Augustus John (21 page)

During this month at Le Puy, McEvoy’s relationship with Gwen appears to have reached some sort of crisis. For much of the time he was silent, ‘a mere wreck’, drinking himself gently into oblivion; while Gwen, who spent many days in tears, seemed inconsolable. Having known Whistler, McEvoy had been able to give Gwen help with her oil painting technique at the Slade; but she had nothing more to learn from him after returning from Whistler’s own tuition at the Académie Carmen. She seemed too demanding, he too immature – besides, he was under Gus’s spell.

‘It will be a frightful job seeking for rooms in London,’ Augustus wrote to Salaman shortly before his return. But by November he had found what he wanted at 39 Southampton Street above the Economic Cigar Company. This was no ‘mansarde’, but would serve for a time. Many of the drawings he had done at Le Puy were now put on exhibition at the Carfax Gallery. ‘Tonks has bought 2 drawings. Brown thinks of doing so too,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘I have a great number if you like to come and amuse yourself.’ It was again partly owing to Rothenstein’s advocacy that the drawings sold so well. ‘John is the great one at present,’ Orpen assured Everett, ‘making a lot of money and doing splendid drawing.’ Augustus himself was delighted by this success – in a restrained way. ‘The run on my drawings tho’ confined to a narrow circle has been very pleasant,’ he wrote in another letter to Will Rothenstein that autumn. ‘People however seem better at bargaining than I am.’

People also seemed better, it struck him, at arranging their lives. He was growing increasingly dissatisfied by the series of pursuing landladies and girlfriends in retreat. Perhaps, after all, there was something to be said for ‘moral living’. At any rate the novelty was appealing.

He began to see Ida again. Although she had few illusions about the sort of life he had been leading, she still loved him. But he was dangerous. He knew he was dangerous and did not attempt to conceal it. In one of the limericks he was fond of composing, he scribbled:

There was a young woman named Ida

Who had a porcelain heart inside her

But she met a young card

Who hugged her so hard

He smashed up her crockery, Poor Ida!

Soon the two of them were together again on the old basis. ‘John is once more in the embrace of Miss Nettleship – the reunion is “Complet”,’ Orpen informed Everett. ‘Marie (la Belle) has faded into the dark of winter, and disappeared...’

But the old basis was no longer good enough. Since the Nettleships would never agree to their ‘living in sin’, and since Ida would never consent to distressing them in this way, ‘moral living’, as Augustus had called it, seemed the one solution. Having decided this, he acted at once. He conceded the formality of a civil ceremony but insisted on an elopement, and set off with Ida early one Saturday morning for the Borough of St Pancras where they celebrated the event in secret. ‘I have news to tell you,’ he wrote the following week to his sister Winifred. ‘Ida Nettleship and I got spliced at the St Pancras Registry Office last Saturday! McEvoy and Evans and Gwen aided and abetted us. Everyone agreed it was a beautiful wedding – there was a wonderful fog which lent an air of mystery unexpectedly romantic.’ This letter he illustrated with a drawing of himself standing on his head.

Jack Nettleship, when he discovered what had happened, took the news philosophically: his wife less so. ‘It might have been worse,’ Augustus commented.
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That evening Ida went up to the bedroom of one of her mother’s employees, Elspeth Phelps. ‘I want to tell you something, Elspeth,’ she said, taking her hands. ‘I want to tell you –’ and then burying her face in her hands she broke into great heaving sobs. After a few moments she continued: ‘I want to tell you I’ve married Gussie – and I think I’m a little frightened.’
106

She gave no sign of this fear in public. After the wedding they went round to tell Will and Alice Rothenstein the news. ‘How pleased we were, and what mysterious things Ida and my wife had to talk over!’ Will wrote.
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That evening the Rothensteins gave them a party. Ida looked ‘exquisitely virginal in her simple white dress’. ‘Mr & Mrs Nettleship, Mrs Beerbohm and Neville [Lytton], Miss Salmond, Misses John, Salaman, Messrs Steer, Tonks, McEvoy, Salaman and myself were there,’ Albert Rutherston wrote to his parents. But Augustus himself was not there. The last anyone had seen of him was on his way that afternoon to a bath. Late that night, he turned up wearing a bright check suit and earrings. ‘We were very gay,’ remembered Albert Rutherston. ‘We had
scherades
[sic]
towards the end of the evening which was great fun. Mr and Mrs John were radiant.’ One of these charades represented Steer teaching at the Slade – a long silence, then: ‘How’s your sister?’ This, Augustus swore, was a perfect example of Steer’s methods.

