Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
UCL Slade School of Fine Art, Gower St, Kings Cross, London WC1E 6BT
Carfax Gallery, 24 Bury St, St James's, London SW1Y 6PF
Spread Eagle Hotel, Cornmarket, Thame OX9 2BW, UK
Three Swans, 21 High St, Market Harborough LE16 7NJ
32 Lancaster Rd, Rugby CV21 2QW, UK
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John Rowland Fothergill (1876–1957) was an English art student and
later became an innkeeper and author. He described himself in ''Who's Who'' as
a "pioneer amateur innkeeper''.
John Rowland Fothergill was born in 1876 in Kent. He descended from the Fothergills of Westmoreland and the Fothergills of Caerleon.
He attended St John's College, Oxford, Slade School of Fine Art and the London School of Architecture. His fellow students at Slade are Augustus John, Jacob Epstein and William Rothenstein. After college, 1898, he opened the Carfax Gallery, 24 Bury Street, together with Rothenstein. Arthur Clifton was the business manager, and Robert Sickert, Walter Sickert's brother, was the managerial secretary. The Carfax Gallery was Walter Sickert's chief dealer in England. William Bruce Ellis Ranken's first exhibition was at The Carfax Gallery. Edward Perry Warren, good friend of Robbie Ross (who was good friend and probably lover of Fothergill), provided the money to open the gallery. Fothergill became one of the biographers of Warren. It was Fothergill who bought the big Tudor oak table that was in the Dining Room at Lewes House; he paid it £25 to George Justice, a Lewes antique dealer, and it was sold, at Warren's death, for £2,100. William Rothenstein, talks about Lewes House in his autobiography, ''Men and Memories''. He says it was "a monkish establishment, where women were not welcomed. But Warren, who believed that scholars should live nobly. He kept an ample table and a well-stocked wine-cellar... There was much mystery about the provenance of the treasures at Lewes House. This secrecy seemed to permeate the rooms and corridors, to exhaust the air of the house. The social relations, too, were often strained, and Fothergill longed for a franker, for a less cloistered life". Fothergill was left £20,000 by Warren and one of his books, ''Confessions of an Innkeeper'' is dedicated, among others, to Harry Asa Thomas, one of Warren's last partners and main beneficiary of Warren's will. The last batch of bills from the bankruptcy of his Thame's inn were cleared by Warren and Thomas.
Spread Eagle Hotel, Thame
Ritratto di John Rowland Fothergill (dipinto) di Luigi Galli (XIX)
Autoritratto (dipinto) by Elsie Doris Gillian Herring Fothergill (primo quarto XX)
Beginning of the 1900s, Romaine Brooks took his portrait. They had met in Rome.
There is a portrait of John Fothergill by Luigi Galli, a nonconformist Milanese painter and a daily frequenter of the Caffè Greco. After studying at the Brera Academy, Galli moved first to Rome and then to Naples (1845) where he joined the School of Posillipo. After moving to England, he returned to Rome in very precarious economic conditions, becoming close to the circle of the famous Caffè where he came into contact with generous friends who helped him pay for his lodging and clothing (among them Henriette Hertz and Ludwig Mond), as well as the food that the Gubinelli family, owners of the café, never failed to provide. He died in poverty in his studio on Via Flaminia. In his honor, Room V at the Caffè Greco bears his name. The portrait of Fothergill, in Rome at the beginning of the twentieth century, was probably commissioned from Galli shortly before his death in 1906, therefore when the eccentric Englishman would have been around thirty years old (it should be noted that almost simultaneously with this portrait another was executed by the American painter Romaine Brooks (1874 – 1970) who he met in the same period in Rome). Fothergill in Rome had become linked to D'Annunzio's circle and to the Caffè Greco and despite his first homosexual relationships he married twice, the first to the painter Elsie Doris Gillian Herring - from whom he divorced in 1921 - present at the Caffè Greco, where he perhaps met her, with a self-portrait. Initially the dimensions of the canvas were intended to be larger, it was Federico Gubinelli, owner of the café and friend of Galli, who reduced them to the current size.
Elsie Doris Gillian Herring was a little-known English artist. She arrived in Rome in the 1910s with her husband, John Rowland Fothergill, who was portrayed by Luigi Galli and associated with artists such as Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh. The couple divorced in 1921. Herring remained in Rome, where she died in 1947. It is unclear how her self-portrait came to be at the Caffè Greco, but she, first with her husband and then alone, was a regular visitor.
From his second wife, Kate, he had two sons, John and Anthony Fothergill.
In 1922 he bought the Spreadeagle at
Thame and for a period it was a successful venture, but ended in bankrupt in
1931. John Fothergill cut an important figure in Oxford. The
Spread Eagle at Thame was frequented by Evelyn Waugh's group and is
mentioned in ''Brideshead Revisited''. Waugh gave Fothergill a copy of his
first novel, ''Decline and Fall'', inscribed to "John Fothergill, Oxford's
only civilizing influence." Fothergill kept the copy in the lavatory of the
inn, chained against the risk of theft. Another friend of this time is
Harold Acton, who mentions Fothergill in his memoirs, ''Memoirs of an
Aesthete''. For his part Fothergill praised Acton's novel, ''Humdrum'', saying
that it "might have been written by the young Wilde." Fothergill's book, ''My
Three Inns'' ends with Fothergill recommending to the reader Harold Acton's
autobiography. After the Spreadeagle, Fothergill managed
the Royal Ascot Hotel and the Three Swans at Market Harborough. He is considered part of the Bright Young Things and
his culinary skills and reputation changed dining standards in Britain, making
it in itself a high art. About his experience as an innkeeper, Fothergill
wrote: ''An Innkeeper's Diary'' (1931), ''Confessions of an Innkeeper'' (1938)
and ''My Three Inns'' (1949). During WWII, he wrote ''John Fothergill's
cookery book''. He also wrote a book on gardening and wrote book reviews.
He was a close friend of Robbie Ross and
Reginald Turner, and when
Fothergill was 19 years old, they presented him to
Oscar Wilde. Wilde grew
fond of him, and Fothergill was one of those to be given an inscribed copy of
''The Ballad of Reading Gaol'', when Wilde emerged from prison. He was attached to Welsh landscape painter
James Dickson
Innes, who died at only 27 years old in 1914. Fothergill wrote a touching
forward to a book of Innes’ works.
He died in 1957 in Rugby.
My published books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fothergill_(innkeeper)
