Paint and Prejudice

By C. R. W. Nevinson

The autobiography of a painter who has managed to keep himself a storm center for more than one reason. His studies, types of work, his friends, enemies, quarrels, his work as an official war artist for England, and the results of those paintings, his two visits to America and what came of that, his comments, criticisms, observations of people, art and life, all make interesting reading. The appeal of the book is not confined to the artistically minded.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Mar 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781446545607

Book preview

PREJUDICE

1

On sort, on crie, c’est la vie

I CAME out on a sultry night of 13 August, 1889, and wailed piteously and lustily. Two battling cats squalled in through the open window of the room, fell into and polluted a bathful of water which was meant for other purposes, and fled noisily out again into the night. The witches had come early to see the brood, and I greeted them stormily.

The nurse had come on from another case and ignored the quarantine into which she had been put. She gave my mother a fever, and this later caused weaning to be difficult. Psychologists of today say that these shocks may be responsible for much of my character. I accept their views: it is always comforting to have somebody to blame.

My childhood is half forgotten. When eventually I learned to talk it was in three languages: German, French, and English. For some reason I invented two imaginary dogs who were my constant companions. One, called Hampstead, was my guide, philosopher, and friend. The other, known as Herod, was evil company, but extremely useful, as I held him responsible for all my crimes. Even today their names stamp them. For those few who read their Bibles the name of Herod must still stand for wickedness; while Hampstead is known throughout the world as representing just what is right and proper. In addition to this early appreciation of values I was truly Trinitarian in my beliefs and endowed my imaginary beings with only three legs. But those creatures were my very own, and when Canon Barnett heard of them from my mother and inquired after their health I suddenly destroyed them, disconcerting the poor gentleman by informing him that they were all horrid lies and rebuking him for encouraging me to speak of them.

Our house was in John Street, since re-christened Keats’s Grove, and was an old, white, Hampsteadean monument of stucco, dampness, bad plumbing, and immense kitchens set in a garden of lilac and may. Opposite was Keats’s cottage, a place of pilgrimage; behind was the Freemason’s Arms, where the shrieks of ejected drunks at midnight made ’Appy ’Ampstead what it was. Beside us were the Asquiths, the father then a rising barrister, and on one occasion I nearly lost an eye through an arrow which had been shot into the air by one of our junior neighbours. Perhaps the archer was Elizabeth, now Princess Bibesco.

Shortly after this escape the Thames froze over and I was taken to see the ox roasted near Waterloo Bridge. I remember being struck by the great number of sea-gulls near the Adelphi and being told that this was the first time they had come so far inland. I then became the pride of the pond, on skates. In those days the Hampstead Ponds stretched right down to the bottom of Keats’s Grove.

Although both my father and my mother came from old English families, I was brought up in a spirit of internationalism. My father had only lately given up a post he had held as a professor at Jena; his friend and neighbour Professor Goodwin, the classical scholar, was more than pro-German, like many people in those days; while my mother’s French was as correct as her English. Both my parents were as much at home in Europe as they were in London. Our servants were usually German or French.

Unlike most artists, I was born into the most exquisite and intellectual ambience, and in my early years at home I was surrounded by scholarship and all the brilliance and wit of the nineties. Fin de siècle was a phrase getting almost as tiresome as mot juste. The Fulleyloves would come down to repeat the latest bon mot of Whistler or of Oscar Wilde, and Mrs. Fulleylove would linger to tell us of the bold bad doings of The Langham, the famous art club, and how some artist was carrying on with a model or two. Nobody worried about my long ears.

Gordon Craig lived somewhere near with Martin Shaw, and I heard a good deal about them.

I was sent to a kindergarten school, but I have little recollection of it beyond the fact that I met the daughters of some R.A. architects and that my mother was in a white fury because their parents had not returned a call. It seemed that they lived in Upper Hampstead and that my father was only a literary man with no academic honour. The eighteen-nineties had as much snobbery as the nineteen-thirties, I well remember that; and some of the precious aesthetes of Kensington, the Adelphi, and Well Walk would often roll their eyes in horror because my mother went to work among the lower orders at Toynbee Hall and taught them French. I must have been completely beyond the pale, for in addition to this my father was secretary to the London Playing Fields Association and an officer of a cadet corps in the East-end; and the docks, the lower river, and Whitechapel High Street were as familiar to me as my native heath, an early experience for which I have always been grateful, as in consequence I have no English fear of the poor or the uneducated.

