A Crisis of Brilliance E-Book

David Boyd Haycock

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington were five of the most exciting, influential and innovative British artists of the twentieth century. From diverse backgrounds, they met in the years before the Great War as students at the Slade School of Art, where they formed part of what their teacher Henry Tonks described as the school's last 'crisis of brilliance'. To the Bloomsbury Group critic Roger Fry they were 'les jeunes' -- the 'Young British Artists' of their day. As their talents evolved, they became Futurists, Vorticists and 'Bloomsberries', and befriended the leading writers and intellectuals of the time, from Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke to D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. They led the way in fashion with their avant-garde clothes and haircuts; they slept with their models and with prostitutes; their tempestuous love affairs descended into obsession, murder and suicide. And as Europe plunged into the madness of the 'War to end Wars', they responded to its horror with all the passion and genius they could muster.

Leseprobe

Praise for A Crisis of Brilliance

‘Haycock manages the drama in this tale with such skill that his story unfolds like a well-plotted novel … Formidably well-informed, he redraws the artistic map of the period before, during and just after the First World War. Never before have the private vicissitudes of these artists’ lives been made so real, or their exuberance so vivid’

Frances Spalding, Daily Mail

‘What gives David Boyd Haycock’s book its freshness is that, through skilful use of letters and memoirs left by his five subjects, he injects it with the anxiety, ambition, self-doubt and jealousy that possessors of youth and talent are fated to feel.’

John Carey, Sunday Times

‘Haycock’s narrative of this entangled, war-defined group is so strong that it often has the force of a novel, hard to put down … We should call for a joint exhibition of [their] work, to complement the moving portrayal of their lives in this engrossing and enjoyable book’

Jenny Uglow, Guardian

‘There is something endlessly appealing about a group of artists behaving badly while simultaneously creating their best work … Haycock’s research provides rich context, with personal letters supplying detail to every squabble or concern’

Metro

The Slade Picnic, 1912

Seated in the front row (from the left) are Dora Carrington, Barbara Hiles, Richard Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Edward Wadsworth, Adrian Allinson (with dog) and Stanley Spencer. Dorothy Brett sits behind Gertler and Nevinson. Kneeling to the left of the group is Isaac Rosenberg, whilst the man in shirtsleeves in the back row is David Bomberg. Standing to his left, arms crossed, is Professor Fred Brown.

DAVID BOYD HAYCOCK

A CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE

To Susannah and Nathaniel

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1: Stanley Spencer

Chapter 2: Mark Gertler and Henry Tonks

Chapter 3: Richard Nevinson

Chapter 4: ‘The Slade Coster Gang’

Chapter 5: Paul Nash and Dora Carrington

Chapter 6: Roger Fry and the Post-Impressionists

Chapter 7: ‘This Anarchic & Egoistical Condition’

Chapter 8: ‘That Awful Ghost Tonks’

Chapter 9: ‘The Din of Happiness’

Chapter 10: ‘A Most Wonderful Country’

Chapter 11: Eddie Marsh and Les Jeunes

Chapter 12: ‘Georgian Painters’

Chapter 13: ‘No Ordinary War’

Chapter 14: ‘A Valuable Man’

Chapter 15: ‘Ever Busy Yet Ever At Rest’

Chapter 16: ‘Strident Lies and Foul Death’

Chapter 17: War Artists

Chapter 18: Armistice

Epilogue: ‘Another Life, Another World’

List of Abbreviations

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Plates

Copyright

List of Illustrations

Front cover image

Paul Nash, Ruined Country: Old Battlefield, Vimy, near La Folie Wood, 1918: Imperial War Museum.

Back cover images

Nevinson, Self-Portrait, 1911, oil on panel: Tate Gallery.

Gertler, Dora Carrington, 1912, gouache on paper: Edgar Astaire collection.

Spencer, Self-Portrait, 1914, red chalk on paper: Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead.

Rupert Lee, portrait of Paul Nash, 1913, pencil on paper: NPG.

Mark Gertler, 1917, photograph: NPG.

Frontispiece

The Slade Picnic, 1912, photograph: Tate Gallery.

Colour Plates (Section 1)

Gertler, Still Life with Melon, 1912, oil on canvas: private collection (Bridgeman)

Gertler, Allegory, c.1910: private collection (Bridgeman).

John Currie, Some Later Primitives and Madame Tisceron, c. 1910: Stoke on Trent Art Gallery.

Spencer, John Donne Arriving in Heaven, 1911, oil on canvas: private collection.

Nevinson, Self-Portrait, 1911, oil on panel: Tate Gallery.

Carrington, Female Figure Lying on her Back, 1912, oil on canvas: Strang Print Room, UCL.

Gertler, The Fruit Sorters, 1914, oil on canvas: New Walk Museum, Leicester City Museum Service.

Spencer, The Apple Gatherers, 1912, oil on canvas: Tate Gallery.

Gertler, The Rabbi and his Grandchild, 1913, oil on canvas: Southampton City Art Gallery.

Nash, Wittenham Clumps, c.1913, watercolour, ink and chalk on paper: Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle.

Spencer, Self-Portrait (1914), red chalk on paper: Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead.

Gertler, Dora Carrington, 1912, gouache on paper: Edgar Astaire collection.

Spencer, The Centurion’s Servant, 1914, oil on canvas: Tate Gallery.

Colour Plates (Section 2)

Gertler, The Merry-Go Round, 1916, oil on canvas: Tate Gallery.

Nevinson, La Mitrailleuse, 1916, oil on canvas: Tate Gallery.

Carrington, Giles Lytton Strachey, 1916, oil on panel: NPG.

Gertler, Gilbert Cannan and his Mill, 1916, oil on canvas: The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Carrington, The Mill House at Tidmarsh, Berkshire, 1918, oil on canvas: private collection.

Nash, Wire, 1918, ink, watercolour and chalk on paper: IWM.

Nevinson, Paths of Glory, 1917, oil on canvas: IWM.

Nash, The Mule Track, 1918, oil on canvas: IWM.

Spencer, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, 1919, oil on canvas: IWM.

Spencer, Swan Upping at Cookham, 1915–19, oil on canvas: Tate Gallery.

Nash, The Menin Road, 1918–19, oil on canvas: IWM

Monochrome images in body of text

Page8 Spencer as a boy with his family, c.1894, photograph: Kenneth Pople.

Page14 UCL, c.1915, photograph: Mary Evans Picture Library.

Page25 Mark Gertler aged about 15, photograph: Luke Gertler collection.

