In 1901 Augustus John accepted a teaching post at an art school affiliated with Liverpool’s University College, and he and his wife Ida relocated to Merseyside, England. In Liverpool the Johns befriended the novelist and essayist Mary Dowdall and her husband Harold Chaloner Dowdall, a prominent Liverpool lawyer. John’s biographer Michael Holroyd has described Harold Chaloner Dowdall as ‘a pompous good-natured barrister, very loyal to the Johns but with a tendency to dilate, perhaps for an entire day, on the extreme freshness of that morning’s eggs at breakfast’.1Michael Holroyd, Augustus John, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996, p. 99.
The son of a Liverpool stockbroker, Harold Chaloner Dowdall was educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Oxford, was admitted to the bar in 1893, and became a member of Liverpool City Council in 1899.2On Dowdall, see W. B. Tracey, Lancashire at the Opening of the Twentieth Century: Contemporary Biographies, Pike, Brighton, 1903, p. 298, and the obituary ‘His Honour H. C. Dowdall, Q.C.’, The Times, 22 April 1955. In 1908 Dowdall was appointed Lord Mayor of Liverpool, a post he held for the usual one-year term. It was at this moment that Dowdall’s and John’s paths came together again. As Holroyd noted: ‘It was the custom in Liverpool for members of the city council to raise a private subscription of one hundred guineas and to present the retiring Lord Mayor with a ceremonial portrait’.3Holroyd, pp. 287–8.
Dowdall later recalled:
It was like this. When I was offered the usual 100 guineas presentation portrait I suggested that I should give the commission instead of leaving that (as had been usual) with the asinine chairman of the Walker Art Gallery [in Liverpool]; and John liked the idea of doing it. We went to the colour-man together and he wanted a vast canvas and I think had in mind a whole group of mace bearers, etc., but I persuaded him to moderate the size.4Harold Chaloner Dowdall, letter to Sir Sydney Cockerell, 6 June 1938, quoted in Leonard Cox, The National Gallery of Victoria 1861 to 1968: A Search for a Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, c. 1970, p. 155.
Dowdall apparently protested that his house was too small to accommodate such a grand composition, while John, though agreeing to downsize his vision, nonetheless purchased the largest canvas available.
According to Holroyd, John worked up a watercolour sketch on the first day of sitting, showing Dowdall holding his wand and sword of office in a kind of inverted ‘v’ with the Mayor at its centre. Lunch was then served by Dowdall’s footman, Smith, and, noticing how the Mayor and his aide shared such bonhomie, John then suggested including Smith in the painting as well.5Holroyd, p. 288.
The enormous portrait has been aptly described as ‘John’s most serious effort to come to grips with grand salon portraiture’,6Malcolm Easton & Michael Holroyd, The Art of Augustus John, Secker & Warburg, London, 1974, p. 16. and echoes of both Diego Velázquez’s The Cardinal Infante Don Ferdinand of Austria, in hunting dress, c. 1632–34 (Museo del Prado, Madrid) and Édouard Manet’s A matador, 1867 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), resound within it.
Harold Chaloner Dowdall was still Lord Mayor of Liverpool in September 1909, when he proudly opened the city’s thirty-ninth autumn exhibition of modern art, a mammoth display of 2300 works at the Walker Art Gallery.7‘Liverpool autumn exhibition’, The Times, 20 Sept. 1909, p. 6. John’s portrait was unveiled to the public at the exhibition; however, it met not with the success expected by artist and sitter, but with ridicule and derision. Holroyd has documented how:
The reception given to the portrait when it was first shown that autumn was extreme. The press called it ‘detestable’, ‘crude’, ‘unhealthy, ‘an insult, ‘a travesty in paint’, and ‘the greatest exhibition of bad and inartistic taste we have ever seen’. The art critic for The Liverpool Daily Post (18 September 1909) felt able to describe it as ‘a work worse painted and worse drawn than any modern picture we can remember’, and suggested that it was ‘an artistic practical joke’ which gave Smith the grounds for legal action. Another critic (19 September 1909) detected moral danger in the canvas. It was, he declared, ‘an attenuated specimen of what Mr John chooses to call a man, over 20 heads in length, all legs, the pimple of a head being placed on very narrow shoulders and by his side, in a ridiculous attitude, a figure that I fancy I have seen before in a Punch and Judy show. All painted in rank, bad colour and shockingly badly drawn … The public have none too great knowledge of art as it is; to publicly exhibit the work is calculated to do immense amount of harm to the public generally and the young art students who go to galleries and museums for guidance and help’.8Holroyd, p. 291.
The footman in John’s painting became a particular focus of attention in Liverpool in 1909, with people flocking to the Walker Art Gallery to view what had become known as the ‘Portrait of Smith’.
After the First World War, Dowdall moved to Melfort Cottage in the small hamlet of Boars Hill, south-west of Oxford. He now decided to sell John’s portrait. The National Gallery in London offered Dowdall £650 for the painting, but they were outbid by private collector, E. P. Warren, to whom Dowdall sold the portrait in 1918 for £1450.9For a full discussion of this painting, its provenance and significance, see Ted Gott, ‘Rich, effective pictorial pageantry: Augustus John’s Rt. Hon. Harold Chaloner Dowdall, Lord Mayor of Liverpool and his sword-bearer, 1909’, Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria, vol. 56, 2018, <www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/rich-effective-pictorial-pageantry-augustus-johns-rt-hon-harold-chaloner-dowdall-lord-mayor-of-liverpool-and-his-sword-bearer-1909>.
In April 1938 the NGV’s London-based Felton Adviser, Sir Sydney Cockerell (who was also Director at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), recommended the purchase of John’s portrait of Dowdall from Warren’s secretary Harry Asa Thomas, who had inherited it after Warren’s death in 1928. The acquisition of this work was opposed vigorously at the time by the NGV’s Director J. S. MacDonald, who loathed the painting. Despite McDonald’s objections, however, Sir Sydney Cockerell proceeded to negotiate a discount price of £2500 for the work with Arthur Tooth & Sons, agents for Harry Asa Thomas. It was Sir Keith Murdoch – owner of the Melbourne Herald newspaper – a staunch advocate of modern art who had become Vice-President of the Trustees in December 1937 and a member of the Felton Purchase Committee in April 1938, just as Cockerell proposed John’s painting for acquisition, who held sway with the Felton Purchase Committee, and so the painting was secured for Melbourne. Unfortunately, before the work’s dispatch to Australia, Cockerell decided that its original frame was ‘entirely inadequate and unsuitable for the picture’ and he ordered a replacement frame to be made for a modest £50.10Radcliffes & Co., letter to the Trustees, Executors and Agency Company Ltd of Melbourne, 25 May 1938. Felton Bequest papers, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. On Cockerell, see Shane Carmody, ‘ “Vain, aggressive and somewhat quarrelsome”: The Enduring Impact of Sir Sydney Cockerell on the Melbourne Collections’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 13, no. 4, 2007, pp. 421–55.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria