Augustus John (31 page)

Intermittently this glow of moral optimism would fade and she envied Gwen John her painting, Dorelia her freedom. Both Ida and Gus would have preferred to be in France with Gwen and Dorelia, whatever the emotional complications. ‘It’s all very well talking about Toulouse,’ Gus reprimanded Gwen that autumn. ‘Naturally I prefer Toulouse to Didcot myself. But there’s the question d’enfants.’
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How he survived the Nettleship family Christmas was a wonder. ‘We are very silly and Gussy has many disdainful smiles,’ Ida wrote to Gwen. ‘…[He] is drawing animals & people for Davie to recognise.’
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There were plenty of animals and people for David and Caspar to recognize at Matching Green: their lunatic of a dog, now called Jack and ‘too silly for words’; and Gwen’s family of ten cats (some of the kittens Augustus drowned in a kettle); and six breeding canaries. ‘Domesticities amongst the birds are going on all around me,’ Ida wrote to Margaret Sampson. Then there was Maggie, the cook; and Lucy Green who came in ‘shining with soap’ to help with the housework; and various visitors
including Esther Cerutti, who arrived from London in all her finery and played the piano.

Almost the only person whom the children did not see so much was the ‘father of the family’ who was ‘generally in London’,
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Ida explained to Winifred. Augustus loved Matching Green – ‘I see things so beautiful sometimes,’ he confessed to Sampson, ‘I wonder my poor eyes don’t drop out.’
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But you could have too much of a good thing. Besides, he had to work at the new art school and make some money for them all. In some ways he was like an extra child for Ida, or an adolescent, who could seldom tell her when he was coming back for supper because he did not know himself.

Ida would have liked to be as free and easy herself. ‘I get very little time for contemplation now-a-days – and if I do get half-an-hour I am certain to tear my dress and have to mend it, or spill a box of pins, or something.’ She had given up painting altogether. ‘For the first time in my life Matching Green bores me – to extinction almost,’ she told the Rani who came down from Liverpool to stay with her. ‘I wish it did quite. It would be quite a pleasant way of dying – to be bored away into nothing.’ She longed for a more adventurous life, and more adult companionship. ‘I am “comblé de travail’”, she wrote to Dorelia. ‘I am usually so tired that if I sit down I doze… My thoughts are often with you.’
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When she compared their lives in her imagination, ‘I long to come over,’ she told Gwen and Dorelia in the spring of 1904. ‘…Your life is romantic, mine a pigstye with the stye overhead.’
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She was getting too little of Gus’s company and far too much of his children’s. ‘I am beginning to wonder if my head will stand much more of the babies’ society.’

From the nursery she began escaping into the kitchen. Though Alice, their maid at Fitzroy Street, had left, their young cook Maggie, now very ‘fat and attractive’ and nicknamed ‘Minger’, had come with them to Elm House. As the weeks went by, Ida did more cooking and Maggie more looking after the boys. ‘I have begun to learn to cook,’ she announced triumphantly (15 February 1904), ‘and can make several puddings and most delicious pastry.’ Cooking was so much quieter than children, so much – despite what everyone said – more creative. ‘I have been cooking and cooking and cooking – and have been so successful. I want to try and make Maggie nurse, and be cook and odd woman [myself]… And cooking is so charming… However, it is not settled yet.’ By the spring it was settled: ‘Maggie is Nurse entirely now – and I am Cook General. It is so much less wearing.’

She also took up gardening, became a ‘scientific laundress’, grew ‘mad on polishing furniture’, involved herself in the manufacture of loud check coats. Guilt often stabbed at her: she was a poor mother, a reluctant
‘housewife’, despite being better off than many others. Besides Maggie, she was soon regularly employing Lucy Green, ‘a very large and conscientious child of 14’ to act as housemaid. Yet still she seemed to suffer from overwork. ‘Matching Green is quite drunk to-day,’ she wrote to Alice at Easter. ‘…Soon the woman who lives on our other side will be helping herself home by our garden railings. It is remarkable the way they all make for the pub. Overwork. I know the necessity. I go to domestic novels – quite as unwholesome in another way. For my part I could not be really at leisure and able to follow my own desires with less than 4 servants. So what can these poor people do without one? And yet how gorgeous life is.’

