Partner Waldemar Hansen, Norman Fowler
Queer Places:
Eton College, Windsor SL4 6DW, Regno Unito
Lockers Park School, Lockers Park Ln, Hemel Hempstead HP1 1TL, Regno Unito
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Sulhamstead House, Reading, Sulhamstead RG7 4DX, Regno Unito
Victor
William (Peter) Watson (14 September 1908 – 3 May 1956) was a wealthy English
art collector and benefactor. He funded the literary magazine, Horizon,
edited by Cyril
Connolly. Privately his life involved a series of male lovers, often Americans (Waldemar Hansen,
Denham Fouts and
Norman Fowler being examples). Although generally extremely popular amongst those who knew him, he was lampooned for his flirtatious habits in the famous privately printed novel by
Lord Berners, “The Girls of Radclyffe Hall”, where his character was represented by “Lizzie”. (He also doesn’t come across too well in Michael Nelson’s “A Room in Chelsea Square”) .
Watson was the son of William George Watson, later Sir George Watson, and
was the youngest of three children—his brother Norman was born in 1897 and
sister Florence in 1894. He was educated at Lockers Park School,[1]
Eton College and St John's College, Oxford.[2]
Watson was an avid art collector acquiring works by such artists as Miró,
Klee, and Pablo Picasso, which were displayed in his Paris apartment in the
1930s. He was the principal benefactor of the Institute of Contemporary Arts
in London and also provided financial assistance to English and Irish painters
including
Francis Bacon, Lucian
Freud and John Craxton.[3]
In 1930, society photographer, artist and set designer Sir
Cecil Beaton began a
lifelong obsession with Watson, though the two never became lovers (Watson at
the time was having a flirt with common friend
Oliver Messel).
Truman Capote once wrote to Beaton's
biographer Hugo Vickers exposing the symbolism of Beaton's decorating choices:
"In Cecil's house there was a book on the desk, a XIX century novel and a book
mark in the place where one of the characters says: "I love you, Mr Watson." One
chapter from Vickers' authorized biography of Beaton is titled "I
Love You, Mr. Watson".
Oliver Messel and Peter Watson
by Pavel Tchelitchew
by Pavel Tchelitchew
by Pavel Tchelitchew
Peter Watson sits while the Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew
Pavel Tchelitchew and Peter Watson in Watson’s home
Girl Reading at a Table, by Pablo Picasso
by Lucien Freud
Rex Whistler and Peter Watson
Cecil & Peter in the mirror
by John Craxton
Jean Connolly moved in an
entourage of young male couples that included
Dwight Ripley and
Rupert Barneby,
Tony Bower and
Cuthbert Worsley,
Peter Watson and
Denham Fouts,
Brian Howard and
Toni Altmann. "Drink, night
life, tarts and Tonys," complained
Cyril Connolly, who referred to
the whole entourage as "Pansyhalla." They liked Picasso,
Marcel Proust, and
Francis Poulenc,
favored in architecture the Baroque, admired
Josephine Baker and jazz. Someone
took a copy of Dwight Ripley's Poems to Jean Cocteau, who responded "Quel
néurophate!", a diagnosis that Rupert relayed with wicked relish. When
Gerald
Heard published two books in 1931 to propose that evolution demanded an
evolved human consciousness, Brian Howard called them "the most important that
have ever been written since the Ice Age." In Pansyhalla, a compelling example
was set by Peter Watson, who joined with Cyril Connolly in 1939 to found
Horizon and then financed that influential journal thoughout its career. Until
the WWII, Watson lived mostly in Paris; a portrait of Jean Connolly, by
Man
Ray, was in his apartment. In 1938 he subsized the publication of a first book
of poems by Charles Henri Ford, the young poet who was painter
Pavel
Tchelitchew's lover, and who, back in New York by 1940, would found a
counterpart to Horizon, the trendier but likewise influential magazine View.
It was View that brought
John Bernard Myers
from Buffalo to be its managing
editor, and Myers who, as director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery that Dwight
himself sponsored, acted as impresario for a cast of painters and poets that
seems now, to typify the postwar New York scene.
