Читать книгу Stanley Spencer (Text Only) - Ken Pople - Страница 13
ОглавлениеAll original artists, I am certain, have always worked without reference to their work’s effect on spectators other than themselves; and they have always assumed that their work has intrinsic value when they themselves have honestly and competently passed it as exactly the thing which they had set out to do.
R. H. Wilenski: Preface to The Modern Movement in Art, 19271
I have just bought Cookham’s great picture of the Apple Gatherers. I can’t bring myself to acquiesce in the false proportions, although in every other respect I think it’s magnificent. I’ve made great friends with him, I went down to the place Cookham two Sundays ago and spent the afternoon in the pullulating bosom of his family. There are too many of them, six out of nine were there, beside the parent-birds, and they are very gregarious, so I never got Stanley to myself; but it was an amusing experience.2
THE LETTER-WRITER was Edward Marsh, scholar, wit, man-about-town, patron of up-coming artists and poets, and at the time private secretary to Winston Churchill. The letter was to Rupert Brooke, then (1913) travelling in America and the Pacific:
The father is a remarkable old man still in his early middle age at about 70 – very clever but – I beg his pardon, I mean ‘and’ – a tremendous talker, and frightfully pleased with himself, his paternity, his bicycling, his opinions, his knowledge, his ignorance – due to the limitations of his fatherhood of nine – his radicalism and everything that is his. … Gilbert is an artist too but only six months since. Stan had only about two things to show, he does work slowly.
Until the 1910 and 1912 London exhibitions of post-impressionist paintings, picture collecting had been largely confined to the purchase of traditional Victorian themes or the resale of Old Masters. But now a fashionable interest was developing among progressive connoisseurs in acquiring the work of young British painters, an interest encouraged by the more enlightened London galleries, by the formation of new groups of artists such as the London Group or the New English Art Club, and by the coming together in loose assemblies of intellectuals and aesthetes. Such an assembly was the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, one venue for which was the Bedford Square home of the startling Lady Ottoline Morrell. The Contemporary Arts Society, formed by Lady Ottoline and Roger Fry in 1910 to acquire the work of up-and-coming artists for national collections, was a product of the new outlook.
Not all the collectors were wealthy enough to indulge their enthusiasm at will. Some, like the ‘prodigal collector’ Michael Sadler, who had been Steward of Christ Church, Oxford, in the days when the Reverend C. L. Dodgson – Lewis Carroll – had been a tiresome Curator of the Common Room, and who was now Chancellor of Leeds University, had to restrict their collecting to the use of such cash as they could raise extra to their emoluments. Edward Marsh was one of these. Although not at all wealthy, he was the recipient in addition to his salary of a fossil pension which had unexpectedly descended to him from a ‘mad aunt’ and which was paid periodically on account of a distant forebear, the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, assassinated in the House of Commons in 1812. This surprising bounty was used by Marsh to buy paintings, originally the conventional old masters, but now from ‘all those bloody artists’ as Rupert Brooke described them.*
Stanley was encouraged to display Apple Gatherers at the Contemporary Arts Society’s summer exhibition of 1913 at the Goupil Galleries – the galleries in which the young Vincent van Gogh had once worked as an assistant. The significance of the painting was quickly spotted. Among the visitors was the painter Henry Lamb, then twenty-eight or so, who wrote to congratulate Stanley. The Gauguinesque influence in the painting appealed to Lamb, whose own work, particularly of Breton fisher-folk, was perhaps similar in style. He was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group at the time that Clive Bell was acting as buyer for the Contemporary Arts Society. Lamb and others confidently expected that Bell would agree to the purchase of Stanley’s painting for £100, wealth to the young artist. But Bell, obsessed with his art theories, vetoed the purchase.* There was consternation at the decision, and Lamb was so incensed on Stanley’s behalf that although by then painting in the west of Ireland he wrote to offer £30. Sydney recounts in his diary the family delight: ‘Stan corroborated the happy news that Florence brought me last night. He has had an offer of £30 for his picture the Apple Gatherers from a Mr Lamb. I am so glad about this.’4
Stanley had not yet met Lamb and knew little of him or the intrigues about the painting. So he not unnaturally assumed that Lamb had offered the £30 because he admired the painting; which he did, but this was not the reason for the offer. Lamb felt that an injustice had been done to a young and worthwhile painter. Although he could ill afford the £30, he ventured on the purchase because he was convinced he could resell the painting at a higher price and thereby blaze abroad the obtuseness of a self-appointed arbiter of taste. In much the same way he had taken up public cudgels the previous year in a battle with French officialdom to support young Jacob Epstein’s controversial tomb in Paris of Oscar Wilde.