In due time I went to a large school, a ghastly place from which I was rapidly removed, as I had some sort of breakdown owing to being publicly flogged, at the age of seven, for giving away some stamps which I believed to be my own. I was described not only as a thief but as a fence. From this moment I developed a shyness which later on became almost a disease. During my sufferings under injustice a conflict was born in me, and my secret life began.

Shortly afterwards I was sent to University College, where I rapidly recovered from the immediate effects of this experience and became a normal, healthy child, quick at learning, with a passion for engineering, and a capacity for painting imaginary and historical subjects which were so far from bad that I was eventually given a prize by Professor Michael Sadler, representing the Board of Education.

Meanwhile we had moved to a modern house in Parliament Hill. My father had now became a journalist, and when the Greco-Turkish war broke out he covered it for H. W. Massingham, who was then editor of the Daily Chronicle. For a time my life was quiet and nearly orthodox. I worked steadily and nothing much happened until the outbreak of war with the Boers, when my father was seen at pro-Boer meetings on Parliament Hill, at which all manner of cranks were present. Morris, the slum reformer, was one of them, and I think another was G. B. Shaw. Whether my father was present in his capacity as a journalist or as a pro-Boer made no difference to the young men of Hampstead. I became a pariah and several times was thrown into handy ponds by patriots. On one such occasion I returned home soaked and sick at heart to find my mother in a state of ecstatic delight because Lloyd George had been roughhoused when he attempted to address a pro-Boer meeting at Birmingham. Her jingoism did little to revive my dampened spirits.

Fortunately my father soon left for South Africa as a war-correspondent and was besieged in Ladysmith. I got accustomed to seeing Nevinson in the newspapers and on the placards, and was grateful indeed that I could now walk alone without fear of further persecution from Kipling-minded beggars.

But I was soon to learn that patriots are not the only misguided people in the world. Full of anticipation I went with my mother to France, where I saw the Dieppe of Aubrey Beardsley, Sickert, and Conder. To my great surprise I also had soda water squirted over me and fish thrown at me for being an English pig. However, in spite of black looks and threats, we went on to Paris, where in our hotel at the Odéon I first saw electric light. At that time three-horse buses used to run from this point to Montmartre, and the band played nightly in the Luxembourg Gardens in a pavilion illuminated by fairy lights, while les étudiants would leap about in wild serpentines. Because of my mother most of my time was spent in Notre-Dame.

If I had little childhood I had far more liberty as a child than most of my contemporaries. The literary lights of the nineties did not mask their thoughts before me, and my father was behind the scenes. While quite young I knew the truth about many matters which were incomprehensible to the public, and I was trained in war long before my doomed generation. I went to a great many places, and from the press box saw a great many sights. The memory of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, which I viewed from Whitehall, is still vividly with me, and from that time until I left home for a public school I witnessed nearly every important event because of my father’s profession. In those days the Press was not, as it is now, an advertising medium rivalled only by Radio, with a dash of jazz news thrown in for relish. It was a respected institution which attracted brilliant men. But that was when truth meant more than circulation and before it was decreed that as women take more quack medicines and buy more clothes than men they must dominate the news. Women must be in everything these days, and if fifteen men were to fall to death from the dome of St. Paul’s we should certainly see the heading, Woman Spectator Faints.

In the days when journalists were literary men the papers were put to bed with hotter news and more truth at a far later hour than they are today, and my father seldom arrived home before three or four in the morning, usually having shared a hansom with Vaughan Nash, who was later to become Campbell-Bannerman’s secretary. I nearly always woke up when he came in, and this nocturnalism has left me with a complete indifference to night or day, whether for work or play. When I was at school I was out of the way, but when I was at home I was driven out early in order that my father could sleep. It was then I roved London in a motor-car which consisted of a plank, four pramwheels, and a stay rib or two that clicked against the spokes of the wheels and made a noise which I was satisfied resembled that of an internal-combustion engine. I am proud to say it was my own design. On this contraption I careered about the streets, travelling miles a day. As any mechanically propelled vehicle was an object of interest in those days, I was given a certain amount of attention, not always polite. I had a peculiar horror of pedestrianism, a horror which persists to this day.

SELF-PORTRAIT. Tate Gallery (reproduced by permission). Presented by the late Margaret Wynne Nevinson

LONDON BRIDGES. Presented by Eugene Gallatin, Esq., to Metropolitan Museum, New York

Then one magic morning I became the possessor of a bicycle. They were the fastest things on the roads and a boy could be allowed to roam without the present fear that he may never return. At a music hall I had seen some trick cyclists and I practised hard in an attempt to copy them. In time I could ride on one wheel, stand on the saddle and on the handlebars, ride backwards and in reverse—feats I would never attempt now. But games always bored me. Instead of playing cricket or football I spent my time in exploring London, and my knowledge for a boy of my age became encyclopaedic.

