The Breakdown by JB Souter (1890–1972)

A racist or an anti-racist statement?

Ian Thomson

1 Photograph of the painting The Breakdown (1926) by JB Souter (1890–1972). Dimensions of original unknown.

The Breakdown, a painting by the Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter, appeared at the 158th Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in 1926. It showed a naked white woman dancing, as if entranced, to music played by a black musician (see Pl 1). Commentaries were extensive and international. Some were positive but many more were adverse and the image soon became controversial. The British government intervened quickly, taking the highly unusual step of requiring the Royal Academy to remove the work from public display, which happened on 8 May. Souter subsequently destroyed it but retained preparatory sketches from which he painted a very similar version in 1962. The principle focus here is the 1926 version.

Given the unusual history of this painting it is inevitable that much has already been written about it. To date, however, commentaries have been relatively short, in the form of press reports, generalised observations, and articles focusing on particular aspects of the work and its exhibition, such as the contemporary musical, and specifically jazz, context implicit in the black saxophonist, perceived racism and the actions of the government. There is more to say about Souter himself, the painting’s art-historical precedents, the important but neglected subject of the saxophone’s role based on its origins in the woodwind family, as well as the government’s highly unusual demand that the painting be removed from public view.

Reference is made throughout this article to a booklet produced by Souter’s niece, Joan Matthew, for the Perth Festival of the Arts in 1990. It is evident that Matthew extracted details from a larger archive held by the Souter Estate and a formal request for access to that archive has been made. The Estate has helpfully permitted an image of The Breakdown to be reproduced here but has refused to allow access to the archive, a denial which limits the extent to which issues can be addressed academically and which invites speculation as to the content of the withheld information.

Summary background details

Souter was born in Aberdeen on 4 June 1890. He attended Gray’s School of Art and was subsequently awarded scholarships enabling him to travel and study in continental Europe. Following acceptance of his first submission to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1914, his artistic career was interrupted by service in the Gordon Highlanders and the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War (WW1). He went on to exhibit at the Academy in 1918, 1924 and 1925 and, after The Breakdown in 1926, was represented by a further 25 paintings at the institution between 1927 and 1957.^[1] Despite this, and having been a respected portrait artist, Souter was never nominated to become an Academician.

The subject matter of The Breakdown was a bold departure from Souter’s previous portraiture and other studies, and was also very different from his later works. He said he mulled over the idea for it for two years and began the large oil on canvas ‘only a fortnight or so before sending-in day’ (which was between 26–30 March). He also commented that it went to the framers with the paint still wet.^[2] Selection started on 29 March and was complete by 2 April, with hanging taking place between 7 and 19 April.^[3] The painting was seen on varnishing day (26 April), by the press (28–29 April), more widely in the private view (30 April), and at the Royal Academy annual dinner (1 May). By the time the exhibition opened to the public on 3 May it had already been viewed by a large number of people. The Academy’s Master Catalogue indicates that the price of the work was £250.00 (£12,575.50 in 2024 terms).^[4]

Having hung in front of press and public for around 11 days, The Breakdown was removed for reasons of State, not of art.^[5] At that point it was returned to Souter who, according to the Westminster Gazette, received one offer but refused to sell, preferring to scrub and re-use the canvas.^[6] Only a black-and-white photograph in the 1926 exhibition catalogue (reproduced in Pl 1) and preliminary sketches remain.^[7] Apparently, Souter’s wife persuaded him it had been ‘wrong to destroy the [original] controversial piece of work’ and as a result, 36 years later, he painted the subject again.^[8]

The painting

Souter explained his purpose in a variety of ways, but firmly denied that he intended The Breakdown to be controversial. Nevertheless he invited dispute and speculation by stating, when the exhibition opened, that ‘mystery is so often an effective element in art’.^[9] The Halifax Evening Courier recognized mystery in The Breakdown at once: ‘Everyone was struck by the remarkable picture by Mr J. B. Souter … crowds of people stood around it wondering exactly what it means.’^[10]

