Alick Schepeler
Russian, born 1882
https://www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/Ideal-Giant-Code-Herdsman-Cantelmans-Spring-/9987588579/bd; accessed 6/16/2021
Augustus John met Alexandra (Alick) Schepeler whilst she was a secretary at The Illustrated London News in 1906, he made many fine drawings of her in 1906-7, next to Dorelia, she became his favourite model. She fascinated him and she became his mistress. He mentions his feelings for her in his autobiography Chiaroscuro "I was at this time principally occupied in drawing and painting a subject, Alick Schepeler, to whose strange charm I had bowed. I made many drawings of Miss Schepeler…..". Dorelia was jealous of this relationship and after John’s wife Ida died in 1907; she insisted that John give her up. Alick continued her rather Bohemian life and became the mistress of W B Yeates for a time.
There are portraits of Alick Schepeler in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and Manchester City Art Gallery.
https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/tamlyn-and-son/catalogue-id-2769162/lot-6865589; accessed 6/16/2021
John's description of her as 'of Slavonic origin is explained by her having an Irish mother and German father, but born in Russia and raised in Poland. It was said of her that 'Love - physical and romantic love - was her escape from dullness. She had avoided the hockey and inhibition of a British education, and unlike many young girls in Edwardian London she was eager for love affairs. So her life became a fairy-tale. By night she was a coquette, abandoning herself anxiously to party-going pleasures. Day came, and she was translated once more into a pale and contented secretary.' (M. Holroyd, Augustus John, The New Biography, London, 1996, p. 209). John wrote to her 'You are one of the people who inhabit my world.. a denizen of my country, a daughter of my tribe - one of those on who, I must depend - for life and beyond life. I am subjected to you - be loyal to your subject.' Dorelia was jealous of the relationship and after Ida's death demanded that John break and with her. She worked for The Illustrated London News for 50 years and died suddenly after retiring.
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5077448; accessed 6/16/2021
One reason for her surprising decision to send Yeats into the epicentre of the marital conflict rather than let him stay at Coole on his own may have been the presence at Mount Vernon of Alick Schepeler, a close friend of the Gregorys and the Summerses from the New English Art Club circle, and the former mistress of Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. Yeats had first met Schepeler a few weeks earlier, beginning a correspondence with her in connection with his clairvoyant searches for a will left by Sir Hugh Lane, who had drowned earlier that year on the Lusitania. If sparks had not already been struck between them then, they certainly had been since Yeats’s arrival at Coole. Margaret records for 29 July that ‘Uncle Frank [Persse] drove Auntie [Arabella Waithman, Lady Gregory’s sister] over in the evening – said how attracted Yeats was with Alick.’ This entry is ambiguously worded, but regardless of who was reporting Yeats’s interest, it was evidently already open knowledge. It is also clear that Lady Gregory was ready to encourage the connection. Recently turned fifty, Yeats had begun to voice a resolute desire to marry, openly lamenting his years of ‘barren’ passion for Maud Gonne, and his consequent lack of an heir, in the introductory poem to Responsibilities in 1914. Having tried, without success, to serve as matchmaker for him for some years, Lady Gregory seems to have regarded Aleck Schepeler favourably, perhaps because a relationship with a friend of Robert and Margaret would have bound Yeats far more closely to the orbit of Coole Park. In a letter to Schepeler after her visit, she commented directly on Yeats’s obvious interest in her.
So it was that just a day after Lady Gregory termed her own son ‘a cad’, and four days after Robert Gregory had assaulted Gerald Summers, Yeats came as a guest into the tense atmosphere at Mount Vernon, with Margaret recording the event in another syntactically ambiguous diary entry: ‘Yeats arrived – Alick in great excitement – of course delighted about R[obert] and the army.’ Given Schepeler’s intimate knowledge of events at Mount Vernon – the diary confirms she was there for most of August, and that she and Margaret had ‘[compared] notes about’ Robert’s and Nora Summers’s ‘guiltiness’ – it seems most likely that it was she who was ‘delighted’ by Robert’s decision to enlist; if it was in fact Yeats’s view, it was not one he subsequently repeated. At Mount Vernon the attraction between the guests quickly blossomed, with Yeats characteristically drawing on the occult as mode of seduction. What Margaret termed ‘a ridiculous séance’ on the first night of Yeats’s stay was followed the next day by his effort at ‘making Alick call up spirits – which she half did and got frightened’. Returning from a walk that night, Margaret ‘saw them through the window’ – a wonderfully cryptic entry, suggesting that matters may have quickly moved from the occult to the physical plane. Given her close friendship with Margaret, Schepeler’s burgeoning relationship with Yeats that autumn ensured he was not only conversant with the circumstances of Robert’s enlistment, but also likely well-informed of what happened between the Gregorys in the months immediately ahead. Fleeting comments in his correspondence with Lady Gregory confirm that he had discussed the explosive events at Coole with both her and Schepeler.
https://thedublinreview.com/article/yeatss-perfect-man/; accessed 6/16/2021
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Last Updated8/7/24
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