniature Mephistopheles; had spent so many hours in the Print Room of the British Museum studying his etchings of the
Thames and of Venice; had seen in the galleries from time to time some reticent new stain from his brush – the image of a tired old gentleman sitting by a wall, or a young one obtruding no more than cuffs and a violin; or of a
jeune fille
poised in immobility, or some dim river in the dusk, washed with silver. ‘An electric shock seemed to galvanize the class: there was a respectful demonstration: the Master bowed genially and retired.’ A few years later Augustus himself would be an idol of the Slade. The students loved him for his good, bad and indifferent drawings, for his undiscriminating vitality, his willingness to destroy so much that he did and his challenge to them to take risks. For those in need of a hero, he was the obvious choice, and his entrance into the Slade Life Class at the beginning of the twentieth century was as exciting to the next generation of students as that of
the fin-de-siècle
butterfly with his famous sting. ‘When I first saw this extraordinary individual was while I was a student at the Slade school,’ Wyndham Lewis later wrote:

‘…the walls bore witness to the triumphs of this “Michelangelo” …A large charcoal drawing in the centre of the wall of the life-class of a hairy male nude, arms defiantly folded and a bristling moustache, commemorated his powers with almost a Gascon assertiveness: and fronting the stairs that lead upwards where the ladies were learning to be Michelangelos, hung a big painting of Moses and the Brazen Serpent…

…One day the door of the life-class opened and a tall bearded figure, with an enormous black Paris hat, large gold ear-rings decorating his ears, with a carriage of the utmost arrogance, strode in and the whisper “John” went round the class. He sat down on a donkey – the wooden chargers astride which we sat to draw – tore a page of banknote paper out of a sketch-book, pinned it upon a drawing-board, and with a ferocious glare at the model (a female) began to draw with an indelible pencil. I joined the group behind this redoubtable personage… John left as abruptly as he had arrived. We watched in silence this mythological figure depart.’
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‘And women, young and old, were fond

Of looking at the man Flammonde.’

Edward Arlington Robinson

Augustus’s growing renown in the late 1890s and early 1900s was partly based upon his extreme visibility. In a uniform world of braced and tied, well-waistcoated, buttoned-down men, it was impossible to overlook him. His shoes, created specially to his own design, were unpolished; the gold earrings he was soon to pin on were second-hand; he wore no collar and was contemptuous of those who did – in its place he fastened a black silk scarf with a silver brooch; he did wear a hat but it was of gypsy design, patina’d with age; his eyes were restless, his hair alarmingly uncut. ‘We are the sort of people’, he told another Bohemian Welsh artist, Nina Hamnett, ‘our fathers warned us against.’

He walked the streets with a terrific stride, as if raising his own morale, protecting himself against other people. One day a gang of children fell in behind him shouting: ‘Get yer ’air cut, mister.’ He halted, turned on them, and growled: ‘Get your throats cut!’

His reputation seemed to depend on deliberate neglect. He neglected to shave; he neglected caution and convention and common sense. There was no telling what he would say or do next – though very often he said and did nothing. The barometer of his moods shot up and down with extraordinary rapidity. Periods of charm, even tenderness, would vanish suddenly before convulsions of temper; days of leaden gloom suddenly dispersed, and he would glow with geniality. There seemed nothing to account for these alterations, or to connect them.

Wherever he went he struck sparks of romance. William Rothenstein remembered him at the age of twenty-one, looking like ‘a young fawn. He had beautiful eyes, almond-shaped and with lids defined like those Leonardo drew, a short nose, broad cheek-bones, while over a fine forehead fell thick brown hair, parted in the middle. He wore a light curling beard (he had never shaved) and his figure was lithe and elegant. I was at once attracted to John… A dangerous breaker of hearts, he would be, I thought, with his looks and his ardour… [He] was full of plans for future work; but he was poor and needed money for models.’
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Augustus was indeed ambitious. He felt eager to develop his talent as a means of fixing his identity. His world was full of echoes and reflections.
He saw himself in other people’s looks, heard himself in their replies, recognized himself through their attitudes. Many of his portraits, such as ‘The Smiling Woman’, were in this oblique fashion autobiographical.

Under the flamboyant exterior there was much uncertainty. He invented a part, complete with theatrical costume, that acted as an eye-catching form of concealment. Unsure of so much, he was dynamic in one thing: the pursuit of beauty, in particular beautiful women. Round him there gathered, wrote Lord David Cecil, a following of ‘magnificent goddesses who, with kerchiefed heads and flowing, high-waisted dresses, stand gazing into the distance in reverie or look down pensively at the children who run and leap and wrestle round their feet. Wild and regal, at once lover, mother and priestess, woman dominates Mr John’s scene.’

