Augustus John (137 page)

Quinn was horrified at this news, and John assured him (16 March 1914) he was not alone. ‘I was at Lane’s lately and told him I had painted out “Forza e Amore”. Words failed him to express his horror… He implored me to send it up to him and let him have the coat of white I gave it taken off. Shall I? I suppose I was a bloody fool to do it.’ Three months later (24 June 1914) he confirmed that Quinn had ‘the only real claim to the picture’ – adding that he was now certain the white coat could not be removed successfully.

96
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (spring 1913). NLW MS 22777D fol. 20.

97
  John to Hope-Johnstone n.d.

98
  Augustus to Dorelia January–February 1914. NLW MS 22777D fols. 34, 36, 39.

99
  John to Ottoline Morrell, July 1914.

100
  In a letter to his brother James Strachey. British Library.

101
  Augustus to Dorelia (summer 1912). NLW MS 22777D fols. 9, 11.

102
  Augustus to Dorelia (1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 87–8, 89.

103
  Augustus to Dorelia (June 1916). NLW 22777D fols. 120–1.

104
  Augustus to Dorelia (summer 1916). NLW MS 22777D fol. 130.

105
  John to Hope-Johnstone, 1916.

106
  
Horizon
Volume VIII No. 44 (August 1943), p. 140.

107
  Llwynythyl was later taken by the composer Granville Bantock. His daughter remembers that John ‘had drawn an enormous mural in white chalk of angel figures covering the entire end wall of the sitting-room… We discovered a whole pile of discarded oil paints and brushes, together with many crumpled sketches. We salvaged and smoothed out two of these sketches and I still have one of them… an amusing cartoon of a woman sitting at a table and trying to work; around her pots and pans are flying through the air, a tradesman presents bills and a half-naked baby screams on the floor.’

108
  See Mark Amory
Lord Dunsany: A Biography
(1972), pp. 73–4.

109
  John to Hope-Johnstone, 20 February 1914.

110
  John to Quinn, 19 February 1914.

111
  John went out sketching with Munnings, listening carefully to Munnings’s theory that a horse’s coat reflects the light of day, and then, after silent reflection, gruffly demanding: ‘If you see a brown horse, why not paint it brown?’ Many years later John told E. J. Rousuck that Munnings’s horses had ‘better picture quality, better groupings’ than Stubbs’s. See Reginald Pound
The Englishman
(1962), pp. 59, 61, 201.

112
  
Interview with the author, 1969. See also Margaret Laing ‘Dame Laura Knight’
Evening Standard
(5 November 1968), p. 12.

113
  Dame Laura Knight to the author. She recalled that they were living in three cottages knocked into one, which made a room thirty feet in length. A panel of Dorelia at Falmouth that winter is called ‘The Mauve Jersey’.

114
  
Horizon
Volume XI No. 64 (April 1945), p. 258. In
Chiaroscuro,
p. 205, ‘our excitement’ has been changed to ‘the general excitement’.

115
  Augustus to Gwen John n.d. NLW MS 22305C fols. 114–16.

116
  Augustus to Dorelia, 6 August 1914. NLW MS 22777D fols. 52–3.

CHAPTER VIII: HOW HE GOT ON

1
  Augustus to Dorelia, from Mallord Street n.d. (5 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fols. 59–1.

2
  John to Quinn, 12 October 1914.

3
  John to , 13 August 1915.

4
  John to Dorelia n.d. (summer 1917). NLW MS 22777D fol. 138.

5
  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt n.d. (September 1914). NLW MS 21468 fols. 76–8.

6
  Susan Chitty
Gwen John
(1981), p. 136.

7
  Augustus to Gwen John, 24 October 1914. NLW MS 22305D fols. 118–19.

8
  
Ibid.

9
  Augustus to Gwen John, 25 December 1914. NLW MS 22305D fols. 120–21.

10
  Winifred John to Gwen John n.d.
(c.
1904). NLW MS 22307C fols. 116–17.

11
  Winifred John to Augustus John, 8 January 1906. NLW MS 22782D fols. 121–4.

12
  Thornton John to Gwen John, 7 February 1917. NLW MS 22307C fols. 51–3. Thornton came back twice to Europe. The first time was in the autumn of 1910 (when he was thinking of getting work in Ireland and brought back one of Gwen’s pictures of Fenella Lovell). The second time was at the beginning of 1915. ‘Factory work is an abomination,’ he wrote to Gwen, ‘but there is nothing to do but hold on grimly.’

