Drawn from Life

by Stella Bowen

Memoir of Australian artist Stella Bowen who was married to writer Ford Madox Ford. Chronicles her life in Paris, America and her artist achievements painting the RAF and others during WWII.

Genres: Biography, Memoir, History, Nonfiction, Art, Australia

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1941

Reviews

[Ian Laird · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have known the name Stella Bowen most of my life, discovering her work as a war artist in my dad’s As You Were 1946 first of a series, published from 1946 to 1950 by the Australian War Memorial.

Her moving wartime portraits are mainly Australian air crew in Britain. One simply called Lancaster Crew is especially poignant:

At Binbrook R.A.F. flying base, Lincolnshire, early in 1944 the crew of a Lancaster bomber were posing in their spare time for Australian artist resident in Britain, Stella Bowen. As opportunity offered, the six Australians and one Englishman would don their flying kits and look “businesslike” for an hour or so while the artist worked. -As You Were 1946 p84

On the night of 27 April 1944, the crew took off and by morning were reported missing. Bowen continued to work on the painting, using photographs and her memory. She said that it was like painting ghosts. It wasn’t until September that word came from Germany that there was a survivor, but only one.

Nora Heysen, daughter of celebrated landscape painter Sir Hans Heysen was the first Australian woman appointed an official war artist, in 1943; Stella Bowen was the second a year later. While primarily a portraitist, her subjects including, among many others, Aldous Huxley and Arnold Bax, Bowen was quite versatile, painting landscapes, both urban and rural and scenes from her domestic life. Bowen’s wartime work of 40 plus paintings and drawings represents the final phase of her working life; she died of cancer in England in 1947 at the age of 54.

Bowen was born in Adelaide in 1893. After her parents died young she sailed for England in 1914 and never returned. While celebrating the armistice in London four years later Bowen met the author Ford Madox Ford and began a nine year relationship. They had a child, Esther Julia. The relationship ended after Ford’s affair with the young Jean Rhys and other infidelities.

Bowen wrote Drawn from Life in 1940, covering her life up until then.

More recently I encountered Stella Bowen in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, the American was well acquainted with Ford Madox Ford in Paris in the 1920s. I learned of Stella Bowen’s life with Ford, though not directly, she is not mentioned by name. Hemingway’s opinion of Ford is not complementary, saying that Ford talks but doesn’t really listen, instead providing advice and opinions liberally. After Ford mis-orders a drink, Hemingway goes on: ‘I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air and the fallen leaves blew along the sidewalks from my side of the table past his, so I took a good look at him, repented, and looked across the boulevard. The light has changed again and I had missed the change. I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good.’ (p63 of A Moveable Feast) Thereafter Hemingway refers to Ford’s ‘very bad domestic troubles’.

Given Hemingway’s low opinion I was curious to learn what brought Bowen and Ford together. I soon found out: Bowen was acquainted with Ford by reputation: ‘he was one of the writers Ezra [Pound] allowed us to admire. Ladies Whose Bright Eyes and The Good Soldier were two of the best-thumbed books on our shelves’ (p61). Then this:

‘He was the only intellectual I had met to whom army discipline provided a conscious release from the torments and indecisions of a super sensitive brain…He was very large with a pink face, yellow hair, and drooping, bright blue eyes. His movements were gentle and deliberate and his quiet and mellow voice spoke, to an Australian ear, with ineffable authority…I found that every known human quality could be found flourishing in Ford’s make-up, except a respect for logic…But he could show you two sides simultaneously of any human affair, and the double picture made the subject come alive and stand out in a way that was very exciting. What he did not know about the depths and weaknesses of human nature was not worth knowing. The hidden places of the heart were his especial domain, and when he chose he could put the screw upon your sense of pity or of fear with devastating sureness.’ (p61-62)

Her fate was sealed.