Stanley delivered the canvas on 3 November to Lamb’s London studio at the Vale of Health Hotel, characteristically insisting on precise details of how to get there.5 The Vale of Health had been developed in a restful hollow of Hampstead Heath – Leigh Hunt had once lived there and the young Keats wrote poetry there – and the subsequent hotel included artists’ studios arranged in pairs each side of a central staircase. Lamb’s was on the third floor. Outside, lawn terraces overlooked the Heath and a small lake, a scene which forms the view through the window in Lamb’s celebrated portrait of Lytton Strachey.6 However, it was not long before Londoners discovered the hotel’s position on the edge of ‘Appy ‘Ampstead ‘Eath and turned it into a holiday pub with a funfair adjacent and drunken fighting at closing time.
None of this troubled the steely and imperturbable Lamb, who reported to friends his first meeting with Stanley with a mixture of amusement and astonishment. As Lamb took Stanley that afternoon round the galleries of London, he who had spent years in France worshipping in the studios of painters he admired, suddenly found himself elevated to the status of a respected guru. They called at the imposing Chelsea home of Darsie Japp, who had overlapped with Stanley at the Slade in 1908 – 9 and who had already bought his Two Girls and a Beehive.7 Stanley was awed by Japp’s background, prosperity and savoir-faire. To him Japp, like Lamb, ‘knew everything’.
A bemused Lamb sent Apple Gatherers to Michael Sadler in Leeds, suggesting £60 and assuring Stanley that he would give him the extra. Stanley, who had accepted with equanimity the rejection of the painting, was surprised and gratified, and told the Raverats: ‘Lamb has sent the preliminary payment of £30. If he has to sell it – and he thinks he will – any profit he makes by so doing he will give me. He is very good. He said: “What can you expect from these fashion-mongers?” But I do not altogether blame the Society.’8
Worried that it was lack of ready cash which was preventing Lamb from being able to retain a painting he admired, Stanley courteously told Lamb in his quaint ‘business-letter’ style:
I feel crossed [pulled in two directions] about that picture because all the time I am wanting money I am wanting you to keep the picture. You understand I can wait. You see, for another year or so I shall not be having to spend a lot – I seldom do – and if I live as I have been doing until now I shall be able to get through without danger. I tell you that I do not worry about money but I [have to] think about it.9
Sadler was prepared to offer only fifty guineas, a sum he had recently received for some extra-mural work. But in the meantime Edward Marsh had come forward as a bidder. At the instigation of Mark Gertler he had been keen to acquire a Stanley Spencer work. Apple Gatherers was in his sights when Stanley and Gertler fell out over their opinions of Cézanne. Marsh felt he could not offend Gertler, whose work he equally admired, and had tactfully to wait until the tiff exhausted itself. He then invited Stanley to spend a weekend at his apartment in Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Stanley was impressed: ‘I spent a weekend with Eddie Marsh. I had Darsie Japp and Gaudier [Brzeska] for dinner one day and Gertler and a man named Nash* the next. … Marsh took me to tea at a Miss Nesbitt’s; the elder of the two Miss Nesbitts is very nice. She is an actress and she seems to be so unlike what I imagined an actress to be.’10 Cathleen Nesbitt was then on the threshold of her long and distinguished stage career. She was deeply in love with Rupert Brooke.
It must have been on that occasion that Marsh ventured to Stanley his wish to purchase Apple Gatherers. Like Sadler, he could not offer more than fifty guineas and Stanley would have to wait for payment until the next allocation of the Perceval pension. Stanley reported the offer to Lamb. He let Stanley decide. Stanley chose Marsh.†
The deal was completed in December. Marsh hung the painting in the small guest bedroom of his flat. It joined his embryo collection of contemporary artists – Augustus John, Duncan Grant, Mark Gertler – among his considerable collection of quiet eighteenth-and nineteenth-century works. Seeing them there Paul Nash commented: ‘Apparently there has been a recent phase among the English progressives which might be called “The Apotheosis of the Dwarf”. Groups of dwarves by Gertler and Spencer seemed to menace me from every wall.”14 Rupert Brooke, returning from Tahiti in June of 1914 and staying in the guest room, promptly christened the painting ‘the Bogeys’. This, thought Marsh, deflated, was ‘a disappointing reaction’.15
But for Stanley these were halcyon years of both hope and accomplishment. He remained at Fernlea but acquired a ‘studio’, Wistaria Cottage, a then empty Georgian house at the east end of the High Street in need of structural repair. He rented it from his cousins the Hatches for eighteen pence a week, and liked it for the quiet and for the light from the east-facing rear windows which overlooked the extensive gardens of St George’s Lodge as they sweep down to a branch of the Thames at Odney Common, a location in which he was to set his Zacharias and Elizabeth (1913–14).