Since an early age I had been receiving the best possible training in drawing from Fulleylove, R.I., the distinguished architectural water-colourists rival of David Murray, a pillar of The Langham club. He was an old and valued friend of the family and a fine tutor for any boy to have.

Gradually I had become familiar with most of the current art exhibitions in London and Paris, and my instincts leaned more and more towards painters and painting. During this period I was happy and industrious. Sometimes I stayed with the Massinghams in Grosvenor Road, near the Houses of Parliament, and once I painted from their window a landscape of the Thames with the Doulton factory on the other side of the water. It must have had something in it, for it was described in a whisper as a Maeterlinck landscape. How I wish that now, when I have a greater technical accomplishment, I could do industrial scenes with the same lyrical quality.

At about this time I was beginning to discover that conformity to other people’s opinions was necessary for happiness. My mother, always a pioneer, was shingled, and she used distemper instead of wall-papers. She could not abide Nottingham lace curtains and Victorian knick-knacks, and our home was full of Italian primitives in reproduction, pre-Raphaelites, and English water-colours. Therefore I was booed in the streets because our house looked different from the others.

Then came the débâcle. I was sent to Uppingham.

My mother, like other people, was influenced by the appalling jingoism of the South African War, and by the fanatic and almost music-hall patriotism that found its expression in the celebrations over the relief of Mafeking, when, draped in red, white, and blue, we wandered from Ludgate Circus to Piccadilly ringing a dinner bell.

Before that, when Ladysmith was relieved, my father had returned on short leave before going to Pretoria, and there is no doubt he was impressed by the charm and brilliance of the Army staff, and the nobility and altruism that seemed to be founded on the public-school spirit. It was much later on in life that he became Socialist. In those days he was a polished Englishman of culture, and said he wanted me to go to Shrewsbury, his old school, and on to Balliol, if not into the Army itself.

Perceiving that I had little interest in the classics, but was enthralled by modern mechanics, and above all by the internal-combustion engine, my mother compromised and in my father’s absence chose Uppingham. It was a great public school with the traditions of Tring, and it was more modern than other public schools of that time. Science was not regarded merely as stinks, and music and painting were not looked upon as crimes. In fact David, a German pupil of Richter, was almost head master owing to the importance in which music was held.

I had no wish to go to any such school at all, but nevertheless Uppingham did seem to be the best. Since then I have often wondered what the worst was like. No qualms of mine gave me an inkling of the horrors I was to undergo.

Bad feeding, adolescence—always a dangerous period for the male—and the brutality and bestiality in the dormitories made life a hell on earth. An apathy settled on me. I withered. I learned nothing; I did nothing. I was kicked, hounded, caned, flogged, hairbrushed, morning, noon, and night. The more I suffered, the less I cared. The longer I stayed, the harder I grew.

I attended endless divine services; listened to strange sermons delivered by doctors of divinity in which Englishmen were confused with God, Nelson with Jesus Christ, Lady Hamilton with the Virgin Mary. The German Fascists of today are fed on no greater confusion of patriotism and religion. English nationalism was a creed which defined Americans as cads, Frenchmen as libertines, and the rest of the European races as a great deal worse—with the possible exception of Germans, who were regarded merely as dangerous rivals in trade.

As a result of my sojourn in this establishment for the training of sportsmen I possessed at the age of fifteen a more extensive knowledge of sexual manifestations than many a gentleman of the centre. It is possible that the masters did not know what was going on. Such a state of affairs could not and does not exist today. It is now the fashion to exclude the hearties from accusations of sexual interest or sadism or masochism; but in my day it was they, the athletes, and above all the cricketers, who were allowed these traditional privileges. Boys were bullied, coerced, and tortured for their diversion, and many a lad was started on strange things through no fault nor inclination of his own.

Games and the practice of games were the order of the day, but I was able to escape grim afternoons of chasing a ball by going to a studio to paint and draw, and by accompanying my art master in a gig to draw the lovely architecture of Rutland. I also joined the Cadet Corps, a move that made it possible for me to escape the main object of the school, which undoubtedly was cricket and perhaps rugby football. Fortunately, too, I was a good runner, and I seldom was whipped by the hunting crops of the hearties, who would ride beside us lashing out at any fellow with stitch or cramp. I was also able to follow the hounds on foot in that great hunting county and thereby escape many a flogging.

It is only just over thirty years ago, yet the latrines were outside and of the bucket-and-earth variety. That was bad enough; but in the cold weather the younger boys were employed to sit for ages to keep warm the seats for the seniors. The appalling food and the general atmosphere of misery gradually numbed me.

