Augustus John (69 page)

But Rothenstein resented being made, as it were, a mere minister without portfolio in Fry’s new government: he wanted a cabinet post – preferably that occupied by Clive Bell. Was it not he, Will Rothenstein, who had first established lines of communication between France and England while Fry was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? Although, in the past, Fry had written generously in praise of his work, Rothenstein refused to trust his judgement.
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Didn’t everyone know how naïve he was, how credulous? But Fry was at a loss to account for Rothenstein’s non-cooperation. ‘I gather you are very much annoyed with me,’ he wrote to him (13 September 1911), ‘but I simply can’t disentangle the reason. No doubt it is all quite clear in your mind, but I haven’t a clue.’

Although Rothenstein was out of things after he left for the United States in October 1911, his tactics affected Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which eventually included only a small British group among French and Russian sections. If McEvoy seems to have been a pawn in the complicated chess game that had developed between these two painter-impresarios, Augustus had been a knight who found himself being moved strongly about the board forwards and sideways on behalf of Rothenstein’s
team. Great efforts were made to capture him. As late as the summer of 1912, Fry was writing to Clive Bell: ‘I’m delighted that John wants to show.’ But in the event he did not do so. His letter of refusal was sent not to Fry but to Clive Bell:

‘Dear Bell,

I received your very enigmatic letter. I am sorry I cannot promise anything for the “Second Post-Impressionists”. For one reason I am away from town, and for another I should hesitate to submit any work to so ambiguous a tribunal. No doubt my decision will be a relief – to everybody.

Yrs truly, Augustus John.’
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It was a relief, primarily, to Augustus himself. ‘I am conscious that the various confabulators find the question of my inclusion embarrassing,’ he had confided to Wyndham Lewis, ‘and I would wish to liberate their consciences in the matter if I could find adequately delicate means of doing so.’ Once he was clear of the whole bloody show he felt marvellously disencumbered. He had owed some loyalty to Will Rothenstein, though he might feel closer to Fry and some of the Camden and London Group painters. He was not, however, close to Clive Bell, who was to launch upon his later work a strong attack,
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valuing it as ‘almost worthless’. It was one of those pieces of Bell’s journalism that, Fry complained,
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‘have done me more harm than all the others’.

The consequences of an artist’s absence from the Second Post-Impressionist show were ‘swift and severe’. He was simply ‘not a Post-Impressionist according to the definition which Bell put forward in his selection of English artists’, S. K. Tillyard wrote in
The Impact of Modernism.

‘When, for instance, Augustus John was left out of the show, his work was no longer described as being connected with Post-Impressionism. But such painting was obviously not Academic… The absence from the 1912 show of John and some members of the Camden Town group increasingly left critics and public without any acceptably “modern” language of description to apply to their work and in particular to their subject matter. Hence John, and, as time went on, Sickert too, became increasingly difficult to evaluate and categorise. As the Post-Impressionist version of the past became gradually accepted, the two artists also became hard to place within any “development” of English painting, and impossible to “rehabilitate” without a re-evaluation of the past.’
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John had no modern group, society or workshop from which to conduct
such an exercise in re-evaluation. His two pictures, ‘Lynn Cynlog’ and ‘Nant-ddu’, listed as numbers 1 and 2 in the first Camden Town Exhibition of 1911, were Welsh landscapes which illustrated his distance from this metropolitan group. For John, the right place was far away from the metropolitan art world, in North Wales or southern France, not alone, but with J. D. Innes.

