Augustus John (11 page)

The school had opened in 1871, at a time when British art was at a low ebb. Cut off by its indifference from the exciting developments taking place on the Continent, the Royal Academy with its English literary tradition was all-powerful. The time was ripe for some form of revolution.

The new school took its name from Felix Slade, a wealthy connoisseur of the arts, who, on his death in 1868, had left £35,000 to found professorships of art at Oxford, Cambrige and the University of London. The Oxford and Cambridge chairs – the former taken by Ruskin – were to be solely for lecturing. In London the executors were asked to found a ‘Felix Slade Faculty of Fine Arts’, and University College voted £5,000 for building the Slade School as part of the college quadrangle off Gower Street.

The first professor, Edward Poynter, was an unlikely choice. A fellow student of George du Maurier, he was portrayed in
Trilby
as Lorimer, the ‘Industrious Apprentice’. In his inaugural address he attacked the teaching in schools, where months were spent upon a single elaborate drawing, and recommended ‘the “free and intelligent manner of drawing”…of the French ateliers, of which he had experience as a pupil of Gleyre...’
2
He recommended other innovations too: men and women must be offered the
same opportunities; students were not examined on admission; and all the teachers had to be practising artists.
3

Poynter did not remain long at the Slade. He became President of the Royal Academy, and in 1876 handed over the Slade torch to Alphonse Legros. Much in the condition of British art over the next fifty years is suggested by his career.

Legros taught his students to draw freely with the point, and to build up their drawings by observing the broad planes of the model. A friend of the great French artists of the period – Degas, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Rodin – he was himself a good draughtsman, a disciple of Raphael and Rembrandt, of Ingres and Delacroix. One of his pupils, William Rothenstein, has described his methods of teaching drawing:

‘As a rule we drew larger than sight-size, but Legros would insist that we studied the relations of light and shade and half-tone, at first indicating these lightly, starting as though from a cloud, and gradually coaxing the solid forms into being by superimposed hatching. This was a severe and logical method of constructive drawing – academic in the true sense of the word… He urged us to train our memories, to put down in our sketch-books things seen in the streets… to copy, during school hours, in the National Gallery and in the Print Room of the British Museum...’
4

Legros took no trouble to hide his hostility to the Royal Academy which, he believed, represented neither tradition nor scholarship, and he encouraged his students to be independent of Burlington House. He was close neither to the Salon painters nor to the Impressionists, and eventually he became an isolated figure. His instruction in painting, as opposed to drawing, was later described by Walter Sickert as ‘almost a model of how not to do it’.

Legros retired from the Slade a year before Augustus arrived, but his principles were firmly established there. He and Poynter had been trained in the studio schools of Paris, and were in a line of studio teachers stretching back to the Renaissance. This was the atmosphere in which Augustus found himself at the age of sixteen – that of a medieval-Renaissance workshop school, which launched him on his Renaissance life.

By the time Legros retired, the Royal Academy had become aware of the Slade’s growing strength, but despite its efforts to get one of its men appointed, the chair was offered to Frederick Brown. Brown was then forty-two, ‘a gruff, hard-bitten man, of great feeling, with something of the Victorian military man about him, such as the colonel who had spent his life on the North-West Frontier, surrounded by savages, which
indeed his life as a progressive artist and teacher during the ’seventies and ’eighties must have rather resembled.’
5
This somewhat grim figure, with his greying hair, chin-tuft, prognathous jaw and grave bespectacled eyes, was invariably dressed in a black frock coat. His teeth seemed permanently clenched, giving him the appearance of a man who would stand no nonsense – nor would he. He had studied in Paris under Robert-Fleury and Bouguereau, and for the past fifteen years had been head of the Westminster School of Art, which he expanded from evening classes and ran on the lines of a French school. He was popular with his students, many of whom followed him from Westminster to the Slade. His severe expression and high standards were complemented by great patience and he endeared himself to students by his wonderful memory – he would often refer to drawings they had done years before, and he became a great collector of their work.

