Augustus John (24 page)

When he left them to return to the university and to Ida, he would try to reason out why he felt these tremors of fascination and what the true significance of it might be. They seemed to have much in common with him; they were natural exhibitionists, yet deeply secretive; they were quick-witted, courteous, yet temperamental and with a dark suspicion of strangers; they were essentially honest, almost naïve, yet prevaricating; they loved children, yet without sentimentality. All this he knew, and yet it still left unexplained that painful hammering of his heart whenever he approached their camps. His excitement came from desires damped down in childhood now magically rekindled. In the sun and wind, like the trees and fields around them, these travellers seemed truly alive. There was nothing confined, nothing claustrophobic here: they did what they wanted, went where they wished – over the next hill, far away – and they were answerable to nobody.

He was exhilarated.

*

At 4 St James’s Road life had begun to follow a steady pattern. ‘We have callers pretty often,’ Ida informed Alice Rothenstein, ‘University men and their wives. Our room is always in disorder when they come as Gus is generally painting – but they survive it.’ Generally he was painting Ida, but she also found time to continue with her painting and ‘have an old man model, who goes to lectures on Dante, and takes part in play-readings. He sits like a rock, occasionally wiping his old eyes when they get moist.’

Augustus’s father came to see them, and so did Ida’s mother. The Nettleships had not come round to Ida’s marriage. Very little was said, but Mrs Nettleship’s work-girls felt her disapproval and whispered among themselves that it was ‘a shame’, that Augustus was ‘not half good enough’ for Ida and had taken her to live in a slum. Ida’s sister Ursula was still disappointed that there had been no smart wedding; but her other sister Ethel
33
bravely came to stay for a week and observed Augustus working hard. It was an uneventful time, but not unhappy. ‘I am afraid I haven’t started a baby yet,’ Ida apologized to Alice. ‘I want one.’

The first variations in this routine came that summer. Ida ‘looks suspiciously pregnant’, Augustus suddenly remarked to Will Rothenstein. The doctor soon confirmed her pregnancy, but in these early months there was a rumour of complications and, so this doctor warned her, the risk of a miscarriage. For this reason she passed the summer months quietly, first at Wigmore Street, then with Edwin and Winifred John in Tenby.

Liberated from domesticity on doctor’s orders, Augustus felt he had been let out from a narrow place. He could go where he wanted, be what he liked. One morning he set out intending to go for a short walk ‘but instead went to Bruges and stood amazed before the works of Van Eyck and Memling’, he explained to Will Rothenstein. ‘The Belgians are as shoddy as they were formerly magnificent. Maeterlinck needs all his second sight.’

His truancy over, he joined Ida in Tenby ‘feeling rather metagrabolized’, and carried her off for a month’s rest-and-painting to New Quay. ‘Now the child has quickened, I suppose there is very small fear of a miscarriage,’ Ida reassured her mother that September. ‘…I have been very well here – no indigestion and very regular bowels. The baby moves from time to time – and I am growing very big and hard.’ Every morning Augustus would go bathing and, during the afternoons ‘have models in a disused school room’. Ida sat at home, letting out her skirts and creating new clothes for the baby, and these she would take up to the schoolroom at tea time, when the painting had to stop.

In the last week of September they returned to Liverpool – but not to St James’s Road, since Ida could no longer manage the stairs there. For two weeks they put up with John and Margaret Sampson – ‘delightful people’, Ida promised her mother – at 146 Chatham Street, a semi-slum. Then they moved off to rather grander accommodation, 66 Canning Street, a three-storeyed, red-brick house, complete with art nouveau metalwork on the doors and railings, and a black projecting portico with Doric cornices.

So much, this autumn, augured well for Augustus. Ida’s pregnancy inflamed him with excitement – a sense of power, tenderness, and some curious feeling of fulfilment, almost as if it were he who was being born again. They had been fortunate in finding Canning Street, and Augustus himself had at last discovered a good studio
34
and was making it habitable.

