Among the Bohemians Read Online Free PDF

her friendGwen John a boiled egg and coffee because she is too poor to buy herself a midday meal.Jacob Epstein earns one shilling an hour as an artists’ model.His trousers are torn, he cannot afford a haircut, and he sleeps under newspapers.
    The early 1920s, and the aspiring artist Kathleen Hale’s luck has run out; she is only able to save herself from starvation by selling her hair.Sophie Fedorovitch, an exiled Polish painter, is living in one room on the Embankment, with no bed, only a chair to sleep on, and a broken window pane which she cannot afford to have mended.The newly married artists John and Christine Nash are struggling to feed themselves on the proceeds from John’s wood engravings.If he makes three guineas Christine reckons they can eat for a month.
    Constantine Fitzgibbon was convinced that by the 1930s conditions for artists had deteriorated yet further – ‘There was suddenly much less money about.’ The Depression meant that parents were even more unwilling to subsidise the younger generation in feckless activities like painting or writing poetry.Compared with what he saw as the irresponsible freedom of art students in the 1890s, Fitzgibbon insisted that his contemporaries had no room for manoeuvre: ‘What the young men of the thirties could afford was a bedsitter and beer and sometimes Bertorelli’s.’
    Bertorelli’s could do a half-portion of spaghetti in those days for fivepence, while a bedsit might cost about twelve shillings a week; (in Dylan Thomas’s case the rent was extracted from him by his flatmates who held him upside down and shook the shillings from his pockets).Two pounds a week would keep the wolf from the door, just.
    I don’t know what I lived on during this period
    recalled the writer Philip O’Connor of that time…
    … on sixpences, half-crowns… friends, my sister; I painted water-colours for our local art-dealer and junkman, who paid me 1½d each for them, and up to five shillings for oils… when [I was] very short, I would raid my sister’s flat, mostly for pots of jam.
    But it all depended on what you expected of life, and a cheerful Micawber-like optimism can be discerned among some very poor artists who found to their joy that they could live within their income.Augustus John’s wife, Ida, wrote to a friend describing the family’s life in Paris in 1905.They had almost no furniture, only one bed between the three adults and five babies,and bare boards on the floor.But Ida was content: ‘I think we must be rich, because though there is such a lot of us, we live very comfortably and are out of debt.’
    Such happy situations were rarely the result of financial competence.Detached from their class, many artists abandoned hope of ever acquiring middle-class virtues like how to handle money.The careful keeping of accounts, an activity so dear to the heart of the bourgeois chatelaine, was in any case dismissed in most artistic households as petty, materialistic and irrelevant to art.
    The themes of unworldliness and poverty run throughout Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London (1907), an autobiographical account of a youthful sub-culture.This engaging book is a companion guide for the novice traveller in Bohemia, with lively descriptions of the terrain, the natives and their habits, diet, language and customs, by a resident; it was written when Ransome was only twenty-two, twenty-five yean before he wrote the first of his classic children’s books, Swallows and Amazons (1930).An odd, subjective ramble, its very naiveté is persuasive.For Ransome, you could only qualify as a Bohemian by being poor, but in Bohemia, discomfort was immaterial, and hunger insignificant compared to the bliss of living there.His descriptions of his garret existence in Chelsea – the Bohemian heartland in those days – are full of nostalgia for a penurious but happy existence.‘Those were wonderful days in that winter of 1904,’ he later wrote in his autobiography, and in the next