Bowen goes on to say that the stiff exterior ‘concealed a highly complicated emotional machinery’ (p62) and his ‘imagination had produced a great edifice which was plainly in need of more support than was inherent in the structure itself. A walking temptation to any woman, had I but known it.’ (p62) And to cap it all off: ‘To me he was quite simply the most enthralling person I had ever met.’ (p63)

The couple established a life of genteel poverty in England, living in tiny, cold and damp cottages, where Stella did the cooking and shielded Ford from unpleasant events, happenings and worries especially about money. She saw him as just a writer, nothing else, requiring a great deal of maintenance: ‘And he needed more reassurance than anyone I have ever met.’ (p80)

The inevitable result of this state of affairs was that Stella’s art was diminished: ‘My painting had of course, been hopelessly interfered with by the whole shape of my life, for I was learning the technique of quite a different role; that of consort to another and more important artist. (p82)

Life with Ford did however give Stella entrée into a world of authors and artists she may have never experienced otherwise. She undertook an art tour of Italy with Dorothy and Ezra Pound, taking in Assisi, Florence and Sienna, which cemented her love of sixteenth century Italian painting. In the south of France she went to the bullfights and the markets. Back in Paris she mixed with the literati including Papa: ‘Presently Hemingway began to visit us with his smile and his tough-seeming bonhomie.’ (p111) She and Ford mixed with Louise Bryant, Andre Gide, Paul Valery and Edmond Jaloux.

But it could not last. Her desire for freedom became greater than her devotion to an artist she still admired but could no longer live with. She returned to England to work as a portrait painter where her subjects included more famous names: Edith Sitwell, William Walton, Diaghilieff, Constance Lambert and Cecil Beaton. Her friend Peggy Guggenheim paid Stella’s fare to the USA where she travelled painting more portraits, before returning once again to England under warring skies, and remained there the rest of her days.

***
Stella Bowen will always be the lady artist from my childhood who painted the brave Aussie men who flew the Lancasters.

[Susan Harter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written by a young painter who was married to the author Ford Maddox Ford. She is so modest about her own talents it's not until half-way through you realize that actually, there were two writers in that family, and Stella is one.

It taught me a lot about painting, and about life, and I have read it so often I've memorized bits, such as this description of their arrival in Provence "I thought pityingly of our efforts to level the orchard in front of the cottage at Bedham, and I thought of the rainn and the mud and the darkness of Sussex, and decided that climate is one of the few things in life that really matter. Other things, friends, fame, or fortune, may elude or disappoint you, but a good climate never lets you down. And really life is too short to be struggling perpetually with the weather when one is already struggling with so many other things!"

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, a book on loan is just so perfect that you have to have your own copy. So it is with Stella Bowen's Drawn from Life, lent to me by WA author Amanda Curtin after I mentioned it in my review of Rosemary Lancaster's Je Suis Australienne Remarkable Women in France, 1880-1945. Amanda's most recent book is about the 20th century expat Australian painter Kathleen O'Connor and I can now see why Stella Bowen's book would have been so useful for research in this period. Stella Bowen (1893-1947) was born and educated in Adelaide, but it's clear from this autobiography that for her, as for Kathleen O'Connor, life began as an expat in Paris.

(And it was also clear to me that I had to buy my own copy, though Amanda's Virago edition is much nicer than my 1999 Picador, because the Virago editions includes reproductions of Bowen's portraits, showing what a superb portraitist she was. See some of them here.)

The first chapter covers Stella's childhood and adolescence, and the bereavements that prompted her escape from the stultifying life mapped out for her by the social expectations of the era. She recalls her birthplace as...

...a queer little backwater of intellectual timidity—a kind of hangover of Victorian provincialism, isolated by three immense oceans and a great desert, and stricken by recurrent waves of paralysing heat. It lies shimmering on a plain encircled by soft blue hills, prettyish, banal, and filled to the brim with an anguish of boredom. (p.11)

Inspired by a charismatic art teacher called Rose McPherson (a.k.a. Margaret Preston), Stella set sail for England in 1914. She had a regular income inherited from her mother; and a return ticket and her uncle's arrangements for her to be chaperoned in London. But when her younger brother Tom subsequently cabled from Australia that he had enlisted and that her return was optional, she sold the return ticket and made a life for herself free of all ties to Australia.

It was war time, but what seems to us with the benefit of hindsight to be a shattering experience, was something Stella appears to have lived through without much emotional impact. She admits that she and her friends did not grasp that they were living in an epic and that the war turned out as it did. She was a pacifist, and she volunteered with some infant welfare work, but she spent most of her time at art school, quickly shedding her uncle's arrangements in order to share a studio with her friend Phyllis Reid. At the Westminster Art School she was taught by Walter Sickert, of whom she said that four minutes with him was worth four months criticism from elsewhere:

He taught me to trust one's faithful eyes, and to open them wide. I had never before been required to look at things so minutely, and having looked, to record them with so little fuss. He hated it if you touched the canvas twice in the same place. The first touch had a virtue all its own, he would say, and any correction you added only substituted a doubtful virtue for a positive one. In the same way, you were never allowed to erase a line. If you were wrong, you just made a heavier one in the right place. Then your drawing had the added interest of showing your first thoughts as well as your second. (p.46)

[I wonder, as we make more and more use of technology that allows us to 'fix' things, if Sickert's virtue still applies anywhere at all.]

It was when Peggy (her former Chelsea hostess) asked the young women if their big studio space could be used for a party, that Stella met Ezra Pound. He turned out to be only the first of the notable people that became part of her life. She went on to meet a Who's Who of London Bohemia: T S Eliot, Arthur Waley, Wadsworth, May Sinclair, Violet Hunt, G B Stern, Wyndham Lewis, and Yeats. These people, and Ezra in particular, added to her education, introducing her, for example, to the work of authors like James Joyce.

Stella's descriptions of people are superb, all done with a painterly eye. Here she is describing her friend Mary Butts, also doing volunteer work at the Children's Care Committee in the East End:

She was a flaming object in that dreary office, with her scarlet hair and white skin and sudden, deep-set eyes. She looked what she was — a girl who came from a lovely old home in Dorset and a family which had given her good manners and an expensive education, but had entirely failed to inspire her with the current ideas of her class. (p.39)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/06/23/d...

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m writing a trilogy set in Paris and Sydney in the 1920s. In the second book in the trilogy which I’m working on now I need to do a lot of research on the Paris Commune of 1871, on the Paris artistic community in the 1920s, particularly 1924 and also on Toulon.
So many books have been written about the “Lost Generation” from the point of view of Americans mainly, so it was wonderful to get my hands on this book by an Australian woman who was there in the midst of it, part of the “charmed circle”. Well one of the circles anyway as there were several groups. You can imagine my surprise when I flipped through the chapter headings and found Paris 1924 and later Toulon where she lived for a time.
As Bowen’s daughter so elegantly puts it in her introduction to the book:
My mother’s life spanned the years between the close of the nineteenth century and the late 1940s, a half century that began with muslin dresses, tennis parties and cricket matches in South Australia and ended with the Second World War and its aftermath in England.”
Even from the opening lines you know you are in for a treat with this beautifully written memoir:
“The land where I was born is a blue and yellow country, although when the sun pours out of a cloudless sky there is very little colour to be seen.”
The memoir details so much of what really is, in my opinion, the balancing act of being a wife, mother and artist. Her desire to be true to herself and follow her art takes her to England in 1914 where she enrols in art school. She writes:
“I found London grimmer, dirtier, more cramped and less spectacular than I had expected.”
From Bowen we learn all about her life during the war years, the society she moved in, the studios she lived in and what it was like to be an independent young woman at that time. Shortly after the Armistice she meets Ford Maddox Ford and becomes his lover; moving in with him into a small cottage in the Sussex countryside. Their daughter Julie is born in 1920 and in 1922 they move to France.
Bowen writes candidly of their relationship and is particularly hard on herself.
“Ford was completely unmercenary, and also completely unable to plan or manage what money he had. I still thought of him almost as God the Father and it took me a long time - until it was too late in fact - to realise that the only sensible thing for me to have done would have been to assume entire control of all the spending, to turn a deaf ear to any alluring suggestions of pleasurable extravagance. But that would have required more strength of character than I possessed, and it would have humiliated Ford.”
During the years Bowen spent with Ford she barely had any time for painting. She mostly only managed small paintings or sketches. As she says herself:
“Any artist knows that after a good bout of work one is both too tired and too excited to be of any use to anyone. To be obliged to tackle other people’s problems, or merely to cook their meals, the moment one lays down pen or brush, is intolerably hard.”
After travelling in the south of France and Italy, the couple finally arrive in Paris in 1924. In Paris, at least, she is now surrounded by writers and artists and not cut off as she was in Sussex.
Bowen writes of their first home in Paris:
...it was fun to lead people down yellowing greenery of the little winding path behind the studios and give them tea in the tiny room with the shabby divan and the big French windows, and the sun pouring through the hanging sprays of creeper.”
Soon afterwards Ford Maddox Ford established the Transatlantic Review which ran for a year and published the likes of Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Bob McAlmon. All these people counted as friends and Bowen details how they met them or what part they played in their lives.
Of course Jean Rhys enters the couples’ lives and that as they say, is that. Bowen’s account of this incident is remarkably restrained to the point that she doesn’t actually even name Rhys.
And here is where I will have to stop. I have only skimmed half of this memoir and this review is becoming unmanageable, mainly because this book offers so much! Contains so much about places, art and life that you will just have to read Drawn From Life to find out the rest. It is a magical book that can’t be summarised.

[Leiki Fae · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit that it was Jean Rhys's affair with Ford Madox Ford, Stella Bowen's common-law husband at the time, that brought me to this book. I was looking for some good gossip. I was thoroughly surprised to discover that Bowen, an artist and professional portraitist, is a solid writer in her own right. She lived among The Lost Generation in 1920s Paris, tending to Ford and their daughter, but also attending and hosting parties with some of the most spectacular names of that era. But Bowen is not pretentious, but entirely relatable. She muses from time to time on her relationship with Ford, how it satisfied her as a woman but distracted her as an artist, and how it took a long time for her to cultivate her own talent when she was so thoroughly burdened with the domestic responsibilities of keeping house for a talented but perpetually broke writer.
I recommend this book for anyone interested in 1920s Paris or the hurdles particular to female creatives.

[Anne Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read "Stravinsky's Lunch" some years ago, it was interesting to hear from Stella Bowen herself. She well describes the dilemma of catering to another artistic ego (Ford Madox Ford) whose needs seem to always take priority (and the man doesn't have to be any kind of artist for this to happen!) while attempting to pursue an artistic career of her own. As she learns, when the other artist is engaged in the full force of creative endeavour and when there's a home to be managed and a child to take care of and food to be prepared and above all the environment kept quiet and conducive to creation, she may as well forget attempting any work of her own. Sadly not much has changed since the 1920s in that regard.

[Heather Slutzkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was lent to me by an elderly lady, and I was unfamiliar with the art of Stella Bowen, and don't usually read biographies. I found it an interesting insight into the literary and artistic world of Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Most interesting was the fact that war was barely mentioned, apart from in the way in affected her trying to establish herself as an artist and support herself. She does reveal a lot of the personal accommodations she had to make in support of her husband, Ford (Madox Ford) in the earlier part of her time in the UK and Europe when she first went there from Australia.

[Josephine Waite · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a bit rambling and anyone not familiar with painting or the period she writes about will struggle (that's why it only gets 3 stars) but I would still like it for the fierce blazing out when she has something to say. On the life of the female artist trying to cater to a male writer's ego, of her devastation when the male chooses another, younger muse, of war, political life, Paris, and the total bucket of shit she pours on Adelaide, South Australia where she was born. It's worth getting a copy just for that; except it is out of print and the copy I read has gone back to the library.

[E.K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young Australian lives the bohemian life of 1920s and 1930s Paris and France. Not sure who she didn't meet in the way of starving artists of that period, who later became famous. But this is not a name-dropping autobiography, rather a sensitive portayal of the trials and joys of those times. How she put up with some of those men, I will never understand. She had to retreat to England during WW2. She lived to see victory but sadly died far too young.
(The paperback edition I read had a fascinating introduction by her daughter Julia Loewe written in 1984.)

[Brenda Rosser]