Page56 Spencer: The Fairy on the Water-Lily, 1909, pen and ink on paper: Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham.

Page77 Carrington, Self-portrait, c.1910, pencil on paper: NPG.

Page94 The Slade Maids, 1911, photograph, Tate Gallery.

Page98 Nevinson, Factories, 1913, IWM

Page110 Carrington(?), sketch portrait of Gertler, 1909–11, pencil on paper: NPG.

Page117 Gertler, Currie and Dolly Henry at the seaside, Ostend, 1912: photograph, Luke Gertler collection.

Page127 Nash, The Pyramids in the Sea, 1912, ink and watercolour on paper: Tate Gallery.

Page155 Rupert Lee, portrait of Paul Nash, 1913, pencil on paper: NPG.

Page181 Nash, Apple Pickers, 1914, chalk and watercolour on paper: Cecil Higgins Collection, Bedford.

Page186 Stanley, Gilbert and Par Spencer with Lady Ottoline Morrell, Cookham, 1914, photograph: NPG.

Page206 Nevinson in uniform, photograph: Michael Walsh.

Page224 Mark Gertler, 1917, photograph: NPG.

Page236 Stanley Spencer in uniform with his brothers, photograph: Kenneth Pople.

Page242 Carrington and Lytton Strachey, c.1916, photograph: Jane

Page265 Paul Nash in uniform, 1917, photograph: Tate Gallery.

Page272 Nevinson: Sweeping down on a Taube, lithograph: IWM.

Page273 Richard Nevinson, poster: IWM.

Page275 Nash, Rain: Lake Zillebeke, print: IWM.

Page277 The Western Front, Ypres, photograph: IWM.

Page279 Paul Nash, poster: IWM.

Preface

‘Ties of Friendship’

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

You said, “Through glory and ecstasy we pass;

Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,

When we are old, are old…” “And when we die

All’s over that is ours; and life burns on

Through other lovers, other lips,” said I,

– “Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!”

“We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.

Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said;

“We shall go down with unreluctant tread

Rose-crowned into the darkness!” …Proud we were,

And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.

– And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

The Hill’, Rupert Brooke

Plenty of artists, it has been observed, ‘have tolerably easy, successful lives’. In 1943, however, Randolph Schwabe looked back some forty years to his student days at the Slade School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in London, and reflected that there were many amongst those he had known then who had died ‘before the full growth and flowering that might have been expected from their talents’. It was impossible, he concluded, ‘to avoid some insistence of tragedy. Suicide, madness, disease and war exacted a heavy toll on them… Much talent and some genius were born into their generation, and their loss, even for those who were not bound to them by ties of friendship, is deplorable in its tale of waste and unfulfilment.’1

What ‘change in character’, Schwabe wondered, ‘might have resulted in the English School’ if all those young Slade students had lived out their natural lives?2 Yet it might also be asked: how was the early twentieth-century English School forged by the very intensity of those events, experiences and personalities? Certainly there were those who were lost too young; but there were also those who – through the stimulation and tribulation of the tremendous events of the years prior to 1919 – rose to greater heights than they might otherwise have achieved. It is, perhaps, the paradox of those times.

The men and women who passed through the doors of the Slade between 1890 and 1910 included such famous (and now not-so-famous) names as Adrian Allinson, Vanessa Bell, David Bomberg, Dorothy Brett, Dora Carrington, John Currie, Mark Gertler, Duncan Grant, Spencer Gore, Gwen and Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Ambrose McEvoy, Paul Nash, Richard Nevinson, Ben Nicholson, William Orpen, William Roberts, Isaac Rosenberg, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth. Together, these men and women helped to make the Slade the foremost art school in England. In the opinion of the critic Frank Rutter, the Slade had eclipsed the Royal Academy in terms of its fertility in producing significant artists.

Whilst the Academy had ‘constantly bolstered up the pretensions of British painters’, Rutter wrote in 1922, the Slade’s professors and pupils ‘have always kept their eyes on what was being done at Paris’ – and it was Paris more than anywhere else that was at the centre of what was new and important in Western art in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth.3

The friends and contemporaries of these Slade artists – men and women who helped them to open their eyes to a wider world that transcended the conservativeness of Victorian and Edwardian England – numbered some of the most influential and famous writers, artists and intellectuals of the time. To offer another long list of eminent names, they included Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Gilbert Cannan, Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, T.E. Hulme, Aldous Huxley, John Maynard Keynes, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Edward Marsh, F.T. Marinetti, Lady Ottoline Morrell, John Middleton Murry, Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Those of the Slade artists who ventured further afield, to Paris, numbered Picasso, Modigliani and Lenin among their acquaintances.

All these names appear within the pages of this book, and what follows is a part of all their stories. But it is told through the experiences of five of the most closely linked and most successful of these young Slade students: Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Richard Nevinson and Stanley Spencer. All five have been written about before, but perhaps not with such detailed analysis of the most formative years of their lives, or with such close attention to the relationships that acted between them.

As I hope to show, these five – more particularly than any of their other contemporaries – were closely, even intimately, inter-connected. All five were a part of what their Professor of Drawing, the irascible Henry Tonks, later described as the School’s second and last ‘crisis of brilliance’.* Together, they provide a remarkably clear insight into the period, and into the youthful experiences and struggles that help to create an artist – any artist.

Between 1910 and 1919 these five, together with their wider circle of contemporaries, loved, talked, and fought; they advised, admired, conspired, and sometimes disparaged each other’s artistic ambitions and creations. The Bloomsbury critic and sometime Slade lecturer Roger Fry dubbed them ‘les jeunes’: they were the Young British Artists of their day. They participated in the newest movements – the Neo-Primitives, the Futurists, the Vorticists, the Bloomsbury Group, the Omega Workshop – and brought havoc with their fights and fanfares in London’s Soho and Mayfair. They frequented (and sometimes redecorated) the capital’s most stylish cafés and restaurants, and founded their own nightclubs; they led the way in fashion with their avant-garde clothes, haircuts and unconventional, Bohemian lifestyles; they slept with models, with prostitutes, and with each other; on occasion their tempestuous love affairs descended into obsession, murder, and suicide.

This wide circle of artists and writers fought – and some of them died – in the War to end all Wars; or they turned their faces away from that awful carnage, and resisted it in the only way they knew how – with words, and with paint. The Great War is the culmination of this book for, as Paul Nash later reflected, the period after 1914 ‘was another life, another world’.4

But their story starts in quieter times: at Cookham, on the banks of the River Thames.