I think it was the kicking which finally settled matters. In this popular pastime known as the flying kick the cricket eleven wore their white shoes and any junior was captured and bent over for their sport. They took running kicks at our posteriors, their white shoes marking the score and a certain place counting as a bull. A period of this marksmanship left me inflamed and constipated, and eventually I developed acute appendicitis, an illness much dreaded in those days, as the operation was thought to be extremely dangerous.

Thank God, I became so ill that I was moved to London, where I suffered attack after attack. I was in a wretched state, septic in mind and body. Largely encouraged by my mother, who was always against surgeons and believed we should appear before our Maker in entirety, the doctors refused to operate. I became even worse, my life was despaired of, and then the problem was solved by an abscess and perforation. A difficult operation, but I survived.

I had made many cycling tours with my mother about England and throughout Brittany and France, and we had left hardly one church unvisited. In the art colonies at Pont Aven, Concarneau, Quimper, St. Pol, Caudebec, and St. Michel we always associated with the painters. The name of Monet had been familiar to me for some time. As my mother had been in Paris from about 1870 she was particularly versed in the Impressionist school; and I had already devoured, by the age of fifteen, the books of Camille Mauclair on Renoir, Manet, Degas, Sisley, and Pissarro, and had heard of Gauguin and Cézanne. I had even heard of the mad paintings of Van Gogh some five years before their discovery by Roger Fry and the dealers.

When we stayed at Pont Aven, Mortimer Menpes, whom Whistler dismissed with, Who is Menpes?, was perfecting the three-colour process; and one of the jokes of the family was that Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh had in the past presented him with some of their canvases, which he considered the work of ardent bunglers, so put aside and lost. I wonder how many thousands they would now be worth.

After my illness we went a Grand Tour to Spain, Northern Africa, Genoa, the Lakes, and Venice. I sketched day and night; but what was best of all, a German, an artist who was of some standing in Munich but whose name escapes me, was much struck with some seascapes, and gave me sound advice and encouragement.

During this period my father was abroad, chiefly in India, in Central Africa, or in Spain, reporting the Spanish-American war. My mother was then a very religious woman, and she was in perpetual indecision as to whether or not she should become a convert to Rome, a grave step at all times, but particularly for her, as she was the daughter of the Rector of St. Margaret’s at Leicester. She was not the kind to hold her peace during spiritual conflict, and this no doubt accounts for my wide knowledge of the Bible and of the various dogmas. But religion has always left me untouched, my public-school training having killed the mystic that lurks within me, though my intimate friends always say I will yet become an intensely religious man!

I had long been accustomed to an ecclesiastical atmosphere and was familiar with cathedral close life through frequent visits to my uncle, Canon Lloyd Jones, at Peterborough, and to my paternal grandfather at Leicester. I have recollections of an old gentleman sitting in a brougham wrapped in shawls, an antiquarian whose house was packed with Chinese furniture, dragons, and other treasures and whose walls were graced by Italian paintings and Constable landscapes. He used to take me on visits to county families near Leicester, where the tradition of the squire lingered on, where every form of class snobbery was worshipped, and where reverence to birth was paid in a way which is now only to be found among the paying guests of Kensington boarding-houses and writers for The Times or Daily Express.

What would they think, those Nevinsons who lie in peace in our old cathedrals or those others on the soldier side of the family, what would they think if they knew we were now called Jews?

Possibly through my life in the streets I have never been class conscious. At Uppingham I was often in trouble because I had been seen talking to cads—boys or men of the county town who were not considered so well-off as the sons of the newly rich of Yorkshire or Lancashire, a type peculiarly numerous in the school at that time. Some of the little brutes had as much as a pound a day for pocket money. The profiteers in the Boer War did almost as well as in the last one.

The gross Edwardian days were in full swing, and everyone was conscious that money was rapidly taking the place of breeding, birth, and culture, and that achievement in the arts or science was about to count for nothing. Even Americanism, as we know it, is not new.

By this time I had become the most hideous, bespotted, cracked-voiced Goop it is possible to imagine; broken in spirit, overwhelmed by a thousand conflicts, bursting with energy, yet indescribably bored. I devoured every kind of literature, with a partiality towards the morbid. I was suicidal, a tendency which shocked my mother, but I can understand now that my spirit had been knocked out of me.

I had an adoration for the theatre and especially for musical comedy, and I used to stand in the queue ridiculously dressed in a white starched collar and shirt, with a school tie and a huge straw hat of black and white, for such shows as The Belle