The 1920s and 1930s saw Augustus John triumph as a portraitist. Poppet, the daughter of John and Dorothy (Dorelia) McNeil, is portrayed here in a half-length pose in the act of turning from a profile to a three-quarter view. She gazes down at the viewer. Her pose is exaggerated and the form, particularly the neck, is distorted – devices used by the artist to create a sense of individual personality. The paint surface is sketchily attractive, the lightly painted form and self-conscious pose capturing the youthful sitter’s modernity.
The artist’s daughter, c. 1927–1928, was originally intended as a purchase for the Tate, London, by the Council of the Royal Academy under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest. This was a bequest made to London’s Royal Academy of Arts by the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey on his death in 1841, the terms of which stipulated that ‘no work of art whether executed by a deceased or living Artist shall be purchased unless the same shall have been entirely executed within the shores of Great Britain’.1‘Chantrey Bequest (Chantrey Fund; Royal Academy of Arts), 1875–1948’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011, <sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/event.php?id=msib4_1256317569>, accessed 16 Aug. 2018. When the Royal Academy’s Secretary wrote to the artist’s dealer, however, to ‘obtain from Mr John a statement that this picture was entirely executed within the shores of Great Britain’, the idea of acquiring this work for the Tate was thwarted.2Sir Walter Rangeley Maitland Lamb, letter to Dudley W. Tooth, 1 Jun. 1932, copy in NGV research files. John had to admit that although this portrait had been begun in Great Britain, he had also partly painted it while on vacation in the south of France.
John’s dealer Dudley Tooth subsequently wrote to the National Gallery of Victoria’s London-based Felton Bequest Adviser Randall Davies, who was charged with recommending purchases to be made using the funds bequeathed to the Gallery by Alfred Felton in 1904:
You will probably have seen the report in the Press (copies of which I enclose), of the Chantrey Bequest having to forego at the last minute the purchase of a fine portrait by Augustus John owing to the conditions of the Will of the late Sir Francis Chantrey. The portrait was painted about four or five years ago and is an extremely clever and animated study of his daughter – one of the best pictures he has painted in recent years. It is worthy to hang in an important Public Gallery and as the Chantrey Bequest are unable to purchase it for the Tate, it struck me at once that you might like to acquire it for Melbourne. John quoted the extremely low price of £475 if the picture was to be bought by the Nation and I think he would allow the price to stand for any other Public Gallery.3Dudley Tooth, letter to Randall Davies, 15 Jun. 1932, NGV research files.
The Felton Bequests’ Committee was in agreement with this suggestion and The artist’s daughter was reserved for the NGV. By way of compensation, however, the painting was allowed to be placed on display at the Tate for six weeks before being shipped to Australia.4‘John picture on loan for Tate Gallery’, The Times, 5 Jul. 1932, p. 11. Meanwhile news of its purchase for Melbourne was syndicated across newspapers throughout Australia.
As noted above, The artist’s daughter is a portrait of Poppet, the eldest daughter of John’s mistress Dorelia McNeill, who was born in tragic circumstances in 1912, while her brother Pyramus (born to Augustus and Dorelia in 1905) was dying of meningitis. Dorelia’s second son, Romilly, recalled how after the birth of his sister:
I remember a grand discussion in the walled-in summer-house about what she should be called – a discussion which has been going on ever since. Elizabeth Anne was the provisional choice on that occasion, but it satisfied nobody, and the baby was finally registered as ‘one female child’, pending the discovery of the ideal name. Meanwhile Caspar, contemplating her one day, chanced to remark: ‘What a little poppet it is!’ – and Poppet she was called from that day forward. A real name was still intended to be found for her, but we had not reckoned with the force of habit, and, in spite of intermittent consultation, and at least one attempt to revert to the original suggestion, Anne, she has continued Poppet to this day.5Romilly John, The Seventh Child [1932], Jonathan Cape, London, 1975, p. 49.
Still a teenager when this portrait was painted, Poppet nonetheless exudes an air of maturity, and even precocious flirtation. This accords with her own reminiscences of her time with John in Martigues, France, in the late 1920s, when she had first begun to question his parental authority.6Michael Holroyd, Augustus John. The New Biography, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1996, p. 482. Augustus John scholars Malcolm Eastern and Michael Holroyd put this delicately in 1974, when they wrote that The artist’s daughter ‘succeeded in catching all the nuances of high-spirited girlhood’.7Malcolm Easton & Michael Holroyd, The Art of Augustus John, Secker & Warburg, London, 1974, p. 182. Another John scholar, Richard Shone praised the ‘studied insouciance’ of this painting, noting that
All is fresh and simple; it has that mixture of suavity and delicacy typical of John’s best portraits, and shows a certain probity in its delineation of character.8Richard Shone, Augustus John, Phaidon, Oxford, 1979, p. 11.
Due to her father’s high profile as the most celebrated contemporary British artist working at the time, Poppet became a favourite of the press in her own right. News of her marriage in 1931 at the age of eighteen to Derek Jackson was widely reported in Australia.9Poppet’s wedding photographs were published, for example in Brisbane’s Daily Standard and Melbourne’s Argus: ‘Artist’s daughter weds’, The Daily Standard, 11 Apr. 1931, p. 2; ‘Mr Augustus John’, The Argus, 8 Apr. 1931, p. 5. When The artist’s daughter arrived in Melbourne in 1932, the sitter was thus a familiar personality to local audiences.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