Notes

1 Schwabe (1943), 6: by the time he wrote these words, Schwabe was Professor of Drawing at the Slade.

2 Schwabe (1943), 9.

3 Rutter (1922), 14.

4 PN to GB, late July 1945, Abbott & Bertram (1955), 219.

* The first had been the earlier generation that included Augustus John, Ambrose McEvoy, William Orpen and Wyndham Lewis.

Chapter 1

Stanley Spencer

The Berkshire village of Cookham lies in a crook of the Thames a few miles upstream from Maidenhead and twenty-five miles west of London. In the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, in winter and spring it was a tranquil place, frequently cut off when the surrounding commons and water meadows flooded. But in summer the river sprang to life, thronging with pleasure seekers in punts, rowing boats, skiffs and paddle steamers. July saw the ancient ceremony of Swan Upping, when the Vintners’ and Dyers’ Companies claimed ownership of the swans between Blackfriars Bridge and Henley, gathering them in to mark their beaks: once for the Vintners, twice for the Dyers, and those left unmarked for the Queen. And in September there was Cookham Regatta, when the village was decorated with flags, and the trees decked with bunting and Chinese lanterns. Brass bands played, and the river filled with all manner of floating vessels.

It was these pleasures of the Thames that Jerome K. Jerome captured in 1889 in his comic novel, Three Men in a Boat:

We went through Maidenhead quickly, and then eased up, and took leisurely that grand reach beyond Boulter’s and Cookham locks. Cliveden Woods still wore their dainty dress of spring, and rose up, from the water’s edge, in one long harmony of blended shades of fairy green. In its unbroken loveliness this is, perhaps, the sweetest stretch of all the river, and lingeringly we slowly drew our little boat away from its deep peace.1

Had Jerome and his friends lingered longer in Cookham, perhaps to gather supplies from the village shop or pause for refreshments at the Old Ship Inn or the Bel and the Dragon Hotel, they would have passed on the High Street two tall, semi-detached Victorian brick villas. Fernlea and Belmont were the homes of two brothers and their families, and had been built by Cookham’s master builder – their father, Julius Spencer. In Cookham, everyone knew everyone else, and many local families were related: courtships and romances started as early as the village school, and Julius’s grandchildren could claim over seventy relatives in the neighbourhood.

Mirror images of each other, Fernlea and Belmont could be distinguished by the brass plate on the former’s front gate: ‘W. Spencer: Professor of Piano’. In the year Jerome’s novel was published William Spencer was forty-four years old and, as local church organist and resident music teacher, was a familiar sight around the village, out in all weather on his lady’s bicycle, music case slung over the handlebars, reciting aloud the works of his adored hero, the art critic and social reformer John Ruskin. William Spencer was an excitable, pious man with a sense of wonder that expressed itself in his fondness for music, poetry and astronomy, and in his intimate observations of nature: ‘I crossed London Bridge on Tuesday and could have stood for hours watching the flight of the seagulls – surely the acme of graceful motion’, he told one of his sons. ‘And yet the people passed by without a glance’.2

‘Par’ Spencer’s family was large, talented and musical; his greatest ambition was the success of his eldest son and namesake. A child prodigy, William junior could play preludes and fugues from memory on the family piano. Even before he could reach the pedals he was performing before the Duke of Westminster at Cliveden, the large country house across the Thames. Guests included the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), who presented the young virtuoso with a piano of his own. When he grew older Will progressed to the Royal College of Music in London, and gave evening recitals at Maidenhead, the family dressing up to hear him play. The Spencers were doing well: Par travelled regularly to London to serve as organist at St Jude’s, Whitechapel, and to give piano lessons to wealthy West Enders. There were concerts, servants and a nurse to look after the five children: what one of them later called ‘all the trappings of position’.3

Par did everything he could to further his eldest son’s musical success. In fact, with overbearing Victorian discipline, he did too much. Long hours of endless practice, together with Par’s ban on outdoor sports that might damage his son’s precious fingers, combined to undermine Will’s health, and he suffered a nervous breakdown. But again, only the best would satisfy Par – Will was sent to Thomas Holloway’s ‘Sanatorium for Curable Cases of Mental Disease’ at Virginia Water. This eventually proved too much for Mrs Spencer, however. Seeing that the hospital was nothing more than ‘a club for rich dilettantes with a turn for discussion and a belief that they had been reprieved from facing life outside’,4 she brought Will home to Cookham. Though she had saved her eldest son from a life of idle infirmity, the family’s fortunes were already broken. Financially spent, his ambitions shattered, according to his youngest son, Par Spencer ‘never quite got over the failure of his highest hopes, and buried himself and his disappointment more and more in his books.’5

It was into this ‘confusion of ambitions, high endeavour, disappointments and partial recovery’ that Mar and Par’s last children were delivered.6 Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham on 30 June 1891 and Gilbert in August the following year. With the money for a nanny eaten away by Will’s hospital fees, their teenage sister Annie took charge of the boys. Theirs would be a simple, unrestricted upbringing, as Gilbert later recalled, and the brothers were preciously close. Stanley later remembered how he once hit his younger brother, ‘not very hard’, but ‘Gil bellowed like a bull & then of course I cried. If Gil cried I cried & if I cried Gil cried. Mar comes rushing into the room, “What is it”, “I’ve hit him I have, I hit him I have, oh Gil”, “Oh Stan”, “Oh Gil”, “Oh Stan”.’

And Stanley recalled another time when he and his brother sat in their high chairs: ‘we were talking over things in general when Gil says very mysteriously “Stan, what are Angels?”, “Ow” says I very knowing and wise “Great big white birds wot pecks”. Gil after digesting this peered about for a white bird wot pecks’. His eyes fell on Annie: ‘so Gil outs with it “Is she an Angel?”, “No” says I very contemptibly “Not great big squashed fat things like her”.’7

The Spencer family, about 1894: Stanley and Gilbert stand by their mother.