The family visited frequently. Will would come over from Cologne in the summer breaks while Johanna joined her family in Berlin. Harold and his wife Natalie – a dancer from Gibraltar were occupied in light orchestral work, abundant then. Horace’s conjuring took him on music-hall engagements at home and overseas. Annie remained reluctantly but dutifully at Fernlea, taking charge of a succession of live-in maids or domestics, for Ma was now confined at times to a bathchair which Stanley would cheerfully push the three miles or so into Maidenhead and back. Florence had married a Cambridge don, J. M. Image, brother to Selwyn Image, Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and an expert on stained glass. Sydney, having worked like a Trojan to matriculate, was overwhelmed by the delights of scholarship, for he had been accepted as a divinity student at Oxford. Percy remained an administrator with his London building firm, and kept a fraternal eye on Gilbert, who was starting his Slade course and, like Sydney, back at Fernlea in vacations.
Stanley’s acquaintance with Henry Lamb continued: ‘I have seen a lot of Lamb recently when I was having my teeth done a few weeks ago. … He had me at his place and he played me – God alone knows what he didn’t play me. I went there twice, and he did heaps of Beethoven, the Diabelli Variations. I was glad to hear a lot of Mozart16 [with J. S. Bach, Stanley’s favourite composer]. His playing is very good; he gets everything clear.’ ‘Getting everything clear’ – vital to Stanley, in music, in literature, in art, in vision.
Both Gilbert and Stanley were attracting the attention of cognoscenti. Several brought excitement into the lives of Ma and Pa by asking if they could call to see the artists at work. Edward Marsh was followed by Henry Lamb, who during a stay at Marlow walked over to Cookham in March of 1914 and for the first time saw Stanley on his home ground. On 30 May of that long hot summer he was in Cookham again on a ramble with Percy, Gilbert and Stanley, during which Percy took them birdwatching, and ‘told the tale of the birds’. During the visit Gilbert showed him his final painting in a trio he called The Seven Ages of Man. Lamb was so impressed that he submitted it on Gilbert’s behalf to the Contemporary Arts Society. It was Lady Ottoline Morrell’s turn to act as buyer. To the family’s joy she chose it in June for purchase at £100.* Thus Gilbert achieved the success so narrowly denied Stanley. Lamb promptly wrote to Gilbert to warn him that at their next meeting the drinks were on him.
Intrigued to meet the brothers, Ottoline herself came with her husband the Liberal MP, Philip Morrell, by train in July for tea at Fernlea and a walk along the Thames with the family. Stanley had just finished his first oil self-portrait, in which he painted himself in a mirror tilted to see part of the ceiling. The effect is to emphasize the jaw and mouth. Did the Morrells, one wonders, sense that in the set of the face and the quest of the eyes, the owner was beginning to see visions denied to many?†
During the visit there was, according to Sydney, ‘keen discussion’ of Mozart’s music, and ‘much fun’ over the taking of group photographs, Ottoline being an enthusiastic photographer. The Morrells stunned the Spencers by airily hailing a local taxi for the return journey. A few weeks later Ottoline, having been offered the use of Lady Ripon’s box at Covent Garden, reciprocated by inviting the Spencers to a Mozart opera. Evening dress was required. Ma was no problem, and Pa had an aged dress suit. Ottoline arranged for Gilbert to be pinned into one of Philip’s, while Stanley disappeared into Edward Marsh’s, which he had lent for the purpose. The procession of the party into the opera-house was a spectacle long-remembered with hilarity by the participants.
Darsie Japp was another welcomed visitor. He had previously visited, and walked ‘twenty miles into Buckinghamshire’ with Stanley; the Thames at Cookham forms a boundary between Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. On their return to Fernlea they were given boiled eggs for tea by Ma, a simple fare which Japp enjoyed, for, he told Stanley, ‘I shall have plovers’ eggs tonight.’22 In August Henry Lamb visited again. Will was there from Germany. Sydney captures in his diary for August the echoes of that last summer before the impact of war: ‘Yesterday Henry Lamb came down and spent some hours with us. We walked to Odney, then to Cliveden. … Suddenly we all concluded we wanted to bathe. So Gil fetched towels and Guy Lacey came with us. The water was delicious. Coming home, Lamb begged Will to play the Hammerklavier Sonata.’