13
  
Ibid.

14
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (31 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fol. 56.

15
  John to Ottoline Morrell, 1 January 1915.

16
  John to Quinn, 15 February 1915.

17
  
Irish Times
(21 November 1964).

18
  Augustus to Dorelia, from the Railway Hotel in Galway City n.d. (13 October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 103–4.

19
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (17 October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 105–6.

20
  John to Quinn, 15 November 1915.

21
  John to Shaw, from Mallord Street, 18 December 1915. BL Add. MS 59539.

22
  John to Quinn, 19 October 1914.

23
  John to Quinn, 12 October 1914.

24
  This commission to paint Lord Fisher had come through Epstein, who had recently done a bust of Fisher for the Duchess of Hamilton. His three-quarter length portrait of Fisher, which was shown at the Alpine Club in 1917–18 and priced at seven hundred guineas (equivalent to £18,500 in 1996), is owned by the National Gallery of Scotland at Edinburgh, and a half-length portrait is in the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.

25
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (
c.
June 1916). NLW MS 22777D fol. 119.

26
  Albert Rutherston to William Rothenstein, 8 December 1916.

27
  
The Times
(3 March 1920).

28
  
Jan Morris
Fisher’s Face
(1995), pp. 132–3; see also p. 221.

29
  John to Quinn, 19 January 1916.

30
  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

31
  Frances Lloyd George
The Years That Are Past
(1967), p. 84.

32
  Frances Stevenson
Lloyd George. A Diary
(ed. A. J. P. Taylor 1971), pp. 83, 103–4; entry for 12 March 1916.

33
  It is now in the Aberdeen Art Gallery.

34
  At the Villa la Chaumière in September 1919.

35
  Quinn to Kuno Meyer, 10 May 1916.

36
  See W. H. Davies
Later Days
(1925), pp. 177–84.

37
  Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

38
  John to Dorelia, from Coole Park n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 80–85.

39
  Bernard Shaw to Francis Chesterton, 5 May 1915.
Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters
Volume 3
1911–1925
(ed. Dan H. Laurence 1985), pp. 294–5.

40
  Lady Gregory remembered this rather differently. In
Coole
(1971) she wrote: ‘John asked while he was here if he might paint Richard, and I, delighted, reading a story to the child, kept him still for the sitting. I longed to possess the picture but did not know how I could do so without stinting the comforts of the household, and said no word. But I think he must have seen my astonished delight when he gave it to me, said it was for me he had painted it. That was one of the happy moments of my life.’ She also added: ‘I had from the time of his birth dreamed he might one day be painted by that great Master, Augustus John, yet it had seemed but a dream.’

41
  Anne Gregory
Me and Nu: Childhood at Coole
(1970), p. 47.

42
  ‘Augustus John had been very annoyed at being thwarted, and had given Richard that funny look to pay Grandma out! The picture of Richard was hung in the drawing-room, on the left of the big fireplace.’ Anne Gregory also remembered that John ‘was large and rather frightening to look at, and we felt he might step on us, as he seemed to stride about not ever looking where he was going.’
Me and Nu,
Chapter VII.

43
  Lady Gregory to W. B. Yeats n.d.

44
  S. Winsten
Days with Bernard Shaw
(1948), p. 164.

45
  
Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence
(ed. Alan Dent 1952), p. 175.

46
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 82–3.

47
  
Chiaroscuro
pp. 96–9.

48
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (May 1915). NLW MS 22777D fols. 84–5.

49
  John to Quinn, 15 November 1915.

50
  To his secretary, Ann Elder, Shaw described John (30 April 1915) as ‘a painter of intense reputation among advanced people’. Of the three portraits Shaw temporarily owned two. In 1922 he presented one of these to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. ‘I note that you are keeping the best – with the blue background – which I suppose still adorns one of the top corners of your rooms at Adelphi Terrace,’ John wrote to him (24 March 1922). This portrait is now at Ayot St Lawrence and belongs to the National Trust.

