Augustus John (78 page)

He was being badgered by their old friend Ursula Tyrwhitt to make sure Gwen was all right. Gwen had written to Ursula describing the bombing raids on Paris and the cattle trucks at the Gare Montparnasse ‘crammed with frightened people’. But though she became a little frightened herself by what she was to read in the newspapers, especially by the massacre at Ypres, she felt ‘more and more disinclined to go’.
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The Germans of course were ‘brutes and vandals’ and it would be ‘dreadful’ if they won; yet England had become ‘quite a foreign country to me’. In a sense she had no country outside the dark first-floor room she now inhabited at 6 rue de l’Ouest and the flat she had rented on the top storey of an old house near the bois de Meudon, in the south-west suburbs of Paris.

In December 1914 Gus came striding up the rue Terre-Neuve in Meudon, ‘tall and broad-shouldered’, Gwen’s biographer Susan Chitty writes, ‘wearing a loose tweed suit with a brightly coloured bandanna round his neck’.
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After having registered as an alien, Gwen told him, she was doing work as an interpreter for English officers; and Gus approved. ‘The soldiers must be glad of your help as an interpreter. I suppose even
the officers don’t know a word of French.’ He suggested she might try Red Cross work – certainly any sustained painting seemed ‘impossible’ for both of them during the war. He also explained why he could not join a fighting regiment (his ‘establishment would go bust if I did’); and Gwen understood. ‘Will the world be very different afterwards?’ Gus was brimful of confidence. ‘It might do people a world of good,’
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he asserted. In any event he was certain Britain would benefit. For Gwen, who had feared Britain would be invaded, there was comfort in the feeling that the English would ‘come up to the mark’.

Gus’s invitation to England remained open; and Gwen remained in France. ‘Ici tout va bien, surtout la petite fille,’ he wrote to her from Alderney.
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‘…The children obstinately keep up the Xmas traditions. They are all flourishing & Dorelia too… Don’t let yourself get frozen dearest. Take exercises. Love from Gus.’
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Dorelia sent over some money and clothes; Gus sent Sanatogen tonic wine and copies of A. R. Orage’s
New Age.
He could tell Ursula Tyrwhitt, and also his father, that he had done what was possible; and old Edwin John could pass the news on to Winifred and Thornton.

Winifred had made her final visit to Europe shortly before Ida’s death. In January 1915 she married – and Thornton, perhaps the loneliest of all these Johns, returned to England. In a letter to Gwen, Winifred had described Thornton as a ‘thought reader’.
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But though he could trespass into her secret thoughts he never seemed to know what other people were thinking and he was, she told Gus, ‘very unlucky in his partners’.
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His twelve years in North America had been disappointing. He worked hard at mining gold in Montana, but found only hostility among the farmers, who disliked the holes he dug in their land and threatened him with writs. Then he got a job ploughing with three horses in British Columbia, but had fallen ill. After that he built a boat which he sailed on Lake Kinbasket, planning to make good wages washing the gravel for gold. He loved his boat and the work suited him, but there was only gravel. By now he had run out of partners and eventually spent his solitary days on his boat, fishing. He was fishing near Lasquet Island when war broke out. He had been so long alone, and the world had changed so much, he was astonished by the news when he went to buy provisions in Vancouver. He applied to join the Canadian Army – nearly all the Canadian troops, he believed, were English-born – but was rejected on account of his broken foot.

Winifred was now a United States citizen, settled in California and pregnant with her first child, a daughter who was to be born in November 1915. She had begun a new life, but there seemed no more life for Thornton in North America – he hated peddling his fish for money. So he came back, paying a duty call on his father in Tenby, walking in the
woods with Gwen at Meudon, seeing Gus at Alderney and in London. ‘The little girl Poppet and I are good friends and I hauled her about the studio on a mat,’
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he wrote to Gwen. This was the one of the few gleams of happiness in his letters. He was to spend part of the war in a munitions factory at Woolwich Arsenal. Working along with conscientious objectors and rejects from the armed services was ‘an abomination, but there is nothing to do but hold on grimly,’ he told Gwen. ‘I try to do as much as I can with as little thought of reward as possible… I know I am not liked.’
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Eventually he found work as a shipwright at Gravesend, and there at last he was in the open air. His boat lay afloat in a basin near by and he managed to work on it nearly every day.