Significant though music was to both Henry Lamb and Stanley, it was a mutual recognition of the importance of art which drew together in friendship this otherwise contrasting pair. For all his more worldly literacy, savoir-faire and sophistication, Lamb seems to have shared with Stanley those moments of self-doubt, even of despair, which all artists suffer. But whereas Lamb’s bouts of despondency would become prolonged, Stanley’s natural buoyancy would quickly lift him to the surface. Perhaps Lamb occasionally needed the help of such optimism from his new friend. Eight years older than Stanley, he was a son of Horace Lamb, a distinguished professor of mathematics, later knighted. He had almost completed the medical course intended for him when he suddenly abandoned it, married the notoriously sensual model Nina Forrest, his ‘Euphemia’ – it was said to be a forced marriage – and went to Paris to study art, particularly under Augustus John. There his marriage disintegrated. He returned to England in 1911 to help extricate John from a relationship with Ottoline Morrell which was becoming tiresome. A slim, pale man, according to Lady Ottoline he was as fascinating to women as he was attracted to them. But essentially he was a man of wide cultural, social, musical and artistic sensibilities. He and Stanley shared an honesty of purpose and a clarity of outlook which all their lives resented pretension. When they met it, their reactions differed. Where Stanley would rant or grumble in protest, Lamb would pick up his lance and charge. The jousting blow he delivered to Clive Bell over the Apple Gatherers affair was not mortal, but at least gave him the satisfaction of displaying his contempt. Neither he nor Stanley was greatly interested in material possession, nor in money save as the means to artistic freedom. But both remained in thrall, despite all obstacles, to the ‘divine fire’.
Artistically, Stanley’s prospects were encouraging. His work was increasingly recognized among connoisseurs, even if not always for the reasons he intended. Materially, it sold. By 1914 he told Gwen: ‘I have £52 in the bank and I think I shall take the money I have in the Post Office Savings bank and make a deposit account at the London County & Westminster Bank where I already have a current account. I think you get 4 per cent interest.’23 He also asks Gwen’s advice on whether he should increase his contribution to the family housekeeping; he was paying his mother £1 a month, perhaps £10 a week now. Interesting projects were in the offing. In 1913 Jacques and Gwen Raverat had made moves to get Stanley and Eric Gill involved in illustrating and lettering a version of the four gospels. Gill, however, declined the project as too onerous, and the Raverats, it seems, were modifying it to discussions of an illustrated version of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, with drawings by Stanley, woodcuts by Gwen, layout by Jacques and lettering by Gill. Rupert Brooke was urging Edward Marsh to promote a theatrical venture with text by himself, scenery by Stanley, and Cathleen Nesbitt as the leading actress.24 Marsh had already in 1912 published the first of the anthologies of contemporary verse he called Georgian Poets. Stanley enjoyed the volume – ‘Marsh gave me a book of English poets. I like Rupert Brooke because he knows what teatime is’25 – and suggested a companion series of ‘Georgian painters’ to include Gertler, Currie, Nash, the Spencers, Seabrooke, Roberts, Rosenberg, Nevinson, Wadsworth and Gaudier-Brzeska. In addition Stanley was diverting Jacques Raverat’s aborted four gospels project towards an associated scheme which was gradually to assume dominance for him in later life: the building of a long gallery – ‘chapel’ – in which the artists’ paintings would illustrate the Life of Christ in terms of their own developing experiences through life.
But all were to come to naught. The times were too troubled. Rupert Brooke, due with Jacques Raverat to join friends on a camping holiday at Helston in Cornwall, sends Stanley (‘Dear Cookham’) a letter which sums up the feelings of the perplexed young men:
I wish I knew about painting. I’ve left Raymond Buildings for months. I don’t know when I shall be back. I’m glad I was there when you came. I’m going sailing and walking with Jacques for ten days or so. At least I want to. But this damned war business. … If fighting starts I shall have to enlist or go as a correspondent, I don’t know. It will be Hell to be out of it; and Hell to be in it. I’m so depressed about the war that I can’t talk, think or write coherently. God be with you.26
He never made his trip to Cornwall.