Paid $50 for a second hand paperback, quite yellowed, completely worth it

[Bronwen Whyatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read. Stella is as much a writer as any of the writers she mentions in her memoir, plus she was a great painter also. It was a telling portrayal of the way men do not understand the sacrifices made by women who live with them, and it seems no coincidence that she progressed farther after she separated from Ford Maddox Ford. I contributed to a recent discussion on a notable broadcaster's Facebook request to answer the question why we hear the works of too few female composers. Stella's words are just as applicable today as they every were:
"Childcare, home care, partner care - for many women their own care of self and their creativity comes in a close ... last. I've just read a book, Drawn from Life, by Stella Bowen, the Australian (ended up living in England) war painter. She writes about this very phenomenon and it is extremely insightful p. 92 "But our steady stream of visitors made a great deal of extra work and was apt to destroy all our privacy and interfere with Ford's (Maddox Ford) writing. My painting had, of course, been hopelessly interfered with by the whole shape of my life, for I was learning the technique of quite a different role; that of consort to another and more important artist. So that although Ford was always urging me to paint, I simply had not got any creative vitality to spare after I had played my part towards him and Julie, and struggled through the day's chores. It is true that I painted a few portraits, and did some illustrations for Ford, but they represented nothing but a hobby - an effort not to let go altogether. Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him. He thought I lacked the will to do it at all costs. That was true, but he did not realise that if I had had the will to do it at all costs, my life would have been oriented quite differently. I should not have been available to nurse him through the daily strain of his own work; to walk and talk with him whenever he wanted, and to stand between him and circumstances. Pursuing art is not just a matter of finding the time - it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it." Another good book on the subject that I haven't read, but have heard is great is Annabel Crabb's, The Wife Drought. Stella agrees with Annabel p.93 "Any artist knows that after a good bout of work one is both too tired and too excited to be of any use to anyone. To be obliged to tackle other people's problems, or merely to cook their meals, the moment one lays down pen or brush, is intolerably hard. What one wants, on the contrary, is for other people to occupy themselves with one's own moods and requirements; to lie on a sofa and listen to music, and have things brought to one on a tray! That is why a man writer or painter always manages to get some woman to look after him and make his life easy, and since female devotion, in England anyhow, is a glut on the market, this is not difficult. A professional woman, however, seldom gets this cushioning unless she can pay money for it." Stella died at age 54 in 1947. Ford had gone and married someone else, and it seems she achieved most in her career when single. It would seem that things have not changed much for creative women. The pressures of the other parts of their lives continue to impact their output.

[Janet Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A couple of weeks ago I sat down under a shade tree in Adelaide’s Stella Bowen Park, saw her remarkably attractive studio photograph on a noticeboard and read a brief snapshot of her brief life.

I was intrigued. Not least because lately I’ve recently been reading about Ford Madox Ford. And between 1919 and 1927 still recovering from a serious bout of agoraphobia brought about in part by his unstable marriage and extramarital love life, Ford (aged 44) met Stella Bowen (still only 24) in London and moved in with her. Waiting for a divorce that never materialized, life was initially rosy and together they had a daughter. But faced with Ford’s catalogue of on-off relationships with other attractive and vivacious women - all equally smitten by this most unlikely-looking, aging Casanova - and the need to put her own career on a back burner to support his, Stella Bowen eventually threw in the sponge and got on with her own life. And good for her.

Drawn From Life fills in the detail. Well not the really messy bits. Born in Adelaide, Australia, always determined to be an artist, she studied under Walter Sickert in London, was the friend of poets, writers and painters, and after her life with Ford Madox Ford in England and France, she returned to London. As a single mother, it was hard. The Depression meant work was difficult to find and she wasn’t making much money from the sale of her paintings. So since there seemed to be interest in her life with Ford she wrote this book. False hope as it turned out. Sales were low but in any case it was published in 1941 and as WWII paper rationing bit deeper, reissue would have been out of the question. All she seemed to get out of it was the advance her publisher made.

What the book doesn’t cover is the upturn in her life when late in 1943 she landed a job as War Artist for the Royal Australian Air Force stationed in England and gained international recognition for her incisive and often moving studies of bomber crews, air force personnel and returned Australian prisoners of war. Nor of course does it deal with the sudden downturn when she was diagnosed with cancer and died in Essex, England in October 1947 aged only 54. She never returned to Australia.

You may enjoy some other of my related reviews:

The Scent of Eucalyptus: Barbara Hanrahan https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Nora Heysen: Light and Life: Jane Hylton https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Men of the R.A.F: William Rothenstein https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stella Bowen offers us a precious, frank glimpse into the world of 1920s Paris and the intelligentsia that gathered there. She recalls her troubles in life and love with an effacing grace, and although much of her memoir recounts the pervasive anxieties about financial stability; it does not tarnish the happiest memories she recalls for us. If anything, it grounds the reader, and reminds us that these were the lived lives of people, rather than merely flights of fantasy that recall a bygone era. She fondly conjures for us the ups and downs of her relationship with author Ford Maddox Ford, and their daughter Julie.

Stella guides us through the soirees, the salons, and the studios with a lively and endearing narration. Her memoirs are at once poignantly simple and wonderfully glamorous, and stand testament to the passion and dedication of a remarkable women and accomplished artist.

[Ann Tonks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it because it isn't written by a writer but rather by an artist that makes the language so clear and the story telling so effective? From her description of summer in Adelaide to her despair about living in the UK during WW2, this is an utterly engaging autobiography.