‘The war probably makes France impossible for holidays,’
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Augustus had written to Dorelia, whom he advised to plan as if for a siege. After his visit to Gwen he did not return to France for more than three years. ‘I feel the nostalgie du Midi now that there’s no chance of going there,’ he told Ottoline. ‘…I commence the New Year rather ill-temperedly.’
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There was no easy escape from these dark days of civilian incarceration, and he began to develop symptoms around the head and legs that ‘put me quite out of action’.
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Ireland now took the place of France. He made several visits to Dublin, to Galway and Connemara. ‘John was a good friend of Ireland,’ Christine Longford remembered. ‘We bobbed our hair because Augustus John girls had short hair; and anyone who had red hair, like the picture of Iris Tree in Dublin, was lucky… He knew Galway well, “the shawled women murmuring together on the quays, with the white complex of the Claddagh glimmering across the harbour”.’
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The men were going off ‘to fight England’s battles’, and there was a great wailing on the platforms as their women saw them off. They were consoled by government grants, and ‘the consequence is an unusually heavy traffic in stout,’ Augustus told Dorelia when inviting her over, adding that she ‘would hate it here’. In her absence he was stalked by ‘my double’ who went everywhere spreading legendary rumours. It became all the more important to get himself settled. ‘I have found a house here,’ he wrote to Dorelia from Galway City,
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‘with fine big rooms and windows which I’m taking – only £30 a year… I had a bad attack of blues here, doing nothing, but the prospect of soon getting to work bucks me up.’ This house was in Tuam Street and owned by Bishop O’Dea, who leased it to John for three years on the understanding that no painting from the nude was to be enjoyed on the premises. John’s plan was to execute a big dramatization of Galway bringing in everything characteristic of the place. He explained this scheme to Dorelia:

‘I’m thinking out a vast picture synthesizing all that’s fine and characteristic
in Galway City – a grand marshalling of the elements. It will have to be enormous to contain troops of women and children, groups of fishermen, docks, wharves, the church, mills, constables, donkeys, widows, men from Aran, hookers
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etc., perhaps with a night sky and all illuminated in the light of a dream. This will be worth while – worth the delay and the misery that went before.’
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He went out into the streets, staring, sketching: and was at once identified as a spy. Bathing – ‘the best tonic in the world’ – was reckoned to be a misdemeanour in wartime; and sketching in the harbour a treason – ‘so that is a drawback and a big one’. In a letter to Ottoline Morrell he complained: ‘There are wonderful people and it is beautiful about the harbour but if one starts sketching one is at once shot by a policeman… It would be worth while passing 6 months here given the right conditions.’

But the right conditions were elusive. Without disobeying the letter of Bishop O’Dea’s injunction, ‘I had two girls in here yesterday,’ he admitted to Dorelia, ‘but they didn’t give the same impression as when seen in the street. I could do with some underclothing.’ He was anxious not to return to Alderney ‘till I’ve got something good to take away’. Every day he would go out and look, then hurry back to Tuam Street and do drawings or pen-and-wash sketches. ‘I’ve observed the people here enough,’ he eventually wrote to Dorelia. ‘Their drapery is often very pleasing – one generally sees one good thing a day at least – but the population is greatly spoilt now – 20 years ago it must have been astonishing… Painting from nature
and
from imagination spells defeat I see clearly.’

Imagination meant memory. His imagination was kindled instantly: then the good moment went. He had to catch it before it began to fade, rather than recollect it in tranquillity. Yet now there seemed no alternative to a retrospective technique – what he called ‘mental observation’.
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He had found himself painting portraits of the Ladies Ottoline Morrell and Howard de Walden while they were ‘safely out of sight’. But this was not why he had come to Galway. After vacillating for weeks between the railway station and the telegraph office, he left. ‘It was in the end’, he explained to Bernard Shaw, ‘less will-power than panic that got me away.’
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He had been at Galway two months. After his return to Alderney he began to work feverishly at a large cartoon, covering four hundred square feet in a single week. Once again he was racing against time. He wanted to bring all those one-good-things-a-day together in a composite arrangement of the ideal Galway: a visionary city locked deep in his imagination.

War gives some painters an opportunity to record and interpret the extremities of human behaviour. Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts and Stanley Spencer were among the artists who grasped this opportunity. Others, such as McEvoy, succumbed to fashionable portraiture. John, like William Nicholson, also painted commissioned portraits to earn money; but they were erratically fashionable. By 1914, in a hit-or-miss fashion, he was still painting in his best vein. ‘Of course painters as good as John will always sell,’ Sickert assured Nan Hudson, ‘war or no war.’ But the war put pressures on him. ‘I’m afraid we are in for thin times over here,’ he explained to Quinn. ‘No one will want luxuries like pictures for awhile.’
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Nevertheless he continued painting those large decorative groups, such as ‘Galway’, for which, he felt, his talent was best suited: also, for a year or two, those bold and glowing landscapes with figures, often on small wooden panels, sometimes with children, which were inspired by private affections, and which show his talent at its most direct and engaged. In the past he had sold such work better than any of his contemporaries, but after 1914 this was no longer possible. Partly for financial reasons, but also because he did not want his work to be wholly irrelevant to the contemporary business of this war, he began to paint a different sort of picture. ‘I am called upon to provide various things in aid of war funds or charities connected with the war,’ he told Quinn.
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Among his sitters were several staff officers and, in 1916, the bellicose Admiral Lord Fisher who brought in tow the Nelsonically named Duchess of Hamilton
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(‘You won’t find as fine a figure of a woman, and a Duchess at that, at every street corner’), to whom John transferred part of his attentions, while Fisher explained how to ‘end the war in a week’.
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When this portrait was shown at the NEAC, Albert Rutherston noted that it was ‘careless and sketchy’,
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and
The Times
critic observed that John had really painted a zoo picture of Fisher as a ‘Sea-Lion… hungering for his prey’.
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Yet it has lasted better than the formal portrait by Herbert von Herkomer and the Epstein bust. John’s depiction of Fisher’s face ‘shows it looking wryly over the viewer’s left shoulder,’ wrote Jan Morris,
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‘its eyebrows raised in irony, its round eyes alert, its mouth mocking, cynical and affectionate, all at the same time. It is a quirky and highly intelligent face.’

