As a frontispiece to this volume I
have chosen a portrait of me painted by a Frenchman called Edouard MacAvoy. I
have the idea that few people in a private station can have been drawn, painted
or sculptured more often than I have. Artists have found me a patient sitter. They
like to talk while they work and I am a good listener. But it is not only on
that account that they have made so many portraits of me. When you are
wandering through the rooms of an exhibition of pictures and come across a
portrait, you may have the curiosity to glance at your catalogue in order to
see the name of the person depicted. If the name is familiar to you it may well
be that, should you be thinking of having a portrait painted of yourself, you
may think that the artist who painted the portrait that attracted your
attention will suit your purpose. Should then for one reason or another the
sitter’s name become more and more familiar, it is not unnatural than artists
should be tempted to paint, draw or sculpt the owner of it in the hope that on
that account their work will attract attention and gain repute. I venture to
claim that I have proved a pretty good advertisement.
Edouard MacAvoy, Portrait of W. Somerset Maugham. |
When Edouard MacAvoy, with an introduction from a common friend, came to see me and said he would like to paint me, I asked him how he, a Frenchman, happened to have a Scottish name. He told me than an ancestor of his, a Scot, had come over to France in the suite of James II when that obstinate monarch, to the relief of his subjects, had fled his country. That seemed to me a sufficient recommendation and I told MacAvoy that I would gladly sit to him. He made a number of drawings and then told me that he had all the material he wanted and would paint the portrait in his studio in Paris. The Second World War broke out and I heard no more from him till it was over. Then I received a letter from him in which he said that he was dissatisfied with his painting of my hands and would like to make further drawings of them. I asked him to come and stay with me for two or three days and he made his drawings. I did not see the portrait till it was exhibited in the Salon. I must admit that I was startled, but I liked it and acquired it. Braque, I am told, saw it and thought highly of it. 'I only have one criticism to make,' he said, 'the left side of the face is slightly realistic.'
Henri Matisse, The Yellow Chair. |
I made the
acquaintance of Matisse. He was bed-ridden. He lay on a great old-fashioned
double brass bed, with big brass knobs at the four corners – the sort of bed
that fifty years ago husband and wife slept in as a mark of respectability and
a proof of the amenity of the marriage state. Matisse liked me to come and see him
so that he could ask how they were getting on with the chapel at Vence, for
which he had designed the decoration, and each time I left him he begged me to
go to Vence again and tell him exactly what the workmen were doing. On one of
my visits, after he had greeted me, he said, ‘look what I did this morning.’ He
had engaged a model, and on sheets of paper, about nine by twelve, had made
line drawings of her head. He had had them pinned up in rows, one row above
another, on the wall that faced his bed. I did not count them, but I guessed
that there were at least forty. It was an amazing feat for an old man lying in
bed to fashion these drawings with such assurance and such distinction. I praised
him and he was pleased with my praise. ‘But you must look at them again and
again,’ he said. ‘You must look at them and look at them, it’s only then you’ll
see their power, the depth of thought in them, and their philosophy.’ I could
only see forty lovely drawings, but I had lived long enough to learn that the
artist, no matter what his medium, is apt to see more in his production than is
evident to the beholder. I nodded and held my tongue.
I bought two pictures by Matisse. One
is known as The Yellow Chair. It is
one of the most engaging pictures he had ever painted. It gave one the
impression that a happy inspiration had enabled him to paint it in a single
morning. When I said so he told the middle-aged woman who looked after him to
bring some photographs. He showed me photographs of the successive states of
the picture and told me that he had scrapped his painting down to the canvas
three times before he could get the effect he wanted. The colours were
brilliant and I found it difficult to place; it made pictures close to it look
rather drab and I had had to hang it by itself on a white wall. ‘Moi, vous savez,’ I said, ‘j’achète des
tableaux pour fleurir ma maisson.’ Matisse gave an angry grunt. ‘Ça, c’est
la decoration,’ he muttered. ‘Ça n’a aucune importance.’ I thought this
nonsense, but was too polite to say so.