Cyril Connolly blamed his marital difficulties on Jean's friends in
Pansyhalla. "WE have still done nothing," he complained, "we have talked,
quarrelled, drunk and laughed a great deal, and made love, but constructed
nothing and not even really helped out friends, our only creations,
Tony Bower and
Nigel Richards." Bower
believed, as did
Dwight Ripley, that the separation (they called it "the parturition") had
more to do with Cyril Connolly's being the child to Jean. When she returned to
England because of the war, it appeared the marriage might be salvaged after
all. Dwight had offered the Spinney, but Jean thought better of it. "The
Connollys haven't showed up," he reported to
Rupert Barneby. Instead she went biking near Trewyn with
Peter Watson's lover,
Denham Fouts, proceeded with him
to Ireland, and from there the two departed for New York. Fouts was to be
entrusted in America with Watson's five-by-four-foot Picasso, Girl Reading at
a Table, which had been on view in the Picasso retrospective at the Musuem of
Modern Art. Fouts continued south to visit his family in Florida, where Jean
panned to join him for a drive cross-country to California. She first had an
errand to accomplish on behalf of Cyril, who had asked her to contact a
prospective contributor to Horizon and encouraged him to submit material. This
was
Clement Greenberg, an
employee then of the US Custom Service, whose now famous essay, "Avant-Garde
and Kitsch" had impressed Connolly when it appeared the previous year in
Partisan Review. Jean didn't telephone; she simply knocked at Greenberg's
door. In his letters to Harold Lazarus, Greenberg described the resulting
affair. Fouts, losing patience, started for California by himself. Jean caught
up with him in Dallas, and in Los Angeles they joined their refugee friends,
who included, by this time, Tony Bower. The interlude that followed was to
inspire the "Paul" chapter in Down There on a Visit by
Christopher Isherwood
(1962). Jean became "Ruthie," Fouts is "Paul," Bower is "Ronnie," and
Gerald Heard is "Augustus Parr."
Early in WWII, Peter Watson had arranged a studio for the Scottish painters
Robert Colquhoun and
Robert MacBryde (they were known as "the
two Roberts" because they were a couple.) Later he provided support to
John Craxton,
Michael Wishart, and
Lucian Freud.
Dwight Ripley
joined in this project, if marginally, when he bought an oil by MacBryde and
lent it to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
In 1940 Watson provided funding for Cyril Connolly's Horizon and
became its arts editor.
Stephen Spender
was also involved with the magazine initially. Watson was art editor for the
magazine between 1940 and 1949. He rarely contributed articles, but gave many
opportunities for his friends to have their pictures reproduced in the
magazine, and also encouraged Horizon to look beyond British Art,
particularly to Paris. Watson commissioned articles on artists barely known at
the time in England, such as Balthus, Morandi and Klee. He persuaded Picasso's
dealer, Daniel Kahnweiler, to comment on the contemporary art market; and he
also got Michel Leiris to write about Giacometti.[4]
Spender recalled to Connolly's biographer, Clive Fisher, that Watson hated
"priggishness, pomposity and almost everything to do with public life," and he
suspected that he had educated himself "through a love of beautiful works and
of people in whom he saw beauty ...". He added "When I think of him then, I
think of his clothes, which were beautiful, his general neatness and
cleanness, which seemed almost those of a handsome young Bostonian."[5]
Fisher writes that Peter Watson "was a figure of striking attractiveness;
women in particular seem to have found his manners irresistible... almost
everyone appears to have liked him." One of Watson's lovers was the American
male prostitute and socialite
Denham Fouts,
whom he continued to support even after they separated as a result of Fouts's
drug addiction.
In December 1945, Peter Watson and
Cecil Beaton arrived in New York
to visit Pavel Tchelitchew
and
Charles Henri Ford.
John Bernard Myers worked
for Ford at View magazine, and through him,
Waldemar Hansen got to meet
Watson and Beaton at dinner in March 1946. In 1947 Hansen got a job with Cecil Beaton,
serving as his secretary, although all-around amanuensis would be a more
precise description. They got along well, considering that Hansen approved of
little that Beaton wrote or designed or photographed. "Perennial chi-chi,"
Hansen would say, "but of course the world would be a dull place without a
luttle chi-chi." In the end he liked Cecil's character. At the end of 1947,
Hansen left New York for London to live with Peter Watson.
In Paris in 1947 with Watson, Waldemar Hansen
wrote home to a friend in the USA that the gay nightclubs were ‘like Berlin,
1941’. Travelling through southern Italy, Hansen wrote that ‘Rome is quite gay on the Via Veneto, where
American soldier-queens sit in cars and camp with the local belles’. He added,
‘I’m told that everyone in Italy is gay, for money. It’s like pre-Hitler
Berlin.’ In a rare moment of self-awareness Watson said in a letter to Waldemar Hansen that his "greatest need [was] to love rather than be love"'.
At the end of October 1949, Hansen left Englad aboard the Queen Elizabeth.
His luggage consisted of two suitcases, one box and a typewriter, plus enough
heartache and self-pity to fill the ship twice over. Just over a month later,
Watson also left England; he travelled down through Spain to Portugal, and at
Lisbon he boarded the SS Alcantara bound for Rio de Janeiro.
Watson was found drowned in his bath on 3 May 1956.[6]
Some have suggested that he was murdered by his young American lover,
Norman Fowler (1927 - March 23, 1971)[7][8]
(from whom Bacon stole £300 to go gambling). Fowler inherited the bulk of
Watson's estate and died 14 years later in the West Indies; he was also found
drowned in his bathtub.[7]
Watson's sister, Florence Nagle, fought a prolonged battle against
Britain's Jockey Club, the controlling body for horse racing. His brother
Norman provided funding for the early development of Lake Louise, a ski resort
in Alberta, Canada.
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