A country of sunlight – Augustus John
David Boyd Haycock on Augustus John’s time in Dorset
Published in September ’18
Augustus John caravanning, September 1909. Image courtesy of Rebecca John
Augustus John – currently the subject of a major exhibition at Poole Museum – had a long connection with Dorset. The man who would go on to become one of the most famous British artists of the 20th century first visited the county in the 1890s, when he was still a student at the Slade School of Art in London. Having grown up at Tenby, in Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales, he had a deep-seated love of the sea coast, and an invitation from a fellow student, John Everett, to visit Swanage would have been an attractive proposition. Everett’s eccentric mother ran a boarding house, ‘Peveril Tower’, and numerous Slade students, including Augustus’s older sister, Gwen John, would visit Swanage in the vacations to relax and to paint.
Although ‘Peveril Tower’ has been demolished, its grounds included the structure from which it took its name: the Wellington Clock Tower, one of the many curious landmarks relocated from London by the Dorset builder, George Burt. Everett, who would go on to have a significant artistic career specialising in paintings of ships and the coastline, used the tower as his bedroom and studio. Swanage would, briefly, be an important home-from-home for John. In 1900 he would spend a protracted period at Peveril Tower working alongside his latest painting companion, Charles Conder, and returned there for his honeymoon the following year.
The Blue Pool, oil on panel, circa 1910
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Thomas Hardy, oil on canvas, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Hardy famously said of the portrait ‘I don’t know whether that is how I look or not, but that is how I feel.’ The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
It was very probably this early connection that brought John back to Dorset in 1911, when he was seeking a more permanent home. In that intervening decade a lot had changed in his life: for a start, he was now famous. The novelist, Virginia Woolf, would later write that by 1908 the era of Edwardian portraitists John Singer Sargent and Charles Wellington Furse ‘was over. The age of Augustus John was dawning.’ His extraordinary ability as a draughtsman had captivated contemporaries, while his unusual personal life proved almost as equally fascinating. As well as his wife, Ida, he also had a beautiful mistress, Dorelia. As early as 1905, he was being described as ‘the man with three wives’ – and he would go on to have thirteen children with six different women.
When Ida died suddenly in Paris following the birth of their fifth son in 1907, John spent restless years wandering France, Wales and Ireland. Dorelia, however, longed for a permanent home. It was John Everett who found Alderney Manor for them. Situated in what was then open countryside on the main road from Poole to Ringwood, in the vicinity of Newtown, it had until very recently been run as a sanatorium for wealthy sufferers from tuberculosis. It was an unusual building – a bungalow with pointed arches and castellated parapets. ‘One laughed outright to see it,’ John’s son, Romilly, later recalled. ‘It was so unexpected,’ he wrote, ‘and, compared with its imposing name, so small; but its poetry even outdid its absurdity. It was difficult to know whether to class it with the ridiculous or the sublime. There was something fantastic and stunning about it.’
Edwin on the Beach, oil on panel, c1911-1912
Poole Museum
Romilly would have idyllic memories of arriving there in the summer of 1911. ‘The sun shone with all the splendour of something beautiful revealing itself for the first time,’ he later recalled, ‘a straight road bordered on each side by healthy country stretched endlessly ahead.’ Poole would be an attraction for John’s many children, and it was perhaps the boats in the harbour that inspired one of them, Caspar, to join the Royal Navy. He would, in time, rise to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet and was First Sea Lord.
The heaths, pinewoods and beaches near Alderney Manor became the location of many of John’s paintings before the outbreak of World War 1. Many featured Dorelia – doing the washing in the garden of Alderney Manor, or sitting in local beauty spots such as Canford Heath or Ower. One of his most famous works from this period, ‘The Blue Pool’, is a portrait of Dorelia lounging with a book by the side of this now famous Dorset landmark. The painting, now in Aberdeen Art Gallery, was sadly unavailable for loan to the current show, although a smaller version, with Dorelia wearing the same distinctive dress, is currently on exhibition at Poole Museum.
T E Lawrence, 1919, pencil on paper
Poole Museum
The waters of the Blue Pool, a former clay pit, would have been particularly attractive for John, as in certain weather conditions it emulated the glorious colours he had enjoyed in the south of France. He had spent the summer of 1910 with Dorelia and some of his children, painting by the Étang de Berre, an inland lake on the Mediterranean coast, a few miles north-west of Marseille. The Times would remark at the time how the ‘Provençal Studies’ John brought back from the south of France and exhibited in London ‘at once transport the beholder into a country of sunlight’. What is so wonderful with John’s paintings from this period just before the war is exactly this transportation of the spectator into ‘a country of sunlight’. Thus in a painting such as ‘Dorelia among the pines’ it is hard to know whether she is standing by a tree in Dorset or one in Provence.
Many other paintings from this period are of John’s children. They were a recurrent and popular subject throughout his life (although the children themselves often found sitting for him rather arduous work). Excitingly, Poole Museum has just acquired its first original work in oil by John, and appropriately it is of his son, Edwin, up to his ankles in mud. It almost certainly dates from the period of the Johns’ arrival in Dorset, and may even have been painted at the Blue Pool itself.
Dorelia Among the Pines, oil on panel, c1912
Collection of Thomas Gibson, Courtesy of Thomas Gibson Fine Art
World War 1 shattered this highly productive period in John’s life, changing him both as man and artist. His family responsibilities kept him from volunteering in 1914, and physical infirmities (as well, no doubt, as his fame) subsequently saved him from conscription. But in late 1917 he went to the Western Front as an official war artist for the Canadian Government: it was an emotional, depressing experience and he failed to complete his official commission. In 1919 he would go to the Paris Peace Conference to paint its representatives for the British Government, and it was there he met and befriended another significant Dorset figure, Lawrence of Arabia.
Another of Poole Museum’s recent acquisitions is a rapid pencil portrait John made of Lawrence in Paris – the first step on the route that led to his famous oil portrait of the great adventurer and author. It was Lawrence who, in turn, introduced John to Thomas Hardy. John had a very high opinion of the Dorset poet and novelist and in 1923 made a number of visits to Hardy’s home in Dorchester, where he painted his portrait. Hardy was by then 83, and would famously remark, ‘I don’t know whether that is how I look or not, but that is how I feel.’ The painting was purchased soon afterwards for £3000 by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge – an enormous sum equivalent to around £140,000 today.
It was the combination of the war and John that brought another significant artist, Henry Lamb, to Dorset. He is currently the subject of an extensive exhibition at Salisbury Museum, which will be coming to Poole through the summer of 2019. Lamb had been a student at the art school that John briefly ran in Chelsea before the war, and had fallen in love with Dorelia. Having served with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Lamb settled in Poole with the combined aim of recovering from his traumatic war experiences and being close to Dorelia. He would often try to convince her to leave John, but despite their sometimes difficult relationship – and John’s many infidelities – she and John remained together (though unmarried) for the rest of their lives.
John, Dorelia and their children left Dorset in 1927, and moved to Fryern Court, near Fordingbridge in Hampshire. In due course Alderney Manor would be demolished, its extensive grounds developed for new housing in the 1940s and ’50s. That part of John’s life is lost forever, but his art remains to be seen and enjoyed in Poole today.
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