G. H. Barrable, Songs from Italy. |
When I was
eighteen I entered St Thomas ’s
Hospital as a medical student. I took two rooms, a bedroom and a sitting-room,
on the ground floor of a lodging house in Vincent Square . At that time the
illustrated weeklies at Christmas gave their readers a large coloured
reproduction [G. H. Barrable, Songs from
Italy]. I got one of them, and as a modest decoration pinned it up in my
sitting-room. […] On one of my vacations I took a trip over to Paris where two brothers of mine, both
several years older than I, lived. I had read, re-read and read again Walter
Pater’s essay on the Mona Lisa and on my first visit to the Louvre I hurried,
full of excitement, past the pictures, till I came to Leonardo’s famous
portrait. I was bitterly disappointed. Was this the picture Pater had written
about with such eloquence and in prose so ornate?[1] I spent my mornings in the
Louvre. I had no one to guide me. One young man, whom I met somewhere, an
aesthete, said to me: ‘There’s only one picture worth looking at in the Louvre,
the Chardin. Don’t waste your time on all that rubbish they’ve got there.
You’ll get much more art in the Folies Bergère.’ That was strong meat to set
before a youth just turned twenty. I was too shy to tell the young man that I
thought Titian’s Man with the Glove a
beautiful portrait and that Titian’s Entombment
had deeply moved me.
Roderick O'Connor, Still Life. |
Roderick O'Connor, Still Life. |
Roderick O'Connor, Still Life. |
Time passed. I had abandoned medicine
and was an impecunious author. I left London and
took a tiny flat in Paris
near the ‘Lion de Belfort.’ An intimate friend of mine, Gerald Kelly, one day
to be President of the Royal Academy, took me to dine at a restaurant where
painters, their wives or mistresses, dined every night at small cost in a room
that was kept for them. There I made the acquaintance of a Canadian painted
called Maurice. He was somewhat older than the rest of us and much better off. He
was a quiet, friendly man and never entered into the heated arguments that
enlivened our modest fare. He painted pleasant little pictures which the other
members of our company praised as the amiable productions of a well-to-do
amateur. He has been dead for many years and his pictures to-day are highly
valued in Canada .
The most interesting person in this little group was an Irishman, sullen and
bad-tempered, called Roderick O’Connor. He had spent some months in Brittany with Gauguin,
painting, and I, already greatly interested in that mysterious, talented man,
would have liked to learn from O’Connor what he could tell me about him; but
unfortunately he took an immediate dislike to me which he did not hesitate to
show. My very presence at the dinner table irritated him and I only had to make
a remark for him to attack it. I remember one violent altercation we had over
the sonnets of Heredia. I forget, however, if I was praising or damning them.[2]
One evening, out of bravado I think, I asked O’Connor if I might come to see
his pictures. He could not very well refuse and so on the following day I went
to his studio. It gave one an impression of abject poverty. He showed me his
pictures. I had never bought a picture before and I am sure that O’Connor had
never sold one. I chose two that took my fancy and told him I would like to buy
them. He was taken aback. After a moment’s hesitation, with a sullen look on
his face, he mentioned a price, a very modest one, and I took the money out of
my pocket and went away with the pictures [the first two still lifes above] in
my hands. A good many years later I saw a picture [the last still life above]
of O’Connor’s at the Salon and bought that too. The Irish have produced some
lovely poetry and some brilliant plays, but so far as I know they have never
been painters of conspicuous gifts. O’Connor had talent, though not a great
one, and it is good to know that now he is appreciated in Ireland . I
don’t think, however, that this would have pleased him: on the contrary, I
think it would have infuriated him.
Wilson Steer, The Severn, Littledean. |
Wilson Steer, Effect of Rain, Corfe. |
Zoffany, Garrick and Mrs Gibber in Ottway's 'Venice Preserved'. |
Samuel de Wilde, Bannister and Suett in George Coleman the Younger's 'Sylvester Daggerwood' |
Time passed.