‘I pray the marriage may be a splendid thing for both parties,’ Orpen wrote to Will Rothenstein. Augustus himself had no doubts. At last someone had given him the chance of vindicating himself. Though Ida and he had undergone a more or less conventional wedding, neither of them were conventional people: they simply loved each other.

For their honeymoon, he took his wife to Swanage, and they stayed at Pevril Tower.

*1
On the University College, London, form she crossed out ‘10 Princes Square’ and substituted ‘23 Euston Square’, apartments rented by a Charles Smith.

*2
Hence E. X. Kapp’s masterly clerihew:

When Augustus John

Really does slap it on,

His price is within 4d.

Of Orpen’s.

*3
Albert Rothenstein changed his named to Rutherston during the First World War, and is generally now remembered by that name. To avoid unnecessary complication I have called him Rutherston throughout.

*4
‘We have now the news of John’s prize,’ Ida wrote from 12 rue Froideveau to Michel Salaman. ‘He sent a delicious pen and ink sketch of himself with 1st prize £30 stuck in his hat as sole intimation of what had befallen him. We were so awfully glad.’

*5
See Appendix One, ‘Desecration of Saint Paul’s’.

‘For an idea of the Academy they deplored, we can turn to the Catalogue of Harry Furniss’s spoof Academy exhibition of 1887 – Alma-Tadema’s Roman Ladies, Stacy Mark’s gnarled birds, a laborious allegory by Watts, cattle shows, whiskery portraits, a besotted cavalier, and the minutely painted floorboards of Orchardson.’

Bevis Hillier,
The Early Years of the New English Art Club

The New English Art Club, by the time Augustus John officially became a member in 1903, was seventeen years old. It had been founded, after some half-dozen years of discussions, by a number of artists who had worked in the Parisian schools and who wanted an exhibiting society run on the French democratic lines of elective juries as against the appointed privileged committee of Burlington House. During the mid-nineteenth century the Royal Academy had been perfecting its policy of caution. It had been slow to welcome the Pre-Raphaelites until Pre-Raphaelitism became diluted – by which time it welcomed little else. To many of the Academy’s forty immortals, Paris was still a name of dread, to be associated with lubricity, bloodshed and bad colour.

But to the mob of disgruntled outsiders Paris was an Elysium. They found their inspiration not so much in Impressionism as in the ennobling realism of Millet and Corot, in the ‘pleinairism’ of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the Barbizon School. Their movement was formalized in 1886 when the New English Art Club came into being.

For a quarter of a century the club was to act as a
salon des refusés.
The exhibitions were shown at the Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, the ‘Hall of Mystery’. Its original members numbered many hardened sentimentalists. Chief among them at the start was the ‘Newlyn Group’, whose watchword was ‘values’. They were not, in any exaggerated way, revolutionaries. The pictures of Frank Bramley, in the matter of domestic sentiment, could rival those of most academicians; while George Clausen,
Stanhope Forbes and H. H. La Thanghe’s large-scale, open-air paintings of country and fisher folk, which excited much popular acclaim, contained little to vex the Academy of Sir John Millais. It was not long before all these artists drifted off to Burlington House.

This dangerous contact with the open air, this accent on ‘realism’ and concentration upon rustic themes, seem at first sight to have something in common with Augustus’s spontaneous landscapes. These pleinair Victorian painters were
theatrical
realists, and their pictures were carefully staged. Sickert explained the artificial nature of the Newlyn Group when he wrote:

‘Your subject is a real peasant in his own natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the sack, and never a breath of air circulates around that painful rendering in the flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a real peasant. What are the truths you have gained, a handful of tiresome little facts, compared to the truths you have lost? To life and spirit, light and air?’
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Augustus abandoned storytelling altogether. Simply the thing itself was what he saw. His figures seldom touch or focus on each other. They appear as single shapes caught in preparatory gestures, or are arranged as in a ballet performed within the landscape of his imagination.

