The Way Down to the Sea

By the first years of the twentieth century Augustus John had established himself as Britain’s foremost young artist. Laurence Binyon, writing in The Saturday Review in December 1907, remarked that such was John’s ‘magnetic power over his contemporaries’ that he could now be considered ‘the acclaimed leader of a strong new movement in English painting’ (Laurence Binyon, ‘Rubens, Delacroix and Mr. John,’ The Saturday Review, 7 December 1907.) Looking back on this period a quarter of a century later, Frank Rutter wrote that from 1904 – and for at least the next six years – ‘what John had done or was doing was the chief topic of conversation in the younger art circles’ This was not because John was doing anything particularly new, Rutter suggested, ‘but because he was doing old things superbly well, better than they had been done for a long, long time’ (Rutter (1933), 88).  

The exhibition of The Way Down to the Sea alongside John’s portrait of Sir William Nicholson (The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) at the New English Art Club’s summer exhibition of 1909 confirmed this status. Reviewing the show for The Observer, P.G. Konody acknowledged that John was ‘the most-talked-about of our younger artists,’ and that these two paintings were a ‘masterly achievement’’ (W.B. Yeats, ‘Address on Contemporary Poetry’, The Manchester Guardian, 1 November 1910). This major work followed a significant recent tragedy in John’s life: the death of his wife Ida in Paris in March 1907, from a fever following the birth of their fifth child. As John informed his friend Henry Lamb the following January, he was struggling ‘without my wife, whom I want: terrible glooms and ennuis visit me in the evenings when I can think of no one I want to see and am yet tormented by solitude. Sometimes I have tried seeing how much I can drink in one night, but it’s a dismal experiment.’ John found release in painting Ida, and it is she who is the focus of The Way Down to the Sea. Her figure is based on a series of life-drawings John had made on Dartmoor some four years earlier, and she playfully holds a ball over the head of one of John’s children. Ida appears posthumously in two other key works from this period, Decorative Group (1908, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin) and Lyric Fantasy (c.1913–14, Tate Collection). John’s partner Dorothy (‘Dorelia’) McNeill, together with various of their children, also feature in all three paintings: here she stands beside Ida, whilst to their left are two unidentified women (probably Henry’s Lamb wife Euphemia and Dorelia’s sister, Edie McNeill); the child may be Dorelia’s eldest son with John, Pyramus, born on Dartmoor in 1905. 

During his time in Paris around the time of Ida’s death John had made closer study of those artists who in 1910 Roger Fry would dub ‘the Post-Impressionists’. He had met Picasso, and he was taking an interest in the work of Van Gogh and Cézanne. To these influences were added the impact of his ongoing close study of Sandro Botticelli and Puvis de Chavannes, as well as a recent summer seaside holiday in Normandy. In November 1910 W.B. Yeats picked this painting out for notice in a lecture on contemporary poetry he delivered in Manchester. Yeats argued that each new generation begins ‘by defying the generation which went before.’ To illustrate this, he contrasted The Way Down to the Sea (which had recently both been exhibited at Manchester City Art Gallery) with the work of Frederick, Lord Leighton. John’s work, Yeats suggested, ‘is probably puzzling you very much. Many of you perhaps are experiencing for the first time how great is the revolt of the young painters against academic form.’ That revolt, Yeats explained, ‘has been the great event in the last two generations of painting. … In poetry we have had an exactly equivalent revolt.’ 

The Way Down to the Sea excited a number of John’s collectors. Sir Hugh Lane was outbid by the wealthy American lawyer John Quinn, who took it home to New York. In February 1913 it was included in the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the armory of the 69^th Regiment of Infantry in Manhattan. In his brief opening address to what is now better known as the Armory Show, Quinn called it an ‘epoch making’ moment in the history of American art, ‘the most complete art exhibition that has been held in the world during the last quarter century.’ Altogether there were thirty-six works by Augustus John to be seen; only one other artist, Odillon Redon, had more works in the show. Frank Jewett Mather, a Princeton professor of art, praised John’s contributions, writing that he ‘can go some way with Matisse because he never forgets Manet and Botticelli’ (W.B. Yeats, ‘Address on Contemporary Poetry’, The Manchester Guardian, 1 November 1910. As Mather’s remark suggests, John was a safe halfway house between the comfortable old and what was rapidly establishing itself as the radical new.