Then, by a happy accident, a play of mine which had been refused by managed
after manager was put on at the Court Theatre and was a success. It was
followed by other plays, light comedies, with the result that I became in a
modest way affluent. I had come to know Wilson Steer and used sometimes to go
and see him. I bought two of his landscapes. Wilson Steer was extravagantly
praised during his lifetime and to-day is unwarrantably depreciated. I was
delighted with my two pictures. I had bought myself a small house in Chesterfield Street
and one day, when I was in my sitting-room, quietly reading, Hugh Lane dropped in to see me. He told
me that he had just seen a theatrical picture [Zoffany’s] at a dealer’s
somewhere in Pimplico. ‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘You’re a dramatist, you ought to
buy it.’ Next day I went to see it for myself and promptly bought it. Not very
long afterwards there was a sale at Christie’s at which there was a theatrical
picture that had belonged to Henry Irving [de Wilde’s], and because I had
bought one I bought another. Thus began my collection of theatrical pictures. I
frequented the sale-rooms, not only Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but less
important ones as well. Nobody was then much interested in pictures of this
kind and I was able sometimes to buy a full-length of an actor in costume for a
pound. I bought watercolour portraits of actors for five shillings apiece.
There was at the time an interest in a National Theatre. I was very much in
favour of it. I thought it shocking that a great city like London , capital of a great country, should
not have one. I was convinced that such a theatre need not only count on
Shakespeare to attract an audience, but that there were in the English
repertoire numbers of plays, known to-day only by scholars, which, adequately
produced, people would be glad to see. I made up my mind to give my theatrical
pictures to adorn the bare walls of the theatre and so give it a pleasant
intimacy. The Labour Party happened to be in power and they were ready to
provide a large sum to build it, but they were defeated at a General Election
and the Tories, less interested in the arts than Labour, who took their place,
were not willing to spend so much money. The plan was dropped.
Paul Gauguin, Eve with the Apple. |
Time passed. I had long had in mind to write a novel founded on the life of Paul Gauguin and I went to
Jean Joveneau, Still Life. |
Jean Joveneau, Still Life. |
Time passed. I lived much in
Marie Laurencin, The Rowing Boat. |
Marie Laurencin, Mother and Daughter. |
Marie Laurencin, The Kiss. |
Marie Laurencin, Young Girl With a Fan. |
Marie Laurencin, Portrait of W. Somerset Maugham. |
Time passed. I bought myself a house on the
Some years later I received a letter
from her in which she said that she would like to paint a portrait of me. In
reply I told her that I was greatly flattered by the suggestion, but felt it
only right to remind her that I was not a young thing with a complexion of milk
and roses and the lustrous eyes of a gazelle, with a sensual, scarlet mouth,
but an elderly gentleman with a sallow, wrinkled skin and tired eyes. She wrote
back to say that nothing of that mattered, but would be grateful if I would
come in a dressing-gown as she did not know how paint a jacket. On this we
fixed a day and, with a dressing-gown over my arm, I presented myself at her
studio. She set to work. While she painted she told me the story of her life. She
was very frank and I enjoyed myself. The great love of her life had been for an
eminent politician who was so busy that he only could come to see her at eight
o’clock in the morning on his way to office. ‘Wasn’t that an inauspicious hour
to make love?’ I asked her. ‘Not for Philippe,’ she answered proudly. Marie
Laurencin was a hard worker. For six days in the week she painted pictures and
on the seventh, as a rest, spend the day with old friends, a man, his wife and
their children, who lived on the fifth floor of a house in Montparnasse .
On arrival she took off her dress and put on an apron, then, seizing a broom,
swept the floor and washed the children. For the mid-day meal she cooked the
food which she had brought with her, for her friends were very poor, and passed
the afternoon washing up, mending clothes and gossiping till it was time to put
the children to bed. Then she took off her apron, put on her dress and went
home delighted with her day, tired-out and happy.
After I had sat for four afternoons
Marie Laurencin put down her brushes and looked at the canvas. ‘Vous savez,’ she said, ‘people complain
that my portraits are not a good likeness. Il
faut que je vous dise que je m’en fou éperdument.’ Freely translated this
would mean, ‘I must tell you that I don’t care a damn.’ She took the canvas off
the easel and handed it to me. ‘It’s a present.’