By the early 1890s control of the NEAC had passed to another group, sometimes called ‘the London Impressionists’, the leading figures of which were Steer and Sickert. They, too, looked to France for their inspiration – not to Millet and Corot, but to Monet, Manet and Degas. London Impressionism had little in common with Monet’s 1874 landscape entitled ‘Une Impression’, from which the name literally derived. It was impressionism relying on line and tonality, and dominated by the influence of Whistler. Whistler himself had ceased to exhibit at the club in 1889, ‘disapproving, perhaps, a society so less than republican in constitution as to have no president’.
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But Sickert was still a faithful disciple and, moreover, a severe critic of Bastien-Lepage. The sentiment and invention of narrative painting were on the way out before impartiality and an insistence upon ‘the thing there’. When D. S. MacColl praised Whistler on the aptness of a bit of wall-skirting in a portrait, he retorted severely: ‘But it’s
there.
’
And Sickert, too, shared this principle. ‘Supposing’, he explained, ‘that you paint a woman carrying a pail of water through the door, and drops are spilt upon the planks. There is a natural necessary
rhythm about the pattern they make much better than anything you could invent.’

Hampered by difficulties over galleries, and weakened by their aesthetic differences, the New English failed to make an early impact. But then, in 1890, the Scottish painter D. S. MacColl became Art Critic of the
Spectator,
and shortly afterwards the Irish novelist George Moore was appointed to a similar post on the
Speaker.
Both writers gave a leading place to the NEAC shows.

Moore, who had studied as a painter in Paris, re-emphasized the French influence of the NEAC over the lingering Nazarene culture in Burlington House. He had been educated, he liked to point out, not round the lawns and cloisters of Oxford or Cambridge but at the marble tables of the Nouvelles Athènes, a café on the Place Pigalle, sitting through the morning idleness and long summer evenings until completely ‘aestheticized’ by two o’clock the following morning. D. S. MacColl revived the antagonism between the club and the Academy, provoking anger among academic reactionaries. Sir Frederic Leighton predicted that the club would soon be disbanded. Sir William Richmond was heard to say of John Singer Sargent: ‘I should like to set him copying Holbeins for a year.’ The climax came in 1893 over Degas’s inaccurately named picture ‘L’Absinthe’. During one of the fiercest aesthetic battles in the history of modern art, MacColl, Degas and the whole of the NEAC were abused ‘from Budapest to Aberdeen’. This controversy had the result of placing the New English Art Club at the forefront of non-academic painting – even Aubrey Beardsley joined it. ‘Degradation to suit a decadent civilization,’ thundered the
Westminster Gazette.
‘No longer does nobility of idea dictate subjects to authors; sex is over-emphasized; the peak of abomination has been reached by the
Yellow Book…
All this relates to the evil at work as expressed by the New English Art Club.’

By the turn of the century, when Augustus began to exhibit, the club was about to enter a new phase in its history. Alphonse Legros had disliked the aims of the NEAC, but Brown was an original member, a close associate of Sickert’s, and the man who had drafted the club’s rules. Tonks, too, became a member in 1895 and was elected to the jury, on which he represented the revolutionary element in many an argument with Roger Fry – roles that were later dramatically to be reversed. It was therefore not surprising that the Slade should emerge as the chief nursery of young talent, and that people should look to Augustus, as the spoilt child of this crèche, to lead the way.

He and Gwen and other ex-students were soon exhibiting there. ‘Gwen has had a portrait hung in the NEAC,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman from Swanage. ‘I don’t know yet whether they have hung mine… Orpen
has sent also and Everett so that there should be a healthy inoculation of new and Celtic blood into the Aged New English at last. The jurors have rejected both Mr Nettleship and Ida’s works. I can’t see why the former should wish to seek laurels in this direction… I have returned now… The New English has opened its doors on the flabber-gasted.’
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