Like his maternal grandfather Thomas Smith, Augustus was a man ‘of full habit of body’. But his view of women was idealistic rather than sensual, and had been formed by the early death of his mother. Back in Tenby, he had been drawn towards full-bosomed mature women, admiring from afar and usually while in church their rich proportions that seemed to offer the warmth and consolation he desired. Typical of these women had been the headmaster’s wife at his unsympathetic school near Bristol, on whose generous bosom, he remembered, ‘in great distress, I once laid my head and wept’.
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With adolescence his world had become invaded by disturbing forces. Whether upon the beach or in the streets of Tenby, it seemed his fate to encounter at every turn the mocking glance of some girl. His awkwardness was painful and the old-fashioned clothes his father made him wear an unspeakable constraint. He would have felt less sensitive if, while wandering alone on the marshes, he had come across some faerie’s child lingering disconsolately amid the sedge. For she, like him, would have been silent, would not have laughed, but taken him into her embrace. Such phantoms peopled his imagination. Prevented by his timidity from making contact with actual girls, he kept company with imaginary creatures who had travelled from the reveries of Burne-Jones and Rossetti.

The conflict between reality and his fastidiously romantic dreamland gradually intensified. On Sunday afternoons in the early 1890s Geraldine de Burgh, her elder sister and a friend of theirs used to walk from Tenby over the sand dunes and rough grass tracks of the Burrows towards Penally and Giltar. And almost every Sunday they were secretly met by ‘Gussie’, Thornton and their friend Robert Prust. Geraldine was partnered by Gussie – the routine was invariable – though she would have preferred Robert Prust. Gussie, she thought, was terribly backward: they did not even hold hands. But as the youngest, it was not hers to choose. Over sixty-five years later, Augustus wrote to her: ‘You are one of the big
landmarks of my early puberty. I was intensely shy then, besides you generally had your brother with you to add to my confusion. Perhaps your noble name intimidated me too. But I was always afraid of girls then – girls and policemen...’

By this time Augustus had experienced what he called ‘the dawn of manhood’. The mysteries of reproduction were explained to him with much raucous humour by the other boys in Tenby. He was horrified. It was impossible to imagine his father involving himself with his mother in this way. Gloom, terror and bewilderment mounted in him. To such improbable coupling did he owe his very existence! It seemed as if he would never be free from the burden of his origins. It was with this knowledge that he tortured Gwen.

But gradually the guilt and disgust receded. ‘Further investigations both in Art and Nature,’ he wrote, ‘completing the process of enlightenment thus begun, brought me down from cloud cuckooland to the equally treacherous bed-rock of Mother Earth.’
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To Augustus, all women were mothers, with himself either as child or God-the-Father. Not long content to figure in the public eye as doubtful or baffled, he presented himself as robustly pagan with a creed that personified Nature as a mother. She was an object of desire, but also a goddess of fertility, a symbolic yet physical being capable of answering all needs: a woman to be celebrated and enjoyed. This he was to express most lyrically in the small figure-in-landscape panels – usually not more than twenty inches by fifteen inches – that he painted in the years before the First World War. Here women and children, like trees or hills, appear as an integral part of the Mother Earth – a connection he specifically and sexually makes in some of his letters. ‘This landscape,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis (October 1946) from Provence, ‘like some women I have heard of, takes a deal of getting into. I am making the usual awkward approaches – and soon hope to dispense with these manoeuvres and get down to bed-rock, but the preliminaries are tiresome.’

These preliminaries grew increasingly tiresome after his third year at the Slade. An occasional glass of wine or whisky or, when in France, of absinthe or calvados or even, at the Café Royal, hock-and-seltzer or crème de menthe frappé, helped him to accelerate past this awful shyness. His first serious girlfriend was the bird-like Ursula Tyrwhitt who, responding to his letters of entreaty, allowed him to walk her home after school. When they were together they drew and painted each other’s portraits; and wrote love-letters to each other when they were apart. ‘How is it pray, that your letters have the scent of violets? Violets that make my heart beat,’ Augustus asked her. ‘…Write again sans blague Ursula Ursula Ursula.’ She was six years older than he was and she dazzled him. He
wrote praising her ‘glorious roseate luminescence’. But their affair ended when, in panic, her clergyman father sent her off to Paris. In one of his last letters to her, while they were both still students, Augustus enclosed a charming self-portrait, pen and brush in black ink, inscribed ‘Au Revoir, Gus’.