Camille Pissarro, The Quai Saint-Sever, Rouen. |
Eugene Boudin, The Banks of the River Loques, Calvados. |
Time passed. The Second World War broke out. A French friend of mine put my pictures in a place of safety and I left the Riviera . When the war was won I happened to be in New York . I had written a novel that had had a large sale [The Razor’s Edge], and the movie rights were bought by Twentieth Century Fox. One day I received a telegram by Darryl Zanuck, Vice-President in charge of production, telling me that the script which had been made was not satisfactory and asking me to go to Hollywood to work on it. The job, Darryl Zanuck added, would not take me more than a fortnight and money was no object. I could name my own price. I wanted the film to be as good as possible and wired back to say that I would gladly come to Hollywood , but did not want to be paid for any work I might do. An old friend of mine, George Cukor, who was to direct the picture, asked me to stay with him. I made the easy journey. After a long conference with the persons concerned I went to work, but at the end of a fortnight I found that I had still more to do and before I could finish the task to my own satisfaction three months had passed.
I arranged to go back to New York . Darryl Zanuck
had kept the telegram in which I had said I did not want payment for my work; I
suspect that in his long experience no one had ever agreed to work for him for
nothing. He sent for George Cukor and told him that he would like to make me a
present. ‘Would he like some nice sleeve-links?’ he asked him. ‘He’s got some
nice sleeve-links,’ said George Cukor. ‘Would he like a gold cigarette case?’
asked Darryl Zanuck. ‘He’s got a gold cigarette case,’ answered George Cukor.
‘Would he like a car?’ suggested Darryl Zanuck. ‘He’s got a car,’ said George
Cukor. ‘Well, what the hell would he like?’ cried the Vice-President
impatiently. ‘I think he’d like a picture,’ said George Cukor. ‘A picture?’
When Darryl Zanuck had got over his astonishment he suggested that George Cukor
should bring me to see him. On the following day I was ushered into the presence
and Darryl Zanuck told me that in return for the work I had done (none of
which, incidentally, was ever made use of) he would be glad if I would buy
myself a picture at the expense of Twentieth Century Fox. I told him that I
would like it very much. ‘You can’t buy a picture for nothing,’ I added. ‘What
would Twentieth Century Fox be prepared to pay?’ ‘Anything up to fifteen
thousand dollars,’ Darryl Zanuck replied. I had never bought a picture at such
a price before and I was thrilled. I thanked the Vice-President effusively and
a day or two later set out for New
York .
But once there I hesitated to go round the picture dealers by myself. I did not think they would trouble to show their best pictures to a rather shabby old party who did not look at all like a purchaser; so I asked a friend of mine, a director of the Museum for Modern Art, to come with me and advise me. We spent several delightful mornings looking at one picture after another. There was one picture that particularly attracted me. It was a scene of the harbour at Rouen by Pissarro. It may not have been such a fine picture as others I saw, but it pleased me. After all, Flaubert was born at Rouen and, when he was writing Madame Bovary he must often have paused to look at the lively view. It existed no longer, for Rouen had been badly bombed during the war. Finally, however, on the advice of my friend, whose judgment was sounder than mine, I bought a snow scene by Matisse. But I could not get the Pissarro out of my mind; I thought I should always regret it if I did not have it, so I exchanged the Matisse for it. A little later I bought a Boudin, not one of those charming little pictures of fashionable women on the plage of Trouville , which he painted to earn a living, but a picture of water and trees. It moved me because I recognized in it a little piece of France that tourists seldom visit, but which I have been familiar with since my childhood.
Camille Pissarro, A Winter Landscape, Louveciennes. |
Henri Matisse, Lady with a Parasol. |
Stanislas Lépine, View Outside Paris. |
In 1946, having stored my two pictures, I returned to
During the war the British fleet, in
an attempt to destroy a semaphore on the top of my hill, had shelled my house.
It was uninhabitable so, with my friend and secretary, Alan Searle, I took a
couple of rooms in an hotel at Beaulieu. It took three months for my architect,
with a discreet use of the black market, to put the house in order. We moved
in. My pictures were returned to me and I placed where they had been placed
before. I resumed my interrupted life. A year or two later a friend brought me
the two pictures which I had left in the United States . I was obliged to
hang them in my bedroom since, with the theatrical pictures and the Marie
Laurencins, I had no other place to put them.