Then again this glow would darken and apathy would sweep over her. ‘I should like to have gone to Michel [Salaman]’s marriage feast but they will do well enough without me, and nothing matters.’

But one person still mattered to her: Gus. All winter he had been subject to dark moods, and when spring came these moods grew blacker and more frequent. Her inability to pull him out of these depressions was a source of self-reproach. She lost confidence – perhaps she was the wrong person; perhaps only Dorelia could help him – help both of them. Ida’s exhaustion was added to Gus’s listlessness, and together they seemed like two ships becalmed, waiting. ‘Dorelia and Gwen, when are you coming back?’ Ida asked; and Gus added his appeal to the same letter: ‘I wish you two would come back & be painted – with your faces towards Spain if you like.’
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*

The Chelsea Art School absorbed much of Augustus’s energy during its first two terms. For his own work he used a studio above the school, and would often spend a full week, or even a fortnight, in town. ‘London is very beautiful,’ he wrote to Dorelia, ‘it becomes more like home every day.’

Orpen’s chief contribution to the school was a series of lectures on anatomy. All pupils had to draw from the model, then ‘skin him’ and draw the muscles employed in his posture.

As at Liverpool, Augustus stressed the value of observation. He discouraged the use of red chalk because it tended to make a bad drawing look pretty. Every line should carry meaning, nothing be left vague. Students were taught to keep their drawings broad and simple, avoiding too much detail, to use a hard piece of charcoal, to draw with the point and to perfect ‘the delicate line’.

Perhaps because it diverted his mind from personal worries, Augustus enjoyed his teaching. The division of his life between town and country
seemed to suit him: he never quite had time to grow tired of either. In London he was meeting many people – Gordon Craig, Arthur Symons, Charles Ricketts, Lady Gregory.
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In March he dined at the house of art collector and critic Hugh Lane, and Lady Gregory noted: ‘We went upstairs after dinner to look at the Titian – Philip II, and I speaking to John for the first time said “How can the wonderful brilliancy of that colour keep its freshness so long?” And John said “Ah-h-h”.’

From remarkable exchanges such as this, he would return with relief to the freshness of Essex. ‘It has been wondrous fine in the country these last few days – a white frost over everything, our humble garden transformed; every leaf and twig rimed with crystal; in the moonlight things sparkled subtly and any old outhouse became the repository of unguessable secrets,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘To-day all changed into the dreariness of mud – the green a morass – the sky all gone, and grey expressionless vapour instead… I am bent on etching now and mark me Will I will have a new set out before it is time to think of potato planting. This bald little house is becoming trim and homely and you will not find it inhospitable when you seek its shelter.’

Armchairs and green-baize tables, a light-oak bureau and a cottage piano had made their appearance there. Augustus’s pipes and slippers littered the rooms; breeding cages for the canaries were raised upon the walls, each suspended by a single nail – ‘they are charming and make an awful mess’, the Rani wrote when she came to stay. The little brown bookshelves in the chimney corners were filled with many of the books he was reading in tandem with Wyndham Lewis: books by Baudelaire, Verlaine and Huysmans; also Stendhal, Turgenev and Borrow, Darwin, Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant, as well as elaborate works on Italian painters, cookbooks, domestic novels and volumes about Wales. The white-papered walls of the drawing-room were covered with rows of Goya and Rembrandt etchings ‘and part of a Raphael cartoon in one corner’. But his own work was subject to fitful delays. ‘Rumbling home in a bus in a state of blank misery I found myself opposite a perfect queen among women, a Beatrice, a Laura, a Blessed Virgin!’ he exclaimed to Will Rothenstein that winter. ‘The sight of her loveliness, the depth of her astonished eyes, her movements of a captured nymph dispelled the turgid clouds from my mind, leaving an exquisite calm which became by the time I got to bed a contradiction of almost religious exaltation. Would I could repay my debt to the enchantress! Would that I too were a wizard!’

