Augustus John (89 page)

John had met Hardy at Kingston Maurward on 21 September 1923 and, after several visits to Max Gate, the house in Dorset that Hardy had designed himself, polished off the portrait by the middle of the following month. Hardy was then eighty-three. ‘An atmosphere of great sympathy and almost complete understanding at once established itself between us,’ John recorded.
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They did not talk much, but John felt they were of a kind:
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‘I wonder which of the two of us was the more naïve!’ He painted Hardy seated in his study, a room piled to the ceiling with books ‘of a philosophical character’. Hardy wears a serious, querying expression; he looks stiff, but is bearing up. It is the portrait of a shy man, full of disciplined emotion. ‘I don’t know whether that is how I look or not,’ he said,
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‘but that is how I
feel.
’ The picture was painted at the suggestion of T E. Lawrence and bought by Sydney Cockerell for three thousand pounds on behalf of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. ‘If I look like that the sooner I am under the ground the better,’ Hardy remarked to Cockerell. But in fact ‘the old man is delighted, & Mrs Hardy also,’ T. E. Lawrence told his mother. ‘It is seldom that an artist is so fortunate in his sitter’s eyes.’
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After his death in 1928, Hardy’s widow Florence reported him as having said to her that he would rather have John’s
portrait in the Fitzwilliam than ‘receive the Nobel Prize – and he meant it’.

In a letter to Hardy, John suggested that this portrait was ‘merely preparatory to another & more satisfactory picture which I hope to do with your help, later on’.
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It was only by labelling his paintings as preliminary studies for more elaborate compositions that he could decide to stop working on them. Where there was infinite time there was infinite delay, infinite painting out and indecision. Some critics interpreted this dissatisfaction as a quest for perfection. But he painted without premeditation, asking his sitters sometimes what background colour they would like, at other times whether they thought he should introduce a flower or a bowl of fruit, or simply demanding: ‘Tell me what’s wrong with this arm.’ When Lord David Cecil inquired what aesthetic motive there had been for making the colour of his tie darker than it actually was, John replied that some black paint had accidentally got mixed into the red, and he thought it looked rather good. He liked, starting perhaps with an eye, to exaggerate the figure as he worked downwards, as El Greco or Velazquez might, for grand manner. His unfinished work is often better in these later years because it manages to convey powers, latent in him, on which he could no longer call. It must be ‘hard’, T. E. Lawrence sympathized (9 April 1930), ‘to paint against time’. But time was a false friend to John – a substitute for concentration. It remained to Dorelia and close brave friends to rescue, by one subterfuge or another, what pictures they could before they were painted into oblivion.

The longer he worked the more difficult it became to persuade him to stop. With commissioned portraits there was often some limitation that imposed a discipline, though it afforded little pleasure. Of all these ‘boardroom’ portraits, his favourite was of Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England. Begun on 1 April 1930, it was completed a year later, Norman’s hair subsiding in the interval from grey to white. To John’s mind he was ‘an almost ideal sitter’, taking apparently no interest whatever in the artist or his picture. ‘It was in a spirit of severe reserve that we used to part on the doorstep of my house,’ John recorded, ‘whence, after looking this way and that, and finding the coast clear, Mr Norman would venture forth to regain his car, parked as usual discreetly round the corner.’
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What John did not know was that, on arriving back at his office, Norman was transformed, regaling everyone with descriptions of the Great Artist at work. ‘It’s marvellous to watch him scrutinizing me,’ he would rhapsodize, ‘…then using a few swift strokes like this on the outline and dabbing on paint like lightning. What a heavenly gift!’
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John represents the two of them as sharing a sense of isolation. Though the banker seemed ‘troubled with graver problems than beset other men’,
it was not difficult, John recalled, ‘to offset Mr Montagu Norman’s indifference to my activities by a corresponding disregard of his’.
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At rare moments ‘our acquaintance seemed to show signs of ripening’, and then, so he told Michael Ayrton, a curious attraction would rise up in him for this dry, preoccupied, semi-detached figure. To John Freeman he later remarked: ‘It seemed to give him pleasure.’ But he was referring to the sittings, not the portrait itself which, with its hard eyes, nervously taut mouth and haunted expression, shocked Norman so much that he refused to let it hang either in his home or at the Bank of England – where, nevertheless, it now hangs.

