Augustus John (30 page)

Near Meilhan they met a sculptor who told Gwen her lines were too short (‘it is good to have things pointed out’); at La Réole they met a young artist who ‘came to look at us in the stable’ and ‘gave us his address in Paris so we can be models if we like in Paris’,
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Gwen reported to Ursula.

By the end of November they reached Toulouse where they hired a room ‘from a tiny little old woman dressed in black… she is very very wicked’. Here they stayed and worked. ‘We shall never get to Rome I’m afraid,’ Gwen wrote to Ursula, ‘it seems further away than it did in England… the country round is wonderful especially now – the trees are all colours – I paint my picture on the top of a hill – Toulouse lies below and all round we can see the country for many miles and in the distance the Pyrenees. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is when the sun goes down, the last two evenings we have had a red sun – lurid I think is the word, the scene is sublime then, it looks like Hell or Heaven.’
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Augustus noted their progress with a mixture of amusement and irritation. ‘I congratulate you both on having thus far preserved body and soul intact,’ he wrote to them when they were about halfway to Toulouse. ‘But with all my growing sedulity I find it difficult to believe you are really growing fat on a diet of wine and onions and under a burden of ½
a hundredweight odd.’ He also congratulated them on having escaped the importunities of an old man in a barn ‘with true womanly ingenuity’, and he enclosed five pounds for Dorelia – ‘a modest instalment of my debt to you’.
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But already small misunderstandings had begun to creep into their exchanges. In any event, Dorelia decided she did not want random gifts of money accompanied by jokes she did not care for – and wrote to tell him so.

Gus was mainly concerned, at this stage, with Gwen’s pictures. He himself was contributing half a dozen works to the Winter Show of the NEAC, including portraits of Mackay, Rothenstein and Sampson: he was eager for Gwen to submit at least one of her own so that she should not be forgotten. ‘The day for the NEAC is Nov. 9.,’ he reminded both girls. ‘I hope Gwen will do a good picture of you, and that it will contain all
the Genius of Guienne and Languedoc. I hope it will be as wild as your travels and as unprecedented.’ But Gwen refused to be rushed. ‘The New English sending day is next Monday,’ Augustus wrote again more urgently, ‘and Gwen’s picture doesn’t seem to arrive.’ When it did arrive – a glowing portrait of Dorelia entitled ‘L’Étudiante’ – it was almost six years late, and was shown at the NEAC Winter Exhibition of 1909.

Soon after Gwen and Dorelia left, Augustus and Ida had taken a two-year lease on what seemed a perfect house, with a large orchard and stables, at Matching Green in Essex. ‘It is lovely here,’ Ida wrote to the Rani, ‘…to go out into the quiet evenings and see the moon floating up above and feel the cold air.’ They moved in with a lawnmower, their canaries, Gwen’s cats and a dog called Bobster during late November. Elm House stood next to a the Chequers Inn, had a studio but no telephone or electric light, and overlooked the village green. ‘Several gypsies have been already,’ Ida informed Margaret Sampson. ‘Our house is one of the two ugly ones. Inside it is made bearable by our irreproachable taste.’ Four-and-a-half miles from Harlow, their nearest town, and twenty from London, Matching Green stood in a tract of land, Augustus told Will Rothenstein, ‘abundant in such things as trees, ponds, streams, hillocks, barns etc.… Pines amaze me growing stiff and lofty like Phallic symbols. I get dangerous classic tendencies out here I fear. London is perhaps on the whole a safer place for me.’

Since leaving his Liverpool job, Augustus’s income had been erratic, while his responsibilities steadily mounted. It was this state of affairs – ‘living as I do in such insecurity’, he described it
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– that now persuaded him to collaborate in a scheme of Orpen’s. ‘I have committed myself to one day a week teaching at a school Orpen initiates with Knewstub as secretary,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein. ‘We hope to make pocket money out of it at least. It is a very respectable undertaking with none of the perfection you had insisted on. It is Knewstub who makes things feasible with his capacity for organising and letter writing.’

Jack Knewstub was the brother-in-law of both Orpen and Will Rothenstein. Nicknamed ‘Curly’ Knewstub, he had fair wavy hair, boyish good looks and a rather tough North Country manner. For a time he had acted as secretary to a Welsh Member of Parliament and it was here that he learnt his skills as letter-writer. In his organizing capacity he was certainly superior to Augustus, but he was no businessman. His father had been both pupil and assistant to Rossetti – old Knewstub, it was said, could draw but not colour, and Rossetti, a superb colourist, could not draw: it was an ideal partnership. But Curly Knewstub, brought up in this Pre-Raphaelite world, could neither draw nor colour. He was an artist
manqué,
a dreamer with ambitious cultural fantasies to which this new school now
acted as a focus. In the firmament of his imagination, Augustus shone like the moon. Over the years, he schooled his own six children to draw in the John manner, until they came to loathe John’s very name.