The university, too, had ‘raised my dole by a smug £200 and a day less in the week than last term’.
35
This increase reflected the excellent work he was doing at the Art Sheds. His predecessor, Herbert Jackson, had been an uninspiring teacher. He would slump down by a student’s drawing board, sketch an ear or a foot, examine it, then remark: ‘It’s not much good, I suppose, but it’ll do.’ Augustus’s methods marked a great improvement. ‘Alas, how many brilliant drawings have I done on the boards of my pupils!’ he commented. It was as though he was learning from his own instruction. Above all he stressed the importance of observation. ‘When you draw,’ he told his class, ‘don’t look at the model for one second and five minutes at your drawing, but five minutes at the model and one second at your drawing.’ He was immensely pleased when his pupils did well, and he was responsible for several gifted young artists later leaving the School of Art and throwing in their lot with the Sandon Studios Society.
36

Despite the incursion which teaching made into his time, his own work was also going well. Liverpool stimulated him, made him more keenly responsive to the visible world. ‘For my part a fine morning fills me with unspeakable joy,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein, ‘ – a tender sky tethers me to childhood, a joyous countenance is an obstacle on the road to old age.’

His letters during this first year at Liverpool are congested with happiness. ‘It has seemed to me of late I’ve been passing through a transition stage,’ he confided to Rothenstein (4 May 1901),

‘taking my leave lingeringly and spasmodically, and with many runs backward, of old traditions… Something stirs within me which makes me think so long and passionate company with so many loves as I have kept has not left me barren. Hitherto I have been Art’s most devoted concubine,
but now at length the seed takes root. I
am,
O Will, about to become a
mother –
the question of paternity must be left to the future. I suspect at least 4 old masters.’

Between the winter exhibitions of 1900 and 1902, greatly to Brown’s disappointment, Augustus sent in nothing to the New English. Instead he relied on the Carfax Gallery and in particular on Rothenstein. To him Augustus would dispatch what he called his ‘parcels of fancies’ and ‘pastels of sluts’ – beggar girls, ballet girls and all manner of remarkable-looking models he had collided with in the streets of Liverpool. His purpose was to record as directly as possible the natural beauty he saw around him, without any message or moral, any attitude or intervening glaze of intellectuality. Yet it is ‘a strange, troubled feeling for beauty’ these pictures reveal, with ‘undefined hungers and raptures hinted at’, Laurence Binyon was to write.
37

With these pastels Rothenstein was most successful, especially in selling them to other artists – Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, Brown and Tonks. ‘Such power, combined with a marvellous subtlety, such drawing, astonished me more than ever,’ Rothenstein recorded; ‘no one living had his range of sensuous, lofty and grotesque imagination.’ But the contrast he regularly showed between crabbed age and youth struck the Royal Academician landscape artist Sir George Clausen as ‘deplorable’. His pastels were not pornographic – they were not even pretty (in the manner of Russell Flint’s watercolours). ‘His work antagonised people; it was deemed
deliberately
ugly,’ Rothenstein recorded. ‘Were people altogether blind to beauty?’
38
he wondered, looking at these lyrical nudes. Augustus’s gratitude, both to Rothenstein and to his models, swelled to its most rhapsodic vein:

‘Beloved Will,

You know nothing delights my soul more than your laudation! you have made me tickle and thrill, and gulp tears to eye and water to lip. And have my poor girls served me so well! Blessing on you Maggie and Ellen Jones!
39
Daughters of Cardigan I thank ye! And you Queen of the Brook whose lewd leer captured me in my dreams, may your lusty honest blood be never denied the embrace it tingles for!

…I pant to do a superb decoration.’

The most important development in Augustus’s art during this Liverpool period was his work as an etcher. He had taken up etching at the suggestion of his friend Benjamin Evans, one of his first plates being a portrait of Evans.
40
He grew immensely enthusiastic over this new
medium. ‘I have been etching a good deal,’ he told Will Rothenstein. It was Rembrandt’s example
41
that Evans had extolled and that now fired off this activity. Like Rembrandt, Augustus’s first experiments included a number of portrait studies of himself in various poses and costumes – fur caps and wide-brimmed hats, bare-headed and in a black gown. But there were also several portraits of Ida, very plump and maternal, in a fur-tipped cape or with a special necklace, or simply as ‘a brown study’: and the macabre or eccentric figures of drapers, chandlers, old haberdashers, young serving-maids, ragamuffin children and all the cosmopolitan population of Liverpool whom he saw on the wasteground of Cabbage Hall, or wandering through the university, or at the working-men’s dining-rooms and doss houses along Scotland Road – gypsies and mulattos, the frock-coated bourgeois, the black women, muffin men, charwomen and old people with fierce hopeless expressions.