One of these students who was to follow Brown to the Slade was a young Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Henry Tonks. Tonks, who had become increasingly attracted to the artist’s life, was eloquent in persuading his patients to pose as models and, when obliged to fall back on the dead, he seized every opportunity to draw the corpses that were dissected in his class. In about 1890, while Senior Resident Medical Officer at the Royal Free Hospital, he had started to attend the Westminster School of Art as a part-time student, hurrying off to its evening classes smelling strongly of carbolic.

Tonks was exactly the person Brown felt he needed to support him at the Slade. He was well educated, businesslike, and had a gift for teaching and a knowledge of anatomy that gave him special insight into the process of figure-drawing. Like Brown, he was dissatisfied with the mechanical methods of instruction employed in most art schools. If Brown resembled a Victorian colonel, Tonks, who was tall and gaunt, had the commanding presence of a nineteenth-century cardinal.

In the late autumn of 1893 Brown offered him the post of his assistant. Tonks was ‘amazed, almost beside himself with pleasure’. A few months before Augustus arrived there, he took up his new career at the Slade. So began the famous partnership of Brown and Tonks, those two lean and rock-like bachelors, which was to carry on the teaching reforms of Legros, establish the Slade tradition of constructive drawing, and influence generations of British art.

*

From morning till late afternoon, Augustus toiled over the casts of Greek, Roman and Renaissance heads. Then, initially for short twenty-minute poses, he and the other new students were allowed down into the Life
Class. Augustus entered this studio for the first time with feelings of awe. Seated on the ‘throne’, he saw a girl, Italian and completely naked. ‘Perfect beauty always intimidates,’ he wrote. ‘Overcome for a moment by a strange sensation of weakness at the knees, I hastily seated myself and with trembling hand began to draw, or pretend to draw this dazzling apparition.’
6
Looking round, he was astonished to observe that the other students appeared almost indifferent to the spectacle, and his respect for them mounted even higher.

The regime at the Slade was still austere. Men and women worked together only in the Antique Rooms. They were segregated elsewhere and rarely met in the evenings. ‘This is not a matrimonial agency,’ Brown told Alfred Hayward, a student whom he had come across saying good morning to a young girl in one of the corridors. Models and students were forbidden to speak to one another; older students in the Life Rooms had little communication with the new pupils, and the hierarchy was like that of a public school. Augustus seemed fixed in his work all day long and half the night. Wherever he went he took his sketchbook, filling it with rapid drawings of his fellow students.

In criticizing their monthly compositions one day, Tonks had said he wanted his students to go to the National Gallery more often and look less at the Yellow Book, with its drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. Augustus passed much of his free time at the National Gallery, the British Museum and other permanent collections in London. What he saw in these places overwhelmed him. He could not sort out his ideas, could not decide what excited him most or what suited his own talent best – the treasures of Europe were at the end of a bus ride to Trafalgar Square. He flitted from picture to picture. Should he be a Pre-Raphaelite or a latter-day disciple of Rembrandt? Or both – or something else again? Looking back at this period years later, he concluded: ‘A student should devote himself to one Master only; or one at a time.’
7
His earliest master, on whom he began modelling his drawing, was Watteau.

The crowded cosmopolitan streets of London stimulated and confused him during these first months. The pervading smell of chipped potatoes, horse dung and old leather; the leaping naphtha flames along the main roads; the wood-block paving of the streets looking like squares from a Battenburg cake; the glittering multicoloured music halls; the costermongers with their barrows of fruit and flowers; the vendors of pickled eels, ices and meat pies; the jugglers and conjurors who performed for pennies: it was too foreign for him to absorb. He walked everywhere – from Bermondsey to Belgravia, from the narrow streets of cobblestones where chickens scavenged and the shabby slum children played to fashionable Hyde Park where men and women, glossily hatted, rode to and fro,
their horses gleaming with health, their coachmen decked out in authoritative livery. It seemed that no encounter was impossible, and every adventure for the asking – if only he had the courage to find his voice.