If Knewstub worshipped Augustus, Augustus tolerated Knewstub. Admittedly he was ‘a tactless idiot’, ‘exasperating’ and ‘difficult to avoid’; and also so ‘damned incompetent’ that it was as well to have nothing to do with him in financial matters. Yet no one was perfect and Knewstub proved an agreeable drinking companion, useful in countless little ways – the paper and sealing-wax of life.

The Chelsea Art School, as it was called, opened in the autumn of 1903 at numbers 4 and 5 Rossetti Studios in Flood Street. It was, Augustus wrote to Gwen, ‘a bold enterprise by which we expect to replenish our coffers’. On the prospectus
*4
Augustus and Orpen were named as its principals. Knewstub, who began by using 18 Fitzroy Street as his office, acted as secretary and general manager. The sexes were segregated, Gwen Salmond conscripted as ‘lady superintendent’ and various other ‘Sladers’, including Michel Salaman and Will Rothenstein, drafted to give lectures.

In some ways this generation of British artists was to remain a band of eternal students. Perhaps it was because their training at the Slade, where they were so happy, had been incomplete. Gwen Salmond, for example, after leaving the Chelsea Art School, was to study with the Spanish-born, French-trained artist Leandro Ramon Garrido and then, after the war, enrol in a school run by the French cubist painter André Lhote, whose classes Gwen John also attended ‘ill or well’ as late as 1936.

Another Slade student, Edna Clarke Hall, who was to join the Central School of Art and Design in the 1920s, decided to enrol in the Orpen and John Chelsea Art School. ‘The great are following,’ Orpen shouted across to Augustus as she entered the Flood Street studios, ‘we shall succeed.’ Having drifted into her respectable marriage five years earlier Edna had been ‘put on a pedestal and forgotten’ by her husband. But she was not forgotten by Augustus. He would turn up unexpectedly at her home from time to time, sit in the garden drawing her, filling up sheet after sheet compulsively with ‘little wonders’. She watched with fascination, having no idea what was coming next. ‘He talked as he drew,’ she remembered, ‘swiftly and casually but with such a learned hand.’
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He always came on weekday afternoons and she would make sure he had gone and all evidence of his work – and hers – been hidden away by the time her husband got back from his law office. For William Clarke Hall continued to disapprove of her art-student friends, especially Augustus John, and
to discourage her from painting and drawing. ‘What is all this rubbish lying around?’ he had demanded, looking at her pens and paints. So she put them away, but went on longing ‘for the old Slade days when we were all drawing together’.

It was Gwen Salmond who arranged the life-drawing classes for Edna at the Chelsea Art School – just as she had arranged for Gwen John to attend the Académie Carmen in Paris – so enabling her to escape for a time the ‘great solitude’ of her marriage. Edna enjoyed returning to school. But nothing could conceal the fact that ‘those happy days’ at the Slade were ‘gone for ever’. So much had been happening to her friends in her absence. Gwen Salmond had become an art teacher, taking classes for the London County Council and the Clapham School of Art; Gwen John had disappeared with the mysterious Dorelia, ‘the queen of all waterlilies’ as Ida called her; and Ida herself had started a large family because, as she explained, ‘there is nothing else to do now that painting is not practicable, and I must create something.’
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Such news of Ida’s domestic routine of washing and sewing and baby-minding as Edna picked up ‘strengthened a longing I have often felt to take you right away from those boys of yours’.
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But where could she take her? Edna herself had no babies. She was merely a child-wife and Edwardian hostess.

‘The school idea receives great encouragement from all sides,’
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Augustus had reported to Michel Salaman. No one was more excited than Edna. She liked the way Augustus taught by demonstration, re-drawing the students’ work with extraordinary skill. He made obvious efforts to be tolerant and enthusiastic but, like Tonks at the Slade, he could also be sarcastic. Having reduced a pupil to tears, he would then become riddled with guilt and, as an act of contrition, find himself inviting the tearful student out for ‘a drink or a day trip up the river on a steamer’,
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during which he would recite Romany verses in his rumbling bass voice – an impressive sound drifting incomprehensibly along the water.