51
  Wyndham Lewis to John, from 19 rue Mouton Duvernet, avenue d’Orléans (Paris) n.d. NLW MS 22783D fols. 19–20.

52
  Shaw to John, 6 August 1915.

53
  He attributed the expression to Shaw’s midday intake of vegetables, though admitted (16 May 1915) that ‘the one in which you have apparently reached a state of philosophic oblivion is perhaps liable to misinterpretation’. It was originally credited with the title ‘The Philosopher in Contemplation’ or ‘When Homer Nods’. It was bought by an Australian who later sold it in
London where it was purchased by the Queen. It now (1995) hangs in Clarence House as part of the Queen Mother’s collection.

54
  Shaw to John, from the Hydro, Torquay, 6 August 1915.

55
  Between John’s portrait and Rodin’s bust, which had been done a few years earlier, Shaw differentiated. ‘With an affectation of colossal vanity, Shaw gestured and genuflected before the Rodin bust of himself when I once visited him,’ Archibald Henderson wrote
(George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century,
1956, p. 789); ‘but during a later visit delightedly rushed me into the dining-room to see the Augustus John poster-portrait, in primary colours – flying locks and breezy moustaches, rectangular head, and a caricaturishly flouting underlip. To the John portrait he pointed with a delicious chuckle: “There’s the portrait of my great reputation”; then pointing to the Rodin bust, he breathed: “Just as I am, without one plea”.’ But it is arguable that, by 1915, Shaw’s protective covering, which he called ‘G.B.S.’, was complete.

56
  It was at this exhibition that the famous ‘ladies of Gregynog’, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, acting on the advice of Hugh Blaker, Curator of the Holburne Museum at Bath, bought their first Augustus John pictures – ten oils (including the self-portrait on the jacket of the Chatto & Windus hardback edition of this book) and a drawing – for £2,350 (equivalent to £84,500 in 1996). In 1918 Margaret Davies bought another oil (‘Study of a Boy’ [Edwin]), and in 1919 added John’s portrait of W. H. Davies (whose
Selected Poems
and
The Lover’s Song Book
were published by the Gregynog Press) as well as a portfolio of ten drawings to their joint collection. This collection was eventually given to the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff.

In October 1920 John dispatched a complete set of his etchings to the National Museum of Wales, the only other public collections having this suite of etchings being Cambridge and Berlin (and in 1949 the British Museum, to which Campbell Dodgson bequeathed his collection). Though the National Museum of Wales was given two John pictures by the Contemporary Art Society in 1936 and 1942, it was not until the end of the 1940s that it bought its first John work (a flower painting, ‘Cineraria’, in 1948 and a nude design in 1949). In 1962 the museum bought the full-length painting ‘Dorelia in the Garden at Alderney Manor’ at the Christie’s sale of John’s work. It also bought portrait drawings of John Cowper Powys and Frank Brangwyn in the 1960s, and then the small oil paintings of Caitlin Macnamara and Ida John and the ‘French Fisher-boy’ of 1907 (owned by Judge Stephen Tumim), some studies for his Slade School ‘Moses and the Brazen Serpent’ and miscellaneous studies and sketchbooks that had been owned by Michel Salaman, all in the 1970s. From the estate of Dorelia in 1972 the museum purchased over one thousand drawings, one hundred and ten paintings and three bronzes, making it, in the words of the Assistant Keeper, Mark L. Evans, ‘the principal repository of John’s work and the main centre for research on his art’.

57
  Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 16 March 1915. British Library.

58
  Lytton Strachey to Carrington, 8 March 1917. ‘At first she [Vivien] completely ignored me. She then would say nothing but “Oh no!” whenever I addressed her. But eventually she gave me a chocolate – “Man! Have a chockle,” – which I consider a triumph.’

59
  ‘Vivien John. Malaysia: its People and its Jungle’. Upper Grosvenor Galleries, 19 January-6 February 1971.

60
  See Nicolette Devas
Two Flamboyant Fathers
(1966), pp. 36–49.

61
  John to Dorelia, April 1915. NLW MS 22777D fols. 74–5.

62
  Some years later, when John was visiting the composer Jack Moeran in Norfolk, he called on Brownsword; and continued seeing her later still after she was widowed, ‘always on friendly terms’.

Gwyneth became a talented painter, and mixed with the Johns after she
had grown up, but remained outside the family circle. She was always fond of Augustus, would frequently see him in London, and lent him her studio to work in occasionally. ‘He was a unique and wonderful man,’ she wrote after his death.