On wet days the boys made their own entertainment indoors: they had only a few toys — an old jigsaw puzzle, a box of buttons, later some wooden bricks. They cut up pieces of paper to make figures to play with, opened with wonder huge old books of wallpaper samples, inhabiting their private imaginative world. Though they preferred to amuse themselves in the nursery, on fine days their sister took them on meandering walks round the village, which began to fascinate and entrance them. Sneaking into the mysterious garden of some grand old house, climbing trees and ‘swinging high into other lands’, Gilbert would long after recall how ‘the thrill of seeing bits of Cookham cropping up in strange places so unexpectedly never lost its charm for us.’8

As they grew older the brothers swam in the river, played football and cricket on the common, or hid unnoticed in dark corners of the village, watching their little world revolve around them. Their love of Cookham and its varied inhabitants meant everything to them – Gilbert swore that the villagers could be distinguished by the different sounds their shoes made on the road.9 And at the centre of it all was the church, where their brother William performed Bach on the organ – a sound like the joy of angels, said Stanley – and in whose graveyard they played among the tumbling tombstones of Cookham’s ancestral dead.10

Such was their love of home that a visit to another brother in Maidenhead left them miserable. Gilbert thought this fierce love of Cookham was inherited from their father: ‘With so much of his life now in the past, it was all he had to give us, but it was all we needed, or for that matter ever wanted.’11 When Par made £10 from a published edition of his poems (Verses, Grave and Gay), he invested the money in a range of ‘Everyman’ classics and established a lending library in Fernlea’s front room, employing Stan and Gil to paste labels in the books. It was opened to the public with expectant excitement – but nobody came. Such schemes were vivid illustrations of what Gilbert called Par’s ‘odd excitability and lack of control’.12 But he galvanised the young boys with his love of existence: ‘With him, there could be no excuse for idleness’, wrote Gilbert much later. ‘Father lived his life whole, and we too if we wished could follow his example out in the “world” – which for us and for him was still Cookham.’13

Mar was the rock on which the family stood, ‘strong willed and strong minded’, taking everything calmly in her stride – but it was Par the boys kissed goodnight.14 Returning home from London, he brought them presents – one penny ‘Books for the Bairns’: Brer Rabbit, Snow White, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress. After Annie had put them to bed she practised her viola in their room whilst downstairs Par continued his piano lessons. Melodies of Handel, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart floated up through the house, with occasionally an exasperated cry of criticism from Par: ‘You play the piano like one of your father’s cart horses!’15

This lively family life seemed to provide for everything. Meal times were an animated riot of discussion – passionate arguments about poetry, music or football whirling round the dining room. And, under Par’s critical eye, everyone played the piano, the focus of family occasions. Another focal point was religion. At first, Mar took her two youngest boys to the Wesleyan chapel – a fervent, emotional experience. Chapel was followed by prayer meetings, which could reach such a zealous pitch that Stanley felt close to breaking down. In a ‘wretched, clammy atmosphere’, the meetings ended with a man whispering, ‘Is there any poor wandering soul here tonight who has not heard the call of Jesus? He is passing by, passing by…’16

The feeling that Christ and his disciples wandered the neighbourhood was emphasised by Par’s Bible readings. He spoke with such conviction, Stanley later recalled, that it seemed as if the New Testament’s miraculous stories had happened in Cookham’s familiar streets.17 Their village became more than simply their home; it was, almost literally, their corner of Heaven.

When the chapel closed and the congregation moved to a new building in more distant Cookham Rise, Mar and the boys started worshipping at the Anglican church by the river. Stanley would later tell his brother that ‘through his pictures it was “Cookham Church at one end and Cookham Chapel at the other”.’18 It would be no surprise that religion became the all-encompassing theme of his life and art.

• • •

As Stanley and Gilbert grew older, the thorny question of their education arose. Par could not afford the cost of private school, and Mother held ‘snobbish objections’ to the local state school, where they would have mixed with the children of their lower-class neighbours. Par found a practical solution by opening his own school in the tin shed down next-door’s garden. A few other children from the ‘poorer élite’ of the village joined them, and for a while Par taught them himself. When this became too much he passed the children’s’ education on to two sisters in the village. Then, when they emigrated, Annie and another sister, Florence, became their teachers.

Though their education was rudimentary, it left the brothers free to develop much as they pleased. In fact, Gilbert thought it was the making of them. He firmly believed that a proper schooling would have ruined Stanley’s emerging imagination, his individuality, and his creative drive.

These were now manifesting themselves in drawing – a talent then largely unfamiliar to the musically orientated Spencer household.* There were almost no art books in the house, and his earliest inspiration were the illustrations in his children’s books, particularly those by Arthur Rackham, an artist with a vivid imagination for landscape scenes peopled with diaphanous fairies, luscious nymphs and dreadful monsters. Rackham’s illustrations for Gulliver’s Travels, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland remain amongst the finest in English children’s illustrations. Stanley made copies, and told Gilbert that one day he would like to draw like Rackham.19

On their walks around Cookham with Annie, at the fringes of Odney Common or by the moor, the boys sometimes encountered William Bailey, a local builder and talented ‘Sunday artist’ who painted atmospheric oils of local scenes and talked mysteriously about the ‘lost-and-foundness of things’.20 His daughter Dorothy was a painter and designer, and she gave them their first lessons in watercolours in her house across the road from Fernlea, where they saw more of Mr Bailey’s Cookham pictures.

William Bailey’s love of local scenes left an indelible mark on the young Spencer brothers. Stanley soon discovered that drawing things in Cookham – its buildings, its animals, its people, the river – somehow connected him even more closely to his beloved home. He first experienced this revelation when he discovered a dead thrush in the garden, the bird’s body limp but still warm. He spread out its wings and made a drawing. Though it was poorly done, ‘I felt a new kind of contact with life had been made: the Thrush had lived in our garden, had been in all sorts of ungetable places in our Pear tree, our Walnut tree, our Yew tree & all the places we weren’t allowed to go into next door’s gardens. I was drawing something that was to do with all those places.’21 This memory, as recalled in the 1930s, was of a discovery of enormous impact. It was the realisation that drawing could bring him even deeper into the almost mystical experience of his everyday surroundings. Through drawing, he could capture or recreate the feelings and experiences and emotions of his village life.