I had not forgotten the pleasure I
had in New York when I wandered from one dealer to another to buy the picture
Twentieth Century Fox wanted to pay for and when I went to Paris I continued to
haunt the dealers. I bought A Winter
Landscape by Pissarro, the Lady with
a Parasol by Matisse and a small Lépine [View Outside Paris].
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Argenteuil. |
Georges Rouault, Christ Crucified. |
Pierre Bonnard, Grandmother and Child. |
Then I went to New
York – for no reason I can remember except that I enjoyed myself
there and bought Renoir’s Argenteuil and
Rouault’s powerful Christ Crucified.
This, when I was home again, I hung in my dining room, but my guests complained
that it took their appetite away, so I have to put it in my bedroom. Another
trip to New York
enabled me to buy The Yellow Chair by
Matisse which I have already spoken of and a touching Bonnard of an old woman
feeding her grandchild.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Trois Jeunes Filles en Promenade. |
Claude Monet, Zaandam. |
Maurice Utrillo, A Street in Conquet, Brittany. |
Alfred Sisley, Le Loing à Moret. |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Nude (Gabrielle). |
A little later I was able to acquire
Renoir’s Trois Jeunes Filles en Promenade,
Monet’s Zaandam
and a street scene in Brittany
by Utrillo. In Paris
I bought Sisley’s Le Loing à Moret
and a small nude by Renoir [Gabrielle].
Renoir lived on the Riviera
not very far from where I lived myself and the story went that his favourite
model was his cook. When he had done his day’s work he would say to her, ‘Now
run along and put your clothes on and get the dinner cooking.’
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Polisseur. |
Some time later I bought Le Polisseur. It was a nude of a young
man polishing a stone floor, and it appears this is such dirty work that the
man who is given the job to do it strips to the skin. The dealer who sold it to
me told me that he could have got three times the price he asked me if it had
been the picture of a woman. Buyers jibbed at a male nude and I was able to buy
it for a very reasonable sum. I often asked the experts who came to see my
pictures whether they could guess who had painted it. Only one of them could. My
old friend, Sir Kenneth Clark, looked at it for two minutes and then said, ‘No
one could have painted that head or that foot but Toulouse-Lautrec,’ and of
course he was right.
Pablo Picasso, The Death of Harlequin. |
Pablo Picasso, Standing Woman (La Grecque) |
At about that time there was a
revival in England
of the plan to build a National Theatre and, eager as I was to have it built, I
wrote to the secretary of the Committee and offered to present my theatrical
pictures to the enterprise. My offer was accepted and I packed them up and sent
them to London .
I was sorry to lose the picture I had collected for so many years, but the loss
gave me more room in my house to hang other pictures. On my last visit to New York I had seen at a
dealer’s Picasso’s The Death of Harlequin
and was fascinated by it. It was a deeply moving picture. But it cost a lot of
money and to restore my house had proved expensive. I could not afford and
returned, disconsolate, to France .
But I kept thinking of the picture; I wanted badly to possess it. It was a
lovely thing. I felt I should regret it all my life if it was snapped up by
somebody else. At last I said to myself, ‘damn the expense,’ and made the
dealer an offer. I knew that he had a monumental picture of a standing woman,
also by Picasso [La Grecque], which
was not an easy object to dispose of and I was aware that he had had it for
some time. I had the exact place in my hall to put it and, thinking it would
tempt him, included it in my offer. To my delight he took it and the two
pictures eventually reached me.
Stanislas Lépine, River Scene. |
Edouard Vuillard, Still Life with Flowers. |
Time passed. One morning I happened
to be driving down Bond Street
when Alan Searle, my companion, suggested that we should have a look at the
pictures of a dealer whose premises were on our way. I agreed and, as we
approached, a lorry drove up in front of my car. A picture wrapped in a sheet
was carried into the shop. We parked the car and followed. There were two men
there, younger partners in the firm and suitably dressed in black as though for
a cocktail party, whose business, I presumed, was to look after the stock and
be polite to a possible client. I watched while the picture was unwrapped. It
was a Lépine [River Scene]. It was
unframed and dirty. It badly needed a cleaning. […] ‘How much d’you want for it?’
