The Slade School Gang.
“What a brood I have raised!” Henry Tonks.
The two artists most connected with Augustus John at the Slade were William Orpen and William Rothenstein. Orpen who arrived at the Slade in 1897 came from the Dublin upper-middle class; he was the son of a solicitor who had won many prizes at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. Popular with students and staff, Orpen won a Summer Composition prize in 1899 for his Play Scene from Hamlet, which uses the open auditorium of Sadler Wells Theatre to show the rehearsal in Act III; this also contains John himself embracing another Slade pupil Ida Nettleship, his future wife. Given an ultimatum from his father to take up a serious career or being cut off with a hundred pounds, Orpen took the money and never looked back. His relations were to cool with John after Orpen became in John’s words “the protégé of big business.” Orpen was philosophical about this: “I am not fit to tie Augustus John’s bootlaces” he confided to a friend. Rothenstein was the son of a wool merchant and delighted in the grim landscape of his native Yorkshire, which was the subject of some early watercolours. He went from Bradford to the Slade (1888-93) where he was taught by Legros. His talent was recognized as early as 1891, when an exhibition of his work and that of the Australian painter Charles Conder at the Galerie Hadrien Thomas in Paris attracted the attention of many artists including Pissarro and Degas. Rothenstein, Orpen and Conder would holiday with John on the North French coast where they roomed together and painted. Paintings like Rothenstein’s A Doll’s House (inspired by the Ibsen play) were the results of those campaigns; this picture also has John (and Rothenstein’s wife) modelling as characters in the drama.
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