*

James Dickson Innes was nine years older than Augustus. ‘Born and bred in Wales,’ Augustus wrote, ‘to which country he felt himself bound by every tie of sentiment and predilection’,
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he had nevertheless practised eating black ants at school in order to establish his French ancestry.
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By the autumn of 1907, when he first met Augustus, Innes was living in Fitzroy Street. ‘A Quaker hat, coloured silk scarf and long black overcoat set off features of a slightly cadaverous cast with glittering black eyes, wide sardonic mouth, prominent nose, and a large bony forehead invaded by streaks of thin black hair. He carried a Malacca cane with a gold top and spoke with a heavy English accent which now and then betrayed an agreeable Welsh sub-stratum.’
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It was during his first visit to France with John Fothergill in April and May 1908 that Innes’s painting life really began. They travelled to Caudebec, Bozouls and (‘because it looked so good on the map’, Fothergill explained) to Collioure, where Derain and Matisse had worked two or three years before. The impact of southern light upon Innes increased his awareness of colour and intensified his involvement with Nature in a manner similar to Augustus in Provence. Having fallen ill, apparently with spots arising from his failure, over a long period, to wash, he returned alone via Dieppe and was found to be suffering from tuberculosis. Such a diagnosis meant probable death. Almost the only treatment was rest. Innes was not the person to accept such passive medical advice. The TB had attacked his teeth so that he could not chew properly: but he could drink, and sometimes did so heavily. There was one other pleasure the disease did not quench (as a romantic adventure with a young Algerian carpet weaver was to demonstrate): tuberculosis was said to stimulate sexuality.

Early in 1909 Innes had visited Paris with Matthew Smith, but does not seem to have been particularly interested in the French painters who (some of them posthumously) were about to invade England. Once again illness curtailed his visit and he was sent to convalesce at St Ives. But in the spring of 1910 he was back in Paris and it was here, at a café in the boulevard du Montparnasse, that he met and fell in love with Euphemia
Lamb. Together they made their way back to Collioure, Euphemia dancing in cafés to help pay their way.

As with so many British artists, this year was crucial for Innes. He had looked for guidance to John Fothergill. But Fothergill himself was in need of guidance. A romantic-looking young man, lithe and elegant ‘like a young fawn’, with almond-shaped eyes and a light curling beard, he had been admired by Oscar Wilde and by the surrealist lesbian painter Romaine Brooks. Caught in the cross-currents of his sexual ambiguities, he then came under the protection of E. P. Warren and his brotherhood of aesthetes. Early in 1910 Fothergill and Innes ended their friendship. It seems that Fothergill’s relationship with Innes was to some degree homosexual. There was a self-destructive aspect to Fothergill – an artist, gallery proprietor and classical archaeologist – who took up innkeeping. Such a masochistic vein Innes, with his violent Swiftian imagery, had been well fitted to exploit.

‘[Derwent] Lees tells me strange things about Innes,’ Fothergill complained to Albert Rutherston, ‘ – in short – [Euphemia] Lamb off – (sounds like 11 o’clock p.m. at a nasty eating house) and also his allowance from mother – gone to Paris, his savings gone also. Knocked a bobby on the head and arrested. He was also wounded in the head in a back street in Chelsea along with John in a fight. What stupidities some people allow themselves to indulge in because they call themselves artists.’

And the company he kept! Drunkards, practical jokers, loose women, known eccentrics. No wonder his mother had cancelled his allowance – Fothergill knew just how she must be feeling. One day when Innes, Horace de Vere Cole and Augustus were in a taxi they ‘bethought themselves of the rite of “blood brotherhood”… Innes drove a knife right through his left hand. One of the others [Augustus] stabbed himself in the leg and was laid up for some time afterwards. Cole made a prudent incision, sufficient to satisfy the needs of the case. The driver was indignant when he saw the state of his cab and its occupants, but the rite had been performed and no lasting damage was done.’
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Both Innes and Augustus, as John Rothenstein observed,
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were obsessed ‘by a highly personal conception of the ideal landscape which also haunted the imaginings of Puvis de Chavannes’; both, in the brilliant Mediterranean light, were working rapidly in high-key colours, and rediscovering what they felt they had first known in their sunlit days as children in Wales. Both were looking for what Augustus, writing about Innes, called ‘the reflection of some miraculous promised land’.
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It was in the autumn of 1910 that Innes and Augustus began seeing a lot of each other. Augustus’s exhibition at the Chenil in December 1910
was followed by a one-man show of Innes’s watercolours, and Augustus immediately wrote to Quinn advising him to buy some of them.