Augustus had made so close a study of Rembrandt’s method, and assimilated it to such an extent, that many of his etchings look like imitations. Yet however derivative his technique, these etchings do reveal a great deal about his work. In a perceptive introduction to the Catalogue of Augustus’s etchings, Campbell Dodgson wrote:

‘There are certain features in his work which make it unlike that of his contemporaries. His choice of figure subjects in preference to the landscape or architectural motives which are so much in vogue to-day is one of them. His consistency in restricting the size of his plates to small, or even tiny, dimensions is another. Both are significant traits which link his work to the great tradition of the painter-etchers of four centuries… But a fault common to many of them is a fault that runs through Mr John’s paintings and drawings as well, lack of concentration and acquiescence in an apparent finish, a facile substitute for true perfection. Or if we consider the subjects themselves, rather than the manner in which he treats them, is there not something unsatisfying, superficial, betraying lack of “fundamental brainwork” in most of the compositions containing two or more figures? There is no apparent motive for bringing them together, and Mr John, with all his intense interest in single types, and his power, unequalled among etchers of to-day, of expressing individual character, lacks the imaginative, constructive, or dramatic gift of showing several characters in action.’

The fruit-sellers, street-philosophers, tramps and coster-girls who figure in so many of Augustus’s visual lyrics were in fact poor subjects – elusive, self-conscious, shy of being stared at. He had taught his students the value of observation but this lesson was difficult to put into practice.
He could catch them all right, these reluctant sitters, but well before the five minutes were up they were off. He was therefore thrown back on memory and imagination, and to some extent these failed him. Everything made its impact at once, and seemed to last only so long as it remained in front of him. Some of these studies of gypsies or fisher folk lack atmosphere. The oxygen has gone out of their world, and they wilt. This seepage of vitality is particularly noticeable in his etchings because the medium was so slow. To fill the emptiness, he overworked them with a turmoil of feathery cross-hatching.
42
He could not decide on the right moment to stop. ‘It is only that I feel ever inclined to add a few scratches on the plate that I husband them in this way,’ he told Will Rothenstein.

Campbell Dodgson’s other criticism Augustus would have refuted. It was not his desire artifically to inject action or drama into these studies; it was not his wish to apply sophisticated ‘brainwork’ to simple people. What action or drama or brainwork is there in a tree, the corner of a field, a standing woman? What intellectual ‘purpose’ may be divined in such everyday shapes and ordinary sights? Augustus did not plot his pictures. His groups are deliberately motiveless. He etches them because they’re there – and because he loves them being there. In a sense, the superficiality of which Campbell Dodgson accuses him is exactly what he sets out to achieve. His theme is the profundity of the superficial. He makes the aesthetic statement that passing sights of no special significance have the power to move us beyond explanation or understanding. So far as the artist is concerned, Augustus believed, the ‘meaning’ of his studies should be left to the unconscious. His intention was to fix the passing moment and make it timeless, and in that timeless moment discover ‘a romantic world composed in the image of his desire’.
43
But when the magic of timelessness fails and the passing moment will not pose for him, time hangs heavy, and we feel betrayed by the pointlessness of this empty life.

*

So much this autumn promised well; so much seemed to trail its shadow of disappointment: and as the autumn changed to winter, these shadows began to stretch out.

The turning point came in October. It was in the second week of this month that Augustus sustained a bang on the head, reminiscent of his bathing accident at Tenby. Ida, in a letter to her mother (16 October 1901), explained what happened:

‘Gus has broken his nose and put his finger out of joint by falling from a ladder in the studio. The doctor came – a splendid big red-brown man –
and sewed up the cut on his nose in two exquisite stitches. Poor Gus was very white, and bloody in parts. He is now a lovely sight, very much swollen and one red eye. His profile is like a lion. They say the scar will not show, and he will be well in a fortnight. The bone was a little damaged but it won’t make any difference – we think his nose may be straighter after!’