‘Sometimes’, John recalled, ‘Lord D’Abernon would come to chat with my sitter. The subject appeared to be High Finance. I was not tempted to join in these discussions.’
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D’Abernon, a trustee of the National Gallery in London, was another of John’s subjects; his portrait, completed after Montagu Norman’s, had been started early in 1927. As the second ceremonial portrait of John’s career, it invites comparison with ‘The Lord Mayor of Liverpool’ but falls incomparably short. It is neither caricature nor straight portrait study: it is a false creation. John himself affected to believe it a finer painting than ‘Suggia’, but this judgement rested on the greater time it had taken him, and on his wish to obtain for it the same price – three thousand pounds (equivalent to £79,500 in 1996). Sometimes, during this five years’ marathon, he was tempted to give up: then another cheque, for five hundred or a thousand pounds, would arrive and he was obliged to paint wearily on. ‘I hope’, he wrote rather unconvincingly to Dorelia, ‘old D’Abernon won’t peg out before the portrait is done.’
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To gain wind it was necessary for him to puff enthusiasm into the ordeal. On 18 December 1927 he writes to D’Abernon that the portrait is ‘too fine a scheme’ to take any ‘risks’ with. Since Lady D’Abernon had a villa in Rome, might it not be ‘a practical plan’, John wondered, ‘for me to come to Rome in February where I could use a studio at the British School’?
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Two years later, on 8 December 1929, Lord D’Abernon notes in a letter to his wife: ‘The Augustus John portrait at last improving – the face less bibulous. Seen from five yards off – it is a fine costume picture.’
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John had brought in a stalwart Guardsman to stand wearing the British Ambassador’s elaborate uniform, but eventually this soldier collapsed and John fell back on a wooden dressmaker’s dummy, the character of which is ‘well conveyed in the completed work’. By the autumn of 1928 he is begging Dorelia to ‘undress that awful dummy and put d’Ab’s clothes in his trunk’.
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But still the work went lamely on. Like Macbeth, he had reached a point from which it was as tedious to retreat as to go on. He put the best face he could on it: ‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.’

The portrait, now in the Tate Gallery, is dated 1932, in which year it was finally handed over to Lord D’Abernon. ‘There are only two styles of portrait painting,’ says Miss La Creevy in
Nicholas Nickleby
:
‘the serious and the smirk’. ‘Lord D’Abernon’ is not smirking and he is not serious. He is nothing. A photograph of Lord D’Abernon posing for the picture ‘shows how unlike him the “parade” portrait was and is’, his wife noted on the back.

On other occasions, when his soul revolted against such formal work, John could be less accommodating. After finishing the portrait of the Earl of Athlone, he agreed to show it the following day to the sitter’s wife. She arrived with her husband and went into his studio. Two minutes later they burst out, looking furious. John stood in the doorway quietly lighting his pipe as they drove off. Egerton Cooper, who had watched the incident from his studio near by, hurried over to ask what was wrong. ‘I tore the painting to pieces,’ explained John. ‘I suddenly couldn’t bear it.’

Another time it was the sitter who dismantled a portrait. During part of the summer of 1920, John had been at work on ‘His Margarine Majesty’, the fish and soap millionaire Lord Leverhulme. Although ‘strongly inclined’ to have his portrait done by John, Leverhulme had begun the first sitting by warning him he could spare little time and that he was an almost impossible subject, no artist (excepting to some degree Sir Luke Fildes) having done him justice. When the time was up, great praise was lavished on the picture: by John. It seemed, he said, to breathe with life and self-satisfaction and only lacked speech. Leverhulme himself did not lack speech, and finding the portrait very ‘humbling to pride’ and a ‘chastening’
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reflection, argued that neither the eyes, nor yet the mouth, nor even the nose were his, though it was probably the bloated face and grasping fingers that hurt him, if not the informality and small size for ‘under a thousand pounds’ commission. Whatever the deficiencies, John, proffering his palette, invited His Lordship to make the amendments himself. This offer was declined and the picture, with all its alleged faults intact, paid for and dispatched.