But he was boorishly shy, and also poor. Most evenings he would return after dark to a dreary little villa, 8 Milton Road, Acton, where he lived with one of his ‘Jesus Christ Aunts’; and every morning he left early on his long day’s journey into town to reach the Slade long before ten o’clock when classes officially began. Occasionally his father would send him a small amount of money and he would hurry off to the music halls. In the melodramas and variety shows at the Alhambra, the Old Mogul, the Metropolitan, the Bedford, Collins’s and Old Sadler’s Wells, where a crowd of students could take a box for a shilling, he sketched the buskers and comedians, including the legendary buffoon Arthur Roberts, and the singers and dancers with their magical names, Cissy Loftus, Cadieux and Mary Belfont, who held him in thrall.
8
They were more real than reality. One student later remembered him shouting out his own line in one of the songs, and the singer improvising her refrain to cap it, and then the two of them keeping up the repartee, she in her harsh cockney, he in his vibrant Welsh, among the cheering and stampeding audience. He went to these music halls whenever he could afford it, and sometimes when he could not: and once or twice was ignominiously thrown out.

But he was much alone. On Sundays he would often wander round Speakers’ Corner, listen to the orators, join the crowds and gaze at the outlandish sights – then, bursting with nervous energy, march all the way home. Often he travelled great distances, staring into people’s faces, carrying under his arm one or other of his two favourite books – Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
and
Hamlet.

Increasingly during this first year, he sought the company of two other Slade students, Ambrose McEvoy and Benjamin Evans. McEvoy was a short-sighted youth, with a low dark Phil May fringe, an oddly cracked voice and spare, limp body, who improbably became something of a dandy, with his dancing pumps, monocle, high collar and black suit. In deference to Whistler, he converted himself into an almost perfect ‘arrangement in black and white’. His natural amiability, talent for quick design (which led to early employment as comic-strip draughtsman for a paper called
Nuts
), and gift for comedy all endeared him to the solitary Augustus.

Benjamin Evans, who had been at the same ‘frightful school’ as Augustus at Clifton, was an intelligent and witty draughtsman, deeply versed in Rembrandt. The three of them went everywhere together. Sometimes they would start out in the small hours of the morning and walk to Hampton Court or Dulwich; then, after breakfasting at a cabman’s pull-up, spend the rest of the day at the picture gallery. At other times they
would take their sketchbooks to the anarchist clubs off the Tottenham Court Road. In the mild climate of England, the foreign desperadoes who gathered here seemed to have grown curiously genial. Augustus saw many sinister celebrities including Louise Michel, ‘the Red Virgin’, who had once fought on the barricades during the Paris Commune of 1870 in the uniform of a man, and was now a little old lady in black; and that doyen of revolutionaries, Peter Kropotkin, dressed in a frock coat and radiating goodwill to everyone. Most innocent of all were the American anarchists – not a bomb, not an ounce of nitro-glycerine, between them. The leader of the English group was David Nichols, founder of ‘Freedom’, whose rashest act was to recite some passages from Swinburne in cockney. Despite a vehement Spanish contingent, the general atmosphere was one of sturdy handclasps, singing and dancing, and voluble monologues in indistinct dialects.

Augustus’s tendency was to hero-worship those whom he liked, but since few people are natural heroes, this idolatry was often replaced by an aggressive disillusionment. Friendship with him was an erratic business. McEvoy, once known as the Shelley of British Art, whose ambition, it was later said, was to paint every holder of the Victoria Cross and every leading débutante, became the wrong type of success; and Evans who (Augustus believed) gave up art to became a sanitary engineer, turned out the wrong sort of failure.

Almost the only person who seemed capable of sustaining Augustus’s adulation was Tonks himself. Tonks was a scathing critic, his drastic comments, like amputations, cutting off many a career. ‘What is it?’ he would ask after closely examining some student’s drawing. ‘…
What is it?
…It is an
insect
?’
Mere accuracy never satisfied him. ‘Very good,’ he remarked of one competent drawing – then added with a deep sigh: ‘But can’t you see the
beauty
in that boy’s arm?’ He would reduce many of the students to tears. But behind the Dantesque mask lay a benevolent nature. Sometimes he would have brief flirtations with the girl students, but his lasting passion was for the teaching of drawing and, as Augustus observed, ‘the Slade was his mistress’.
9