But on the whole these public portraits of war celebrities are not satisfactory, perhaps because John could not match his public sentiments to private feelings. In his correspondence he is often approving of these statesmen and soldiers; but when he actually came face to face with them he felt unaccountably bored. He did not think it proper to caricature them as he had done the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. Some satire, in a muted form, does come through: but seldom convincingly.

Perhaps the most biographically interesting of these war pictures was that of Lloyd George, who had ‘introduced himself to me’ at the Park Hotel in Cardiff in the early summer of 1914. Towards the end of 1915, having recently been appointed Minister of Munitions, he agreed that John should paint him. A suitable canvas had been bought by Lieutenant-General Sir James Murray, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in aid of Red Cross funds, the arrangement being that John would paint whomever Murray designated. Like a marriage broker, Murray settled the agreement between them, then discreetly retired, confident that the two Welshmen would hit it off like fireworks. In fact they seem to have had just the wrong things in common and did not take to each other. The poetry of their natures was rooted in Wales: England had magnetized their ambitions. But their ambitions were different. Happy as a child, pampered by his family, Lloyd George was greedy for the world’s attentions. John in his childhood had felt deprived of love, and now grasped at it while seeking to evoke a romantic world set in those places of natural beauty politicians call the wilderness. ‘I feel I have no contact,’ Lloyd George told his mistress Frances Stevenson. John too had no contact by the end: but he had been reaching for other things.

In public, John admired Lloyd George. He was ‘doing good work over Munitions’ and would surely have made a better business than Asquith, then the Prime Minister, of leading the country to victory. ‘One feels that what really is wanted is a sort of Cromwell to take charge,’ he told Quinn, ‘having turned out our Parliamentarians into the street first.’
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The Welsh wizard who was to play the part of Cromwell had agreed ‘to sit for half an hour in the mornings’ but, John complained, was ‘difficult to get hold of’.
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The portrait lurched forward in short bursts during December, January and February. On 16 February 1916 John wrote to Quinn: ‘I have finished my portrait of Lloyd George. He was a rotten sitter – as you say a “hot-arse who can’t sit still and be patient”.’ It was a restlessness that consumed them both. Lloyd George may not have appreciated being placed, in order of priority, behind the actress Réjane whom John was then also painting, and indiscriminately shoulder to shoulder with ‘some soldiers’. According to Frances Stevenson, ‘the sittings were not very gay ones.’
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Lloyd George was ‘in a grim mood’, suffering, in addition to toothache, from the latest Serbian crisis. Nevertheless, this cannot wholly account for the ‘hard, determined, almost cruel face,’ Frances Stevenson noted angrily in her diary, ‘with nothing of the tenderness & charm of the D[avid] of everyday life’.
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‘Do you notice what John says about pictures which he does not like?’ Lloyd George had asked her. ‘Very pleasant!’ He was ‘upset’, she realized, ‘for he likes to look nice in his portraits!’ Another worry was Frances herself. Though professing to find
John ‘terrifying’, she acknowledged him to be ‘an uncommon person… extraordinarily conceited… nevertheless… very fascinating’. Lloyd George persuaded her not to have her own portrait painted by John and, to her disappointment, prohibited her from going to his parties. Confronted by John’s ‘unpleasant’ portrait he reverted to nursery tactics, gathering his family round him (much to John’s irritation) in a chorus of abuse over the object, and drawing from ‘Pussy’ Stevenson her most maternal protectiveness. To account for the cunning and querulous expression, he suggested calling the picture ‘Salonika’. Then he affected to forget about it.
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But John remembered. Announcing his first portrait to have been ‘unfinished’, he caught up with Lloyd George nearly four years later in Deauville,
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drew out his brushes and began a second canvas. Under his fierce gaze Lloyd George grew restless again, hurried back to London and, wisely, did not honour his promise to continue the sittings at Downing Street. For John this was a foretaste of how his career as a professional portrait painter would proceed.