John had then gone down to Tenby. Returning to Mallord Street late in September he discovered the portrait had been returned to him – at least, that part representing Lord Leverhulme’s stomach, shoulders, arms, hands and thighs, though not his head, which had been scissored out. That evening (31 September 1920) John sat down and wrote: ‘I am intensely anxious to have your Lordship’s explanation of this, the grossest insult I have ever received in the course of my career.’

Leverhulme’s reply four days later shone with friendliness. He felt ‘extremely distressed at the blunder that has occurred’, but added: ‘I assure you it is entirely a blunder on the part of my housekeeper.’ He had
intended hanging the painting in his safe at Rivington Bungalow, but overlooked ‘the fact that there were internal partitionings and other obstacles that prevented me doing this’. After a bold prognosis, he settled on a surgical operation, removing the head, ‘which is the important part of the portrait’, and storing it safely away. This letter, culminating with an urgent request to keep the matter dark, was succeeded by an invitation to ‘dine with my sister’. To his surprise, John appeared dissatisfied with this answer, and the correspondence between them persisted in lively fashion over the next ten days until suddenly appearing in full on the front page of the
Daily Express.
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It was a case of the Baronet and the Butterfly in reverse. ‘I actually frightened him into violence,’ John told T E. Lawrence.
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Leverhulme insisted that he had a right to deal with his own property – a little trimming here or there – as he chose. Even the copyright, he hazarded, belonged to him. As for the publicity, it was not of his choosing: ‘all that I am impressed by is that Mr John can get his advertising perfectly free… whereas the poor Soap Maker has to pay a very high rate for a very bad position in the paper.’

For John it had begun as a matter of principle. He took the Whistlerian view that money purchased merely the custodianship of a picture. Whatever the legal rights, he was convinced of his moral right. ‘Formal portraiture implied a subservience of artist to patron increasingly unacceptable to artists imbued with a romantic concern for expression, particularly self-expression,’ wrote the art historian Edward Morris.
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The history of John’s ‘Leverhulme’ was to take its place between Sargent’s ‘Henry Irving’ and Graham Sutherland’s ‘Winston Churchill’.

The excitement provoked by this beheading was tremendous. Newspapers throughout Britain, the United States, Europe and as far off as Japan trumpeted their reports of the affair. Students of the London art schools marched on Hyde Park ‘bearing aloft a gigantic replica of the celebrated soap-boiler’s torso, the head being absent’.
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In Paris there was furore; in Italy a twenty-four hour strike was called involving everyone connected with painting – even models, colourmen and frame-makers. ‘A colossal effigy entitled “IL-LE-VER-HUL-ME” was constructed of soap and tallow, paraded through the streets of Florence, and ceremoniously burnt in the Piazza della Signoria, after which, the demonstrators proceeded to the Battisterio where a wreath was solemnly laid on the altar of St John.’
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Appalled by the rumpus, John backed away to Lady Tredegar’s home, near Broadstairs; but the reporters, discovering his hiding place, besieged him there. ‘I did not want this publicity,’ he prevaricated. ‘I get too much as it is.’ Nevertheless, some papers were announcing that he intended to press the matter to the courts so as to establish a precedent for the
protection of artists. ‘The bottom fact of the case is that there is something in a work of art which, in the highest equity as distinct from the law, you cannot buy,’ declared the
Manchester Guardian.
‘…Whatever the law may allow, or courts award, the common fairness of mankind cannot assent to the doctrine that one man may rightfully use his own rights of property in such a way as to silence or interrupt another in making so critical appeal to posterity for recognition of his genius. The right to put up this appeal comes too near those other fundamental personal rights the infringement of which is the essence of slavery.’

The country waited for this Wilberforce of the art world to act. But after this great roll of drums, there was nothing. For John, unlike Whistler, had no relish for court work. He did not have the stamina of his own indignation, and his sense of humour outran his sense of honour. He ended the affair with a joke, exhibiting his portion of the portrait above the title ‘Lord Leverhulme’s Watch-chain’. For years he patiently preserved this decapitated torso while the missing head continued to stare unseen in its depository. Then, in 1954, by what Sir Gerald Kelly, the President of the Royal Academy, described as ‘hellish ingenuity’,
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the two segments were sewn together and the picture elevated to a place of honour in the Leverhulme Art Gallery at Port Sunlight.