But he could summon up no wizardry to control his own emotions. Visual experiences affected him as a switch controls an electric light. Without these, he was nothing. Clouds of ‘blank misery’ rushed in to fill the vacuum. They came and went again, forming and dissolving according
to no obvious laws, but massing more densely, taking longer to evaporate. For Dorelia, like a sun beyond the horizon, was out of sight: and he was miserable without her. ‘What can have taken place in Relia’s [Dorelia’s] head’, he asked Gwen, ‘that she never writes to me?’
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He had hoped she would return for a belated house-warming party at Matching Green. ‘Of course Dorelia you are coming here,’ Ida wrote. ‘Gus says you are well worth your keep only as a model – and I can give you plenty to do too. But what would your family say? Gwen would love this place.’ Augustus also loved this apple-and-pear country. ‘The village seems to me curiously beautiful in a humble way,’ he wrote to the two girls, ‘ – the Green is now full of ponds. At night the little lighted tenements are reflected in the water in a very grave and secret way.’
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He longed to finish his portrait of Dorelia. ‘Your fat excites me enormously and I am dying to inspect it,’ he wrote to her.

‘I am itching to resume that glorious counterfeit of you which has already cost me too many sighs. I have a feeling that the solitude of Matching Green will do much towards its perfection. The thought of this picture came upon me with an inward fluttering and I am fond to believe that the problem will now find its final solution in your newly acquired tissue. When are you two going to turn your backs on Pyrenean vistas? How is it you are not going to assist at the warming and consecration of Elm House? I imagine new papers in the ladies smoking room with ribbons and roses on it and new chintz on the chairs and sofa again with roses and ribbons. Ida has commissioned me to paint a silk panel for the piano, and the front door is already a pure and candid white behind which no hypocrisy can harbour.’

He asked to be told of their exploits, but all he received was a package of out-of-date Christmas presents – bonbons and toys for the children, and some cakes for him and Ida. ‘Gwen is still in Toulouse I believe,’ Ida told Alice (January 1904), ‘painting hard – and anxious as soon as her 5 pictures are finished, to go to Paris.’ ‘They have a dog who is naughty
always,
Gwen says,’ she wrote to Winifred the same month. And that, it seems, was all they knew.

Even before the end of the year Augustus had been growing impatient at their prolonged absence. ‘The spring days stir my bowels subtly,’ he had confided to Sampson. ‘…My palate begins to water to lusty appetites.’
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The weeks went by; he heard almost nothing, and what news did trickle through tantalized him. ‘It was a bloody long time before I heard from you,’ he burst out in a letter to Dorelia from the Chelsea Art School.

‘Gwendolina says that you get prettier and prettier… When are you coming back again? You are tired of running about those foreign places I know… I have stayed up here now for many days, laudably attempting to get things done, but these models, drat them, don’t give a man a chance with all this employment. However I am gettting into a weedy condition. My studio is grimey, my bed is unmade, my hair uncombed, my nails unpared, my teeth uncleaned, my boots unblacked, my socks unfresh, my collar unchanged, my hose undarned, my tie unsafety pinned (I wish you’d send me some safety pins, it’s not too much to ask) – lastly, my purse unlined.’

It was true that Gwen and Dorelia were by now growing tired of Toulouse. Their room was bare; they bathed, when it was not too frigid, in the river; and subsisted mainly on a diet of old bread, new cheese and middle-aged figs – though there were also evenings over a bottle of wine and a bowl of soup. Gwen, Dorelia observed, was becoming very strict and demanding. She disapproved of the theatre and spoke with disgust of the ‘vulgar red lips’ of a girl they used as a model. Yet she was not unattractive to men, and never careless of her appearance – ‘in fact’, Dorelia noted, ‘rather vain’.
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To maintain themselves the two girls made portrait sketches in the cafés for three francs each. The rest of the time Gwen worked at her five paintings, at least four of which were portraits of Dorelia.
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‘I look forward to a little time in which I can try to express in some way my thoughts,’ she wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘I am hurrying so because we are so tired of Toulouse – we do not want to stay a day longer than necessary – I do nothing but paint – but you know how slowly that gets on – a week is nothing.’

‘Is Dorelia much admired… She must look gorgeous,’
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Ida had written to Gwen. Gwen’s portraits of Dorelia were gorgeous and show someone admired and loved. She was working with layers of paint over a fast-drying base of burnt umber, the technique she had apparently picked up from Ambrose McEvoy. These pictures are less oblique than anything she was to paint over the next thirty-five years in France. Together with her two self-portraits (the first an extraordinarily confident bravura work akin to the portraiture of Augustus, who owned it all his life; the second, which Augustus had described as a ‘masterpiece’ and which resembles an English governess, owned by Frederick Brown of the Slade), they represent the crown of Gwen John’s ‘English’ period.