And this could be done not only by drawing the things he saw in Cookham, he discovered, but also by the things he imagined might happen there. An early drawing depicted Cookham’s Fire Brigade in their helmets and uniforms riding on the backs of snails along the cobbled stones outside the Bel and the Dragon Hotel. Done in black and red ink, Gilbert described it as ‘a miracle’ – and seriously intended, too. ‘Even at this early date, without perhaps being very aware of it, he had, I think, joined issue with his destiny.’22

For Gilbert, so aware of the great expectations their father had held for William, it was ironic that in their very midst, unnoticed, another talent was developing unfettered: ‘Will’s sacrifice on the altar of my father’s Victorian theories and rigid training of the young was not in vain if Stanley’s genius was left free.’23

• • •

Conscious that he must to do something serious about his youngest sons’ education or abandon them to a future of menial labouring jobs, Par finally decided to send Gilbert to a co-educational school in Maidenhead. He was less sure about what to do with Stanley, however, who was developing into a solitary, undersized young teenager prone to long walks, but with a heightening passion for drawing. Par was close friends with a local gentleman, Lord Boston, whose wife had studied at the Slade School of Art in London. Par showed her some of Stanley’s drawings, and although Lady Boston was not especially enthusiastic about the boy’s work, she invited him to come and draw with her twice a week. As Stanley’s work slowly improved, in 1907 she arranged for him to attend the Technical Institute in Maidenhead. Here for the first time he studied under professional guidance, making detailed copies from casts of antique sculpture. Stanley’s future was now clear: he would be an artist.

After a year’s schooling at Maidenhead Tech, Par considered sending Stanley to the radical new art school at Newlyn in Cornwall, founded by the painter Stanhope Forbes in 1899. Forbes encouraged painting out of doors, and had made his name with scenes from everyday French and English village life. It sounded an ideal place for Stanley. But it would have meant leaving Cookham, and most Spencers suffered excruciating homesickness. So Lady Boston suggested her old school instead: Stanley could catch the 8.50 morning train to London, and by catching the 5.08 from Paddington after lessons he could still be home in time for tea. It sounded perfect. But would the Slade take him?

University College, London, around 1910: the Slade’s buildings are just to the left of this picture

The Slade School of Art had been founded in 1871 by a series of endowments made by the will of the collector and antiquary Felix Slade. As well as establishing Slade Professorships at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, a substantial amount of money was left to found a similar Chair of Fine Arts and six scholarships at University College, London. The new School was situated in the attractive front quadrangle of UCL’s neo-classical building on Gower Street, Bloomsbury, about half a mile north of the British Museum. The first two London Slade Professors quickly established a tradition of fine draughtsmanship at the School, demanding that students draw from life models as well as from antique sculpture. The third Slade Professor, appointed in 1893, was Fred Brown, himself a former student of the School. An energetic man who at times happily walked all the way home from Gower Street to his home in Richmond, a student recalled his ‘general manner’ as ‘gruff and, superficially, discouraging’.24

As a young painter Brown had kept abreast of artistic developments in France, and was particularly influenced by French Impressionism. In 1886, along with a number of friends who had also studied in Paris, he founded the New English Art Club. Modelled on the Parisian Salon des Refusés, up to 1914 the NEAC was one of the few institutions for those British artists who wanted to exhibit their work outside the stuffier confines of the Royal Academy. Though by the turn of the century it had established itself as the new orthodoxy, it was here that many of Brown’s students would first display their work for public scrutiny.

On his appointment at the Slade Brown had invited one of his pupils, a gifted young doctor and anatomist with a predilection for art named Henry Tonks, to join him as Professor of Drawing. Another friend, the highly talented but painfully taciturn Philip Wilson Steer, he appointed as Professor of Painting. Then in 1895 Walter Russell, another of Brown’s former pupils, was appointed Assistant Professor. Together, these four men formed a close-knit company of friends, advocating realism in both drawing and painting. By 1907 a number of important British artists had passed through their tutelage; these talents included Augustus John, William Orpen, Wyndham Lewis and Spencer Gore. For a young student looking to learn to draw – and to draw well – it was the place in England to study. As an historian of the School has written, in the first years of the twentieth century, ‘The emphasis on the Slade tradition of draughtsmanship was uppermost: nothing more. In these conditions, and subject to whim or belief, students could be called neither good nor bad. They were either encouraged or discouraged’.25

In 1908 Par Spencer took a selection of his son’s drawings to show Brown and Tonks. They immediately saw the boy’s potential. In fact, they were so impressed that they waived the usual written entrance exam – which, given the poor state of his formal education, Stanley would probably have failed. Lady Boston generously paid the £10 termly fees, and his future now lay in London.

But Gilbert was apprehensive: ‘To be trained and yet not guided or steered was going to be the problem for my brother’. Fortunately at the Slade ‘this great danger in the period of training, which could disturb any young student, was avoided, since between the staff and the students there was compatibility. The Slade held a mirror in front of him, the like of which did not exist at home, and he saw himself among the forebears of his art in all their glory. It must have been a revelation to him, although in mood he had been prepared for this moment at home, in his experience of music and literature.’26

For Stanley, London was a revelation. Though he hated the daily train journey, he later recalled that his experience of studying at the Slade was

similar to me to what I imagine it would be if it were possible to get into a book one was reading. The sounds coming in at the open upstairs windows of the long corridor outside the Antique Room, sounds that were coming from the somewhat removed streets, sounds of a barrel-organ playing something which I had heard a cousin playing… It seemed that I and that music was a part of the contents of a book on the cousin’s shelf in their house next door. I was so much in the ‘Life-Room’ that I can’t think of any of the students as people one could see in the street anywhere… I liked the girls’ paint-covered frocks and walls plastered with palette-knife dabs.27

Though they lay on the same river, how could London be more different from Cookham-on-Thames for the young Stanley Spencer? For his brother Gilbert, the two were worlds apart. In 1910 he followed Stanley into an artistic career: he had long been entertaining himself at home making farm animals and toy carts from wood and old pieces of leather. Now he went to study carving at the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, lodging in south London with another of their many brothers:

I was quick to realize that here in Brixton we were in the heart of the struggle for survival. The red glare of the London skies killed the starry heavens shining over Cookham, but not the night life of the Brixton Road. Those were the days before cold storage, and it was a desperate time to walk down the Atlantic Road late at night, when the lean and hungry ones timed their visits to perfection. They knew the butcher’s dilemma, as with each passing minute, they eyed his tumbling prices. By midnight the road was in uproar with high pressure bargaining. It was a cut-throat business, though no throats were cut. There was nothing sinister or sordid about it, just a spirit that was London’s, with the evening shoppers swarming round barrows illumined by paraffin flares, and floating on a sea of indescribable litter, and the barrowmen themselves shouting their wares, and offering goods of little value to an intelligent and informed clientele.28

This was London in the last days of the Edwardian era, the world’s largest city and hub of the greatest Empire history had ever known. For some, London simply was England; but for those born and brought up in the countryside in the early years of the twentieth century, before suburban sprawl or the mass ownership of motorcars, before television or radio, London seemed like another country. Here could be found electric lighting, horse-drawn trams, fast-moving motorcars and underground trains, music halls and cinemas showing motion pictures, smoke-belching factories and City banks with their endless stream of clerks and businessmen, the multiform bustle of hundreds of thousands of people streaming back and forth, a ‘slick and snappy city’ living the new century’s modern life at speed.

