Augustus John Read Online Free PDF Page B

1988 by Sotheby’s, which had now sold the same papers twice.
    The price was not quite what the owner had wanted, but then the collection itself was no longer so comprehensive. Only photocopies, for example, of letters from members of the Gypsy Lore Society were included, the originals having been retained by the anonymous American collector. Like Sir Angus Fraser (who edited George Borrow’s letters and published a book on gypsies), he obviously kept up a special interest in travelling people and ‘the affairs of Egypt’.
    My biography had gone into paperback in the 1970s and was lastreprinted in 1987. The publication of Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan’s Gwen John Papers at the National Museum of Wales the following year, and the schedule of Gwen John Papers and catalogue of Augustus John Papers which she compiled in 1988 and 1991, alerted me to the large archive of both artists that had been formed at Aberystwyth since my biography was written. After being given advance notice of a further reprint in 1992, I decided to go and have a look at these collections. What I saw during this reconnaissance persuaded me to buy back the rights in my book and prepare this new edition.
    The Augustus John collection has changed considerably since I was handed it in instalments by Dorelia and Romilly John at Fryern, and drove it in great disorder to my room in London. Then the papers had been all muddled together and posted into shopping bags and pillowcases; now they were sorted and filed, bound and guarded by what at first gasp appeared a formidable set of regulations. Traces of their old happy-go-lucky days could be detected in Caspar John’s flowing pencil dates and occasionally, I was surprised to see, my own more tortuous ones. But now there was a systematic dating guide provided by the catalogue calendar, this being all the more necessary because many of the envelopes that had existed twenty-five years before had gone missing. There were a few other items missing from the papers after their long journeys by car, ship or plane, but documents had been added in the mid-1970s when Ronald Hamand was going round the family preparing his catalogue. This material was new to me, as were some of the Nettleship and John papers donated to or bought by the National Library of Wales between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. 8 This group includes approximately three hundred and twenty-five Augustus John letters.
    Even more interesting to me was the Gwen John archive. I had used some of the contents and could recognize Mary Taubman’s handwritten dates. But there was a good deal of material I had not seen, including papers that no one else had used while they were in private hands (such as Augustus John’s letters to his son Edwin). There are more than seventy-five letters from Augustus John in the Gwen John archive, as well as correspondence from her father, her brother Thornton and sister Winifred, her nephew (Augustus’s son) Henry John, and from Ida and Dorelia.
    For the first time I was able to examine holographs the contents of which had previously been given to me as copies. For example, there was the single long letter to Gwen John from the painter with whom Dorelia had eloped to Bruges in 1904. 9 His first name was Leonard and his family name (indicated by another piece of correspondence) began with the letter B. Looking at the written copy I was given in the early 1970s, it had seemed to me that his address had been shortened to ‘kplaas 5’. So Ihad gone to Bruges, found the only ‘plaats’ or square beginning with the letter K and deduced that Leonard and Dorelia were living in a house belonging to Lodewyck Van den Broucke and his wife Leonie (née Huys). The records that might have revealed their son’s name had been destroyed, but I surmised that he might have been named after his mother and was therefore Leonard Broucke. Thus he stands as a hypothesis in my footnote and more definitively in the index.
    But when Ceridwen