I asked. The two men looked at one another with embarrassment. It was not for
them, I suppose, but for the head of the firm to make a price; ‘theirs not to
reason why.’[4] After some hesitation the
elder of the two took his courage in both hands and mentioned a price which
from the look of me he thought I would not give. He was mistaken. ‘All right,’
I said. ‘I’ll buy it.’ The picture, cleaned and framed, hangs in my bedroom. I
have placed my bed so that I can see it when I awake in the morning and see it before
I close my eyes for the last time. I have never bought another picture. A
little while ago, however, an old friend gave me, or rather lent me, a charming
Vuillard, with the proviso that on my death it should be passed on to my
long-time friend and secretary, Alan Searle. It hangs by my bedside.
Stanislas Lépine, A View From Caen. |
[1]
See also the essay “Reflections on a Certain Book” from the collection The Vagrant Mood (1952):
Leonardo's
'Mona Lisa' is not a picture that everyone can care for now, but we know the
communication it had to make to Walter Pater; it was not a purely aesthetic
communication, but it is surely not the least of this particular picture's
merits that it had it to make to a man of peculiar sensibility.
[2] This is a
very fascinating reference. Compare with WSM’s hilarious description of his
bohemian sojourns on Capri in The Summing Up (1938):
I
listened with transport to conversations, up at Anacapri at the colonel's
house, or at Morgano's, the wine shop just off the Piazza, when they talked of
art and beauty, literature and Roman history. I saw two men fly at one
another's throats because they disagreed over the poetic merit for Heredia's
sonnets. I thought it all grand. Art, art for art's sake, was the only thing
that mattered in the world; and the artist alone gave this ridiculous world
significance. Politics, commerce, the learned professors - what did they amount
to from the standpoint of the Absolute? They might disagree, these friends of
mine (dead, dead every jack one of them), about the value of a sonnet or the
excellence of a Greek bas-relief (Greek, my eye! I tell you it's a Roman copy
and if I tell you a thing it is so); but they were all agreed about this, that
they burned with a hard, gem-like flame. I was too shy to tell them that I had
written a novel and was half-way through another and it was a great
mortification to me, burning as I was too with a hard, gem-like flame, to be
treated as a philistine who cared for nothing but dissecting dead bodies and
would seize an unguarded moment to give his best friend an enema.
This must have been in the summer of 1897 if Maugham
“had written a novel and was half-way through another”. Either Heredia’s
sonnets were much discussed by young man with artistic inclinations in France and Italy
in those times, or Maugham simply transferred to his own experiences in Paris incidents that had happened years earlier to other
people in Capri .
[3] See again
“Reflections on a Certain Book” where Maugham describes again his cook’s
fascinating with this strange picture and uses the occasion to argue that
artistic appreciation is accessible to everybody:
More
than twenty-five years ago I bought an abstract picture by Ferdinand Leger. It
was an arrangement of squares, oblongs and spheres in black, white, grey and
red, and for some reason he had called it 'Les Toits de Paris.' I did not think
it beautiful, but I found it ingenious and decorative. I had a cook then, a
bad-tempered and quarrelsome woman, who would stand looking at this picture for
quite long periods in a state of something that looked very like rapture. [...]
It seemed to me that she was receiving as genuine an aesthetic emotion as I
flattered myself I received from El Greco's 'Crucifixion' in the Louvre. I am
led by this (a single instance, of course) to suggest that it is a very narrow
point of view which claims that the specific pleasure of artistic appreciation
can only be felt by the privileged few. It may well be that the pleasure is
subtler, richer and more discriminating in someone whose personality is
cultivated, whose experience is wide, but why should we suppose that someone
else, less fortunately circumstanced, cannot feel a pleasure as intense and as
fruitful? The object that in the latter gives rise to the pleasure may be what
the aesthete considers no great shakes. Does that matter?
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.