But the pleasures of West End cinemas and hotels, smart restaurants and expensive cafés, were pleasures for the wealthy. London was also home to the cripplingly poor, the hungry, the homeless, and a magnet for immigrants and abject refugees escaping political and economic hardships or religious intolerance in Ireland and Eastern Europe. London seemed to suck them in. At the British Museum, only a few minutes’ walk from the Slade, the exiled German revolutionary Karl Marx had sat and written his great work, Das Kapital. Here he had laid out his grand critique of the iniquities of Capitalism, a system which meant that whilst a few prospered, millions laboured and starved; whilst a few grew rich and enjoyed the luxury of town squares and country houses, the masses inhabited the squalor of ‘the abyss’ – the East End slums of Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, the opium dens, sweatshops and ghettos, the pubs, penny gaffs and brothels, the tenements, rookeries and anarchists’ clubs of what was dubbed ‘the city of endless night’.

In 1894 in his Tales of Mean Streets, Arthur Morrison wrote, ‘There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End?’29 Certainly not the village boys Stanley and Gilbert Spencer. The East End’s many gloomy enclaves were the place for outsiders: Huguenots had made it their home in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and now the Irish and continental refugees were doing the same.

Here, somewhere among the cramped ghettos inhabited by the 100,000 or so Jewish immigrants, lived another of the promising new students who arrived fresh-faced at the Slade in October 1908: the talented, handsome and wildly ambitious Mark Gertler.

Notes

1 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1962), 117.

2 Pople (1991), 10.

3 Spencer (1961), 30.

4 Ibid., 34.

5 Spencer (1974), 12.

6 Spencer (1961), 34.

7 TGA 8116.8, Glew (2001), 20.

8 Spencer (1961), 40–1.

9 Ibid., 11.

10 Rothenstein (1957), ‘Stanley Spencer’, 406–41.

11 Spencer (1974), 14.

12 Spencer (1961), 69.

13 Ibid., 68–9.

14 Ibid., 51.

15 Ibid., 36.

16 SS to the Raverats, 23 December 1914, TGA, Pople (1991), 25.

17 Rothenstein (1957), 410.

18 Spencer (1961), 55.

19 Rothenstein (1979), 14.

20 Spencer (1961), 48.

21 TGA 733.2.51, Glew (2001), 26.

22 Spencer (1961), 45.

23 Spencer (1974), 13.

24 Schwabe (1943), 141.

25Made at the Slade (1979), 4.

26 Spencer (1961), 102–3.

27 Carline (1978), 25. Spencer would tell Eddie Marsh in 1913, ‘I hate coming to London it is the journey upsets me’. SS to EM, 7 November 1913, NYPL.

28 Spencer (1974), 28.

29 Quoted in Ackroyd (2000), 679.

* Whilst at the Royal College of Music Will had made drawings of the staff and students, which were so well thought of it was suggested to Par that he might do even better as an artist. But nothing ever came of this, and Gilbert wrote that before Stanley there was no strong interest shown in pictures at Fernlea.

Chapter 2

Mark Gertler and Henry Tonks

Mark Gertler’s upbringing could hardly have been more different from Stanley Spencer’s. Yet it would leave him with the same passionate and deeply personal attachment to home and family. Whilst the Spencers had known comparative wealth before falling into lower middle-class want, the Gertlers had only very slowly clawed their way out of desperate destitution in London’s overcrowded ghetto.

Mark’s immigrant parents, Louis and Golda, were from Przemysl, a small cathedral city in Galicia, that uncertain border country lying between Russia, Austria and Poland, and which in the late nineteenth century formed part of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire. In an attempt to escape poverty and anti-Semitism the Gertlers and their four young children emigrated to London in 1891, renting two rooms in a slum lodging-house in Gun Street, Spitalfields. There, on 9 December 1891, ‘Max’ was born (only later would his name be anglicized to ‘Mark’). He was their last child, and the youngest by seven years.

Like many impoverished exiles, Louis Gertler did not prosper in London. Before long the family and their young child were back in Przemysl, their repatriation financed by an English Jewish charity. However, Louis’s attempts to run an inn met with failure: he exchanged the inn for a bag of old boots, and the boots for buttons. He sold nothing, and fled alone to the United States, promising Golda that he would send for her and the family when he had found employment there.

For four years Golda cared for their five children alone, taking odd jobs in restaurants and feeding the family on scraps. Finally, in 1898, Louis wrote from London: ‘I have prospects. Come, we shall meet in England. I know what to do there and if what I do there is not good we shall go to America where I know still better what to do.’1

Mark’s earliest memory was not of the rough, tightly-packed, cattle-boat journey across the North Sea, but of their arrival: of England approaching, the voyage up the Thames to London docks, and his mother’s anxiety when their feckless father failed to appear. ‘Everybody is pushing and shoving’, Mark later recalled. ‘It doesn’t feel friendly – all is chaos, selfish and straining – I am being pushed and hustled, some women are screaming and men shouting roughly.’2 His recollection of arrival echoes the observation of the same scenes made two years earlier by the philanthropist Charles Booth:

There are few relations and friends awaiting the arrival of the small boats filled with immigrants: but the crowds gathered in and about the gin-shop overlooking the narrow entrance of the landing-stage are dock loungers of the lowest type and professional ‘runners’. These latter individuals, usually of the Hebrew race, are among the most repulsive of East London parasites; boat after boat touches the landing stage, they push forward, seize hold of bundles or baskets of the new-comers, offer bogus tickets to those who wish to travel forward to America, promise guidance and free loading to those who hold in their hands addresses of acquaintances in Whitechapel, or who are absolutely friendless… For a few moments it is a scene of indescribable confusion; cries and counter-cries; the hoarse laughter of the dock loungers at the strange garb and broken accent of the poverty-stricken foreigners; the rough swearing of the boatmen of passengers unable to pay the fee for landing. In another ten minutes eighty of the hundred new-comers are dispersed in the back slums of Whitechapel; in another few days, the majority of these, robbed of the little money they possess, are turned out of the ‘free lodgings’ destitute and friendless.3

The Gertlers were lucky: their father had not deserted them. He sent an old Przemysl friend, Louis Weinig, to meet them. He led them to Liverpool Street, the railway station on the edge of the City and Whitechapel, only a stone’s throw from Gun Street, where banking wealth rubbed uncomfortable shoulders with destitution.