Everything began promisingly at the Chelsea Art School. ‘They have 35 students – but need to double the money to make it pay,’ Ida wrote to Winifred John in January 1904. ‘They have fine studios in Chelsea. Gwen Salmond is the chief girl and looks after the women’s affairs. Isn’t it mad?’

One person who thought the arrangement dangerously mad was Alice Rothenstein. Did Ida, she wondered, know
nothing
about men? It was inviting trouble, this burying herself in the country and permitting Augustus to roam the streets of London alone. Her head swam at the pure folly of it. So strongly did she feel, that she would have intervened had she not been weightily pregnant at the time. As it was, the very least she could do from her bed of confinement was to pepper Ida with warnings. Of
course, it was none of her business, but then what were friends for? Alice had been on the stage before she married Will. Ida had had a sheltered upbringing and was an innocent creature – she must be protected by post. Ida endured these reprimands stoically, then retaliated (12 December 1903):

‘You are quite quite wrong, but I will not scold you now as you are just going to have a baby. In the first place I prefer being here. And healthy or no, Gus enjoys being in London alone.

Think it pride if you will, but the truth is I would not come back if I had the chance. You do not understand, and you need not add my imaginary troubles to your worries. If I had not known it was alright I should not have come here.
I always know.
So there. Cease your regrets and all the rest of it. Yrs. Ida.’

Alice was shocked. This was the last thing she had expected. The temptation to appear more offended than she actually felt was almost irresistible. Ida, however, was having no nonsense. She refused to be seen as forlorn, abandoned or irresponsible, as Alice’s theatrical imagination demanded. ‘Dear Alice, I was not in the least vexed,’ she replied, ‘and you know I was not. And please always say exactly what you feel. Only I can’t help doing the same and disagreeing. And I know it is such a good thing we came here, and you say it is a bad thing.’

Thereafter, whenever Alice’s volleys of questions grew too intense, Ida would put up a smokescreen. Had Alice observed how lovely the trees were looking just now? Would she like news of the two piebald pigs she owned (‘they grunt very nicely’) and about the terrific number of black-and-white cats Gwen John had left with them? Sometimes Ida would post her ‘several pages of nothing’: at other times she would reveal that, with many disheartening interruptions, she was learning the piano or making a hat. She sent flowers and embroidery and lists of ‘scattered visitors – all very pale’ to Elm House: her mother and sisters, Margaret Sampson, the Rani – ‘we have giggled and been stupid and feminine all the time’. She invited Alice to visit her also and see the elm trees, the green, the open skies: ‘The geese still cackle and waddle on the green, and the bony horses graze. All the buds are coming out, and the birds beginning to sing long songs.’

But by far the best method of deflecting Alice’s formidable pity was to introduce the ever-interesting subject of children. Alice, who was extremely proud of her children, simply could not resist it. Ida is careful to establish that her two sons are in no way comparable to the magnificent Rothenstein boys. David, who ‘is spoiled – or any rate he is difficile’,
shouts whenever the sun comes out, loves nursery rhymes with any mention of dying in them, says ‘NO’ a great many times each day and has taken to drawing, making their lives terrible with his ceaseless howls for pictures of hyenas, cows and ‘taegers’. Caspar is enormous, struggles with a free style on his tummy across the floor exclaiming ‘Mama’ as if it were some kind of joke, remains perfectly toothless at ten months old, but has developed two fat and rosy cheeks from perpetually blowing a trumpet – ‘his first and only accomplishment’. He is strong as a bull and has achieved a ‘long dent in his forehead from a knock… [which] really must have dented his skull as it still shows after several weeks’.

But sometimes her stream of domestic trivia runs dry, and we catch sight of other aspects of Ida’s life. ‘Dear Alice, I have nothing to say – do forgive me. I am very tired.’ The children dominated her night and day, sucking away all energy. Never, it seemed, could she escape from their noise, their eternal need for food and attention. ‘I am getting a little restive sometimes,’ she admitted (15 February 1904), ‘but what I chiefly long for is 2 or 3 quiet nights. Not that they are restless in the night – but as you know they require attention several times.’ She was a conscientious mother, determined to make the best of it. Motherhood was a medicine she had to swallow, and to judge from its bitter taste it must be improving her character. ‘All my energies go to controlling my own children’s passions,’ she explained to Alice. ‘I do get angry and irritable sometimes, but I am getting slowly better, and it is a discipline worth having. I have been so used to looking upon life as a means to get pleasure, but I am coming round to another view of it. And it is a limitless one.’