‘He’s a really gifted chap and shows a rare imagination in his landscapes. It is true he has not done much yet, being quite young, but if he can keep it up there can be no doubt about his future. London doesn’t do for him and he’s off to Wales and later to the south.’
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It was a relief to leave London and paint their way over the moorland and mountains from Bala to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where there were no theories of what should be painted or why. Innes visited London for exhibitions and would sometimes stay on, obeying what he called the ‘stern call of dissipation’. These were innocent romps. ‘Innes has just been given the option of 40/- or a month [in jail] for pulling Bells in the King’s Rd,’ Augustus wrote to Sampson after one episode. Innes was by now a bearded figure, still with his wide black Quaker hat, but permanently covered with paint, permanently ill and permanently out of doors, preferring to live rough and sleep under the stars. One night, wandering upon the moors of North Wales, he had come upon the lonely inn of Rhyd-y-fen and been cared for by its landlord, Washington Davies. Waking up next morning Innes had seen the mountain of Arenig against the sky and fallen in love. ‘Mynedd Arenig remained ever his sacred mountain and the slopes of the Migneint his spiritual home.’
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Upon the summit of this mountain, under the cairn, he was to bury a silver casket containing his letters from Euphemia.
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For him she
was
Arenig. This was the magnetic point to which, like the needle of a compass, he always returned.

Compelled, like a lover, to broadcast his feelings, Innes confided to Augustus about Arenig, and the two of them made a plan to meet at Rhyd-y-fen that March. ‘Our meeting was cordial,’ Augustus remembered, ‘but yet I felt on his part a little reserve, as if he felt the scruples of a lover on introducing a friend to the object of his passion.’
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Behind the inn, to the south, rose the flanks of Arenig Fawr, and beyond the little lake of Tryweryn they could see in the distance the peaks of Moelwyn. ‘This is the most wonderful place I’ve seen,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia (March 1911). ‘…The air is superb and the mountains wonderful… We are now off for a week to see a waterfall that falls 400 feet without a break.’ They decided to look for a cottage and found one some three miles from Rhyd-y-fen on the slopes of the Migneint by a brook called Nant-ddu. They furnished it sparsely and moved in when Augustus returned during May. ‘I think Innes was never happier than when painting in this district,’ Augustus wrote.
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‘But this happiness was not without a morbid side for his passionate devotion to the landscape was also a way of escape from his consciousness
of the malady which then was casting its shadow across his days… This it was that hastened his steps across the moor and lent his brush a greater swiftness and decision as he set down in a single sitting view after jewelled view of the delectable mountains he loved before darkness came to hide everything… ’

‘Before working with John,’ wrote the art critic Eric Rowan, ‘Innes had been painting in water-colour… After John’s arrival in North Wales, Innes began to copy his technique of making quick sketches in oil paint on prepared wooden panels.’
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Though rapidly done, these panels had often entailed long expeditions over the moors looking for that moment of illumination which would suddenly burst through the procession of clouds. He worked like a man condemned. The effect of this upon Augustus was extraordinary. Never before had he met someone whose swiftness exceeded his own. What he had once done at the Slade for others, Innes, acting as a pacemaker, could now do for him.

But there was another way in which Innes helped. ‘He was an original, a “naif”,’ Augustus wrote
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– and in a letter to Quinn (15 June 1911) he describes him as an ‘entirely original chap and that’s saying a lot. He is not the sort who learns anything. He will die innocent and a virgin intellectually which I think a very charming and rare thing.’ Augustus did not imitate Innes or seek to learn from him any very painterly secrets. It was Innes’s example that inspired him. He had felt recently that his own innocence, the quality which W. B. Yeats had found so remarkable, was in jeopardy. Innes helped him to repossess it – so much is evident from his letter to Quinn in which, passing from Innes to himself, he adds: ‘I am on my way I think to get back (or forward) to a purely delightful way of decorating which shall in no way compete with the camera or the coal-hole. But one has a lot to unlearn before the instinct or the soul or what you call it can shine out uninstructed.’

It was ironic that their chief disciple should have been a copycat of genius, the Australian painter Derwent Lees. ‘I tire of seeing my own subjects so many times,’ Innes wrote of Lees’s pictures. Besides Inneses, Lees could paint McEvoys and Johns
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fluently. He had come from Melbourne, after a duty stop in Paris, to London, and now taught drawing at the Slade. A fair-complexioned man, rather thin yet somehow giving an impression of plumpness, he was remarkable, in the days when artificial limbs were still unusual, for a fine and exciting false right foot, complete with wooden toes in which, amid much giggling, a Slade girl once got her finger caught.