Here the Gertlers waited, like a gang of gypsies, little Mark in his long Hungarian coat of orange leather, a brother straining under his load of feather beds. Finally their father appeared, and they followed him through the streets of London. As Mark later recalled:

Yes, this was London! For some people it may be England my England, but for me it is London, my London. Yes, although I was born in it, I saw London – experienced London – for the first time when I was six and my only language was Yiddish! …Yes, there was a moment in my life when I was actually fresh to London – London where I have lived for so long, experienced so much, London that has become part of me to such an extent that I can almost imagine life more easily without the people I have known than its own embodiment and peculiarity. And it is here then, in London, and at the age of six and in 1898, that my true history commenced – my own life as I have known it and suffered it.4

At first there was much suffering. Their early weeks back in London were spent with Louis Weinig and his family in a damp tenement in Shoreditch, all seven of them sharing a single room. On his first night Mark woke in the darkness, his family around him asleep beneath sacks, and his heart was filled ‘with overwhelming sadness. I cried, but quietly, not to awaken my mother, and that is the first real fit of depression I remember experiencing.’5

Louis Gertler worked hard to improve the family’s situation, and friends helped him out. In Spitalfields and Whitechapel the Jewish community, though often desperately poor and living in overcrowded conditions, suffering from disease, malnutrition and intolerance, worked hard to support one another. Here there were fellow speakers of Yiddish (Mark’s mother would never learn much English), shops selling kosher food, and on Brick Lane the Machzikei Hadath Synagogue (a converted Huguenot church built in the 1740s) as well as Schveik’s Russian Vapour Baths, where the Orthodox bathed on Fridays. Though the conditions of life were dreadful, though they were alien and isolated, their small corner of the East End offered solidarity to the Jewish immigrant community.

Mark’s father was a distant figure: Golda described him (albeit affectionately) as a tuttalla, a ‘simpleton’, holding him responsible for the family’s failures – her parents had told her never to marry him. Golda is the clearest figure in Gertler’s accounts of his early life. She was devoted to her children, ‘completely self-sacrificing’, but Mark, the youngest, was her darling.6

Despite his failings, Louis eventually found a job sandpapering walking sticks. The family took lodgings with a Jewish bootmaker who ran a small sweatshop in the same building. Here four or five young men and women toiled hour after hour in a dirty, airless little room. One of them went quietly mad with the stress of overwork and one day was found pacing the back yard, spinning gold sovereigns in the air, ‘and murmuring as each piece clinked to ground, “What is money, what is money?”’7

This is what the East End could do: it seemed almost to spawn a different race of people – pale, undersized, weak of limb, unsound of mind. As James Cantlie, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, suggested in a lecture delivered in 1885, ‘Degeneration Amongst Londoners’, there was a new disease distinct to the late nineteenth century: urbo-morbus, ‘city disease’. ‘It is sad to contemplate’, Cantlie observed, ‘that now-a-days honest labour brings with it of necessity illness and misery, instead of health and comfort – that the close confinement and the foul air of our cities are shortening the life of the individual, and raising up a puny and ill-developed race.’ The East End sweatshop workers were stunted, ‘prematurely old’, with ‘grave and sorrowful countenances’ betraying bodies and minds at variance with nature. ‘Being an abstemious class they continue, it may be, to a third generation; but they are more machines than active livers, and, on the face of it, it is improbable that out of such a class a healthy person could spring.’8

It was a harsh environment in which to bring up a young child, offering little hope either of escape or of a long or prosperous life. Its impression would govern the rest of Mark Gertler’s life.

• • •

Mark was sent to Maida, the Jewish school where he learnt Hebrew from the Rabbi’s monotonous intonation of the Torah. Later, when the school inspectors tracked him down, he was sent to a board school in nearby Settles Street, and then another at Deal Street, both just east of Brick Lane. A friend later recalled that their school ‘was in a very poor slum area… very dark and frightening, with frequent screams and drunken fights, and homeless people asleep in corners or on steps.’9 These were the streets where, only ten years before, Jack the Ripper had prowled, eviscerating his female victims and fuelling fear and ethnic prejudice. As the serial killer had scrawled on a wall after committing one of his atrocities: ‘The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’10

Racial and religious animosity meant that East End schools were effectively segregated, but alongside other Jewish children Gertler learnt English, and received the rudiments of an English education. It was here, too, that his first name was anglicised: ‘Max’ became ‘Mark’, and so he would remain.

Unsurprisingly given such an upbringing, Gertler later described himself as ‘a very nervous, highly strung, and emotional child, somewhat undersized, thin and pale’. Though much younger than the rest of the family, his mother kept him up late as friends visited and talked long past midnight, and the pressure started to show. As he later recalled: ‘I shall always remember the awful mixture of exhaustion and despair I felt every morning when I had to make myself get up in time for school, for I was very conscientious and terrified of losing a mark, and every morning the strain made me weep and cry as I dressed, “It is late already, I shall be late.”’11

It was drawing that offered Mark a way of escaping this world of poverty and anxiety. Though ‘utterly ignorant of everything connected with art’, he ‘longed to draw and paint, right from the very beginning.’ He admired the pavement artists who made pictures in chalk for money, and the brightly-coloured tin adverts in the smoke-blackened streets, whilst the shops ‘full of the brilliant colours of meat and fish, vegetables and fruit, were a continual joy, and my mother would sometimes get things for me, which I would paint.’ As Golda cooked, Mark sat in the warmth of her kitchen with a school friend, Cyril Ross, and they drew and painted. Cyril later recalled how Mark’s drawing ‘always seemed extraordinary to me, so accurate, clean and perfect; it was correct from the very start. We would spend hours working on the floor in the dim gaslight, while his mother washed clothes in the cement copper in the corner.’12

Mark’s discovery in a local second-hand bookshop of a copy of the Victorian artist William Powell Frith’s Reminiscences sealed his ambition. Frith had risen from childhood poverty to study at the Royal Academy Schools and paint the portraits of royalty. If Frith had done it, why couldn’t Gertler? By the time he left school at fourteen, and though he had never been to a public art gallery or had any contact with the artistic world, Mark knew without any doubt that he wanted to be an artist. But this only perplexed his father, who arranged a clerkship for him at a timber yard instead. A family member recalled that Louis ‘didn’t understand what an artist was. To him a Jew could not be an artist; he thought everyone should learn a trade.’13 But the family situation had started to improve. Though still living in the heart of the East End, they had moved out of the slums and into the relative prosperity of Leman Street, from where Louis ran a furrier’s business with his two older sons. There was a little money to spare and, with help from a Scottish friend of his father’s, Mark was enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, one of the best technical schools in London. Once he was presented with this opportunity, the privations of his background motivated him even harder to succeed.

