Burghers of Calais. She thought it ‘marvellous’; and also admired an Adam and Eve by Frank Taubman; and the work of ‘Chas Ricketts and C. H. Shannon’, ‘one of which is a beautiful young man. Must be Ricketts—ask Albert. It’s Shannon.’ In 1901 she was a craning, admiring student, but within five years she was friends with three of these four: Rodin, Shannon and Ricketts. Rossini she never met (though Benjie Bruce met Puccini, who played him parts of Madame Butterfly on the piano, explaining it as he went. ‘Ca, c’est japonais; ca c’est moi,’ he said: That is Japanese, that is me.)
Interspersed with the self-improvement were the people: fellow art students, Rosslyn’s theatrical friends (he was now curate of St Ann’s, Soho, and knew all sorts of people who were generally held to be rather too interesting company for a clergyman), dashing young things about town. Again, Kathleen’s diary speaks: Ernest Thesiger came up; Aveling walked her home; more hysterics from Dolly; awful letter from Evelyn; Stella has dyed her hair; Rothenstein gave her Sappho; gruesome fog; Rover had a stroke; dined with Skenes; long talk with Victor Reynolds about mortality, Aubrey Beardsley, etc; ‘Drank champagne and were amusing’ before seeing Millicent off to Capri; kept meeting Aveling, ‘felt rather a cad about that’.
She became friends with Mabel Beardsley, sister of the late Aubrey. Mabel and Aubrey had been the subject of scandalous rumours of incest, and Mabel had an illegitimate child who some said was his. Kathleen ‘played’ with Mabel after they met in adjoining boxes at Two Little Vagabonds, and later they helped to organize a masked ball, which was a great success although Max Beerbohm didn’t turn up. They forgave him, and went to the private view of an exhibition of his caricatures. She took Rosslyn to ‘pinafore parties’ in studios, where the guests stayed till 5 a.m., and the day before Queen Victoria died in January 1901 Rosslyn took Kathleen to a play at the Garrick, and to a party given by the actress Madge Titheradge.
There were admirers, and admirees. In November 1901 she went to a play of Sherlock Holmes. She noted that the lead, William Gillette, was forty-five, and ‘oh so gorgeous, could love him heaps and heaps’. On December 5 she ‘met the Russian Goldarbeiter in a bus. Clever of him to contrive to make such a meeting romantic.’ One Watts had no such trouble at the Slade ball that Christmas: they danced many times and he proposed to her ‘with great élan’. ‘Percy’ merited only the comment ‘well I wonder’. Cousin Hener the pianist was reduced to ‘oh the silly ass of a child’.
Someone by the name of Wilfred, however, caused her slightly more grief.
Oct 3: Hideous jealousy. She’s not as fair I know, nor is her intellect to be compared. Had I modelled the statuette I would not have been so far inferior. It’s not severe enough to be unrequited love and thus an experience, simply irritating. Still it has the virtue of being the only thing so far that has occurred, and it has occurred in most lives that have been lived, and tis best to know and feel—it’s really only a pity that it isn’t more.
She was too proud, and too strict with herself, to allow much in the way of girlish moonings. Besides, as Herbert Spencer said and Kathleen copied down in her notebook: ‘Every pleasure increases vitality, every pain decreases vitality.’ Suffering was never her idea of a good time, and this is the only expression of jealousy of another female in all her diaries.
In August 1901 she went to Germany with her sister Presh. ‘Every prospect pleases, only man is vile,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Here alas there are women too, they are worse.’ Not Presh, of course. Kathleen was very fond of Presh. This is typical of her ‘dislike of women’ throughout her life: she would claim to dislike all women heartily, and yet there always seemed to be a couple present whom she liked very well.
For Christmas that year she went to the Hervey Bruces at their English pile, Clifton, near Nottingham. Sir Hervey’s late wife had been Marianne Clifton, whose family had lived there since Domesday, and the house included a renaissance ‘pages’ hall’, redecorated with Dutch painted panels in honour of a visit by Charles I; an octagonal Georgian hall; a Chinese drawing room; a scaled-down copy of the Crystal Palace as conservatory; two dozen bedrooms and no bathrooms, peacocks, bestatued balustrades and seven terraces. ‘Uneventful, physically and mentally,’ Kathleen wrote, which was about as damning as it could be. The only high spot was on 28 December when someone was overheard to say: ‘Heavens, child, be careful not to marry a Bruce, they are dreadful people with scarcely a redeeming virtue.’ Kathleen rather agreed. It was time to get away from all these Bruces.
‘I wish it were correct to live all alone,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘It’s far the best form of existence.’ It was the sort of thing that you could do in … oh, Paris, say.
THREE A Badly Dressed Virginal Anglaise in Paris
1901–1902
IT WAS UNUSUAL for young women to head off to Paris with artistic intent, but it was not unheard of. Gwen John, sister of Augustus, went there in 1904, and posed for Rodin and for English women artists as well as making her own name. Parisian art schools were largely better than the English ones at the time, with more opportunity to work from life, more and better models, a more individual approach to the teaching, more study of the anatomy. And Paris was Paris: you could live in the Latin quarter, be Bohemian, meet other artists, go to the cafés and get away from your family. This is not to say that the schools were filled with young dilettantes with no interest in art. The work was hard, and though unsuitable companions for a young lady were readily available they were not obligatory. There were ladies-only pensions, ladies-only classes, and it was also allowed for a young woman to take a chaperone to any individual classes she might have.
And so Kathleen went to Paris, to study art. She did not go alone: two girlfriends from the Slade, neither of them close, also thought it was ‘a fine idea’.
They lived initially at a pension, run, of course, by Madame. Madame was in her mid-fifties, ‘dark and squalid’, fussy, with a wig. She had about a dozen young women staying, whose grammar she would correct rudely over meals. They enrolled themselves to study at the Académie Colarossi, a studio popular with art students from all over the world. Clive Holland, a journalist writing in 1904, reported ‘A pretty Polish girl’, ‘a Haytian negro’, ‘a merry-faced Japanese’, ‘an Italian girl of whom great things were expected’, half a dozen Americans and ‘a sandy-haired Scotsman’. Classes here included life drawing and painting both nude and clothed, watercolours, sketching, black and white drawing, ‘decorative composition’ and sculpture.
Kathleen was rather afraid of both her friends. ‘I was younger than they, shorter than they, poorer than they, shyer than they, less well dressed than they and much less dignified than they. They were both very pretty.’ Whether or not Kathleen was pretty is almost impossible to say. She was athletic, not tall, with particularly strong shoulders and arms. Her hands were still large, and she never sat still. Photos show a strong face, quite masculine, with a firm jaw and a definite nose. Descriptions say she was pretty, mentioning bright eyes, masses of hair and joie de vivre. Her dress sense never improved very far beyond the holey underwear of her boarding-school days and the homemade almost-Fortuny cloak. Certainly she was attractive.
When she wrote about them later, Kathleen gave them the names Jocelyn and Hermione. Jocelyn was in fact Eileen Gray, who was later to become a well-known and influential modernist furniture designer and architect, one of whose chairs fetched $28 million at auction in 2009. Hermione was Jessie Gavin, fair and beautifully dressed, who told Kathleen that she lived her whole life in terror because there was madness in the family. This made her wonderfully romantic. Kathleen thought perhaps she should meet romantic cousin Hener.
It was Kathleen who got the male attention: ‘As weeks went on I found various young men waiting