The aspiring artist: Mark Gertler aged about 15.

Though the Polytechnic was originally intended as a Christian Institute, its head, G. Percival Gaskell, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, soon befriended the young Jewish boy. Recognising his talent and dedication, but also his limited education, Gaskell took Gertler on his first visit to the National Gallery. There he introduced him to the works of Velázquez, Fantin-Latour and the eighteenth-century still life painter Jean-Siméon Chardin. Mark, who was already keenly painting the everyday objects he found around his mother’s kitchen – pots and pans, or the fruit and vegetables and fish Golda bought at the local markets – was fascinated by the realist still lifes of the Dutch masters. He was soon trying to emulate them.

At the end of his first year he did reasonably well in his examinations, though not brilliantly. As Louis was finding the Polytechnic’s fees a burden he applied to a charity, the Jewish Educational Aid Society, for assistance. They replied unhelpfully: was the young boy really worth investing in? They told Louis, ‘It will be necessary for us to take a further opinion before we can come to a definite decision’.14 So Mark would have to start paying his own way. In December 1907 a position was found for him as trainee illustrator at Clayton & Bell, a prestigious manufacturer of stained-glass windows, whose factory was next door to the Polytechnic. Working there by day, repetitiously copying out endless designs of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, by night he continued his art classes.

If Mark was working hard, he was still able to enjoy himself. He returned home to Whitechapel and entertained Golda with stories of the people he encountered in the West End. He brilliantly mimicked the people he saw around him: ‘the mincing ladies and the lordly shopwalkers, the tittering girls and the men working in the streets’, reproducing for Golda, who never ventured from the ghetto, ‘the whirl, the glitter, the roar, the splendour of London’.15

At the same time he discovered other social and educational opportunities. In 1901 the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Library had opened as a venue for promoting culture and personal improvement amongst the East Enders. Gertler started spending spare evenings there, and befriended a number of other young Jewish artists, among them the equally ambitious David Bomberg. Another new friend was the Oxford-educated Quaker Thomas Harvey. Harvey was Warden of nearby Toynbee Hall, a Christian establishment set up in the 1880s as a place where Oxford students could come to experience the East End’s social problems first hand, and bring moral and instructive improvements to the slums. The Hall itself was much like an Oxbridge College, and with its ivy-clad porch, turreted library, dovecote and clock tower stood out oddly amongst its shabbier surroundings. Like Gaskell at the Polytechnic, Harvey, who was then in his early thirties, provided cultural guidance and encouragement to the young Gertler.

And then there were the music halls. As Peter Ackroyd records in his biography of the city, ‘the East End harboured more music halls than any other part of London – Gilbert’s in Whitechapel, the Eastern and the Apollo in Bethnal Green, the Cambridge in Shoreditch, Wilton’s in Wellclose Square, the Queen’s in Poplar, the Eagle in the Mile End Road, and of course the Empire in Hackney’. These, along with many others, ‘became as characteristic of the East End as the sweatshops or the church missions’.16 Here could be found every variety of performer, from singers of comic songs to acrobats, from strong men to conjurors. They provided local entertainment for Cockney audiences, and Gertler loved it. He regularly headed the queue for the cheap seats in the gods when Sabbath ended on Saturday afternoon.

Though he had not done brilliantly in his Polytechnic examinations, in the summer of 1908 his precocious oil painting Still Life with Melon won a Bronze Medal in the National Art Competition. This was run by the Board of Examination, with 15,000 young artists contending from around the country, so a medal represented a major – and well-deserved – success. A renewed application to the Jewish Educational Aid Society now warranted further consideration. Mark’s work was shown to Solomon Joseph Solomon, a successful painter who had recently become only the second Jew appointed a Royal Academician. Solomon sought the opinion of another prominent Jewish artist, William Rothenstein. Thirty-six years old and with a large house and family in the well-to-do London suburb of Highgate, Rothenstein was the son of a wealthy German wool merchant. Brought up and educated in Bradford, he had studied at the Slade and at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris, where he had known Degas, Pissarro and Toulouse-Lautrec. A friend of Oscar Wilde’s, he had co-founded the Carfax Gallery in St James’s – one of the most enterprising in London for showing the works of contemporary painters. Rothenstein was proving himself an influential patron for young artists, Jews and gentiles alike. He had even encouraged Augustus John – the Slade’s most exciting former-student – to hold his first solo show at the Carfax.

So one day with the help of one of his brothers, Mark carried some of his paintings to Highgate, and rang the front bell. The door was opened by Rothenstein’s young son John, who recalled seeing a nervous, sullen-faced boy ‘with apricot-coloured skin and a dense mop of dark brown hair so stiff that it stood on end. I took him for a barrow boy, but he said he had been sent to see my father.’17

The sixteen-year-old East Ender shuffled shyly in to present his pictures. As Rothenstein wrote to Louis Gertler the next day:

It is never easy to prophesy regarding the future of an artist but I do sincerely believe that your son has gifts of a high order, and that if he will cultivate them with love and care, that you will one day have reason to be proud of him. I believe that a good artist is a very noble man, and it is worth while giving up many things which men consider very important, for others which we think still more so. From the little I could see of the character of your son, I have faith in him and I hope and believe he will make the best possible use of the opportunities I gather you are going to be generous enough to give him.18

Gertler’s parents were so moved by this letter that they framed it and hung it on their wall – to Rothenstein’s amazement when he later came to visit. If Louis had harboured any doubts about his son’s future, they were now dismissed.

Using his connections and his conviction of the boy’s potential, Rothenstein immediately secured a place for Mark at the Slade. The Jewish Educational Aid Society agreed to pay his fees, together with some extra money for travel and expenses, and Mark was released from his position at Clayton & Bell. As the secretary of the JEAS wrote to inform him: ‘You are to become a student at the Slade School of Art, and Mr. Rothenstein has very kindly agreed to personally look after your studies. This will include the valuable privilege of occasionally working at his studio. So I think you ought to consider yourself very lucky and determine to make the most of the opportunity now offered you – as I am sure you will.’19

• • •