Souter told the Newcastle Evening Chronicle that his intention was to ‘interpret the prevailing influence of the negro on the arts’.^[11] This was an implicit reference to ragtime and jazz music, then a relatively new black art form, and to the idea, uncommon in Britain at the time but stimulating intellectuals in Paris, that associated the musical freedoms offered by jazz with the pictorial freedoms of new art forms.^[12] As Jody Blake has remarked, ‘jazz and Dada were seen as quintessential expressions of the irreverent, frenzied, and cosmopolitan post-Armistice period’.^[13] Souter held back from implementing continental theories: the painting contains no references to Primitivism, Dada, Futurism, Expressionism or any other art movement of the early 20th century. Such influences would anyway have been unusual for a society portrait artist such as Souter to embrace. The Breakdown is a competent, traditional artwork of the kind which Frank Dicksee, president of the Royal Academy and a person who opposed modern styles of painting, felt worthy of special praise.^[14] Souter did, however, pay lip service to Primitivism when he told the Daily Mail that the painting was about ‘the fascination exercised by the primitive and savage upon the over-civilised’, such that the dancing nude is a symbol of ‘the return to the primitive … she has thrown off the trappings of civilisation while the negro has acquired them’.^[15] Souter appears to have been attracted to the ideas of Primitivism but disinclined to apply them stylistically.

Souter painted a generic musician, modelling the body on his own (with the exception of the musician’s head, which he created after ethnicity studies in the Natural History Museum).^[16] The musician is sitting on a broken statue, perhaps Minerva or, as one commentator suggests, Britannia. He is in white-tie evening dress, complete with black top hat, normally a symbol of high social standing, but in this case an accessory to the white-tie dress code invariably adopted by classical orchestras to present a uniform appearance and taken up widely by contemporary jazz/dance bands.^[17] In this formal attire – actually his working clothes – and with much-emphasized backlighting from an unshown window, he almost fades into the drab background walls, such that his saxophone sound comes from a dark place, obscured in shadow. There is a clear juxtaposition of black and white, given his formal dress is contrasted with the body of a white, naked woman with her eyes closed, her hair bobbed, and wearing only earrings (in the 1962 version, green earrings).^[18] She has the immature, androgynous and emaciated appearance of a ‘flapper’, a word which had various meanings historically but which by 1920 came to mean a ‘frivolous, scantily clad jazzing [young girl], irresponsible and undisciplined’.^[19] It is difficult to accept Souter’s denial, in the Daily News, that the painting portrays the modern girl in a satirical manner.^[20]

At a first glance, the painting conveys the uncomfortable feeling of having walked into a secretive rendezvous in a basement space where relics are stored. The musician, looking a little guiltily at the viewer, notices the intrusion but the dancing woman does not. Deeper significance is indicated through contrast. The musician’s dark skin and clothes and the dark shadows contrast not only with the woman’s enlightened white skin but with the white statue fragments as well. He sits fully clothed: she dances naked. His eyes are open, looking at the viewer: hers are closed. His hands hold and direct his instrument: hers are empty, and the hand of the broken statue grasping a now useless object makes a further distinction. He has agency and purpose: she simply responds to the music, like a puppet. Souter commented that in pursuing his art he was interested in contrast and in this painting he achieved it.^[21]

Commentaries^[22]

Opinions in the provincial press appeared quickly and were in the main favourable. For example, the Halifax Evening Courier considered it a ‘remarkable picture … admirably painted … [which] in one hour became the most discussed work of art in London … even the juxtaposition of the nude girl and the negro raises no qualms … people thought it typified the “Spirit of the Age’’’.^[23] The Birmingham Gazette took a similar line, calling it a ‘masterly example of the painting of the nude’.^[24] The Western Mail observed no sense of shock on the opening day.^[25] Some national newspapers thought otherwise. The Daily Mirror considered the painting a ‘shocker … a criticism of the Girl of Today’.^[26] The Times suggested: ‘If [the Royal Academy] stands for artistic truth [it] should not encourage pictures like “The Breakdown’’.’^[27] Arthur Froggatt, writing in the Musical Times, noted that the number of works having some connection with music [was] ‘a considerably larger proportion of the whole … than in any other of recent years, being very nearly one in fifty’, but found Souter’s The Breakdown ‘peculiarly offensive in choice of subject’.^[28] The editor of The Melody Maker music magazine was much angered, giving the subject full front page coverage, and warned of ‘perverse danger to the community’, demanding that ‘the habit of associating our music with the primitive and barbarous negro derivation shall cease forthwith …’ , and concluding that the painting should be burnt.^[29] The international press was similarly critical.^[30]

There was much debate (which continues to this day) about the meaning of the title. ‘What elusive meaning does [he] intend to convey?’ asked The Manchester Evening News.^[31] The Nottingham Journal linked jazz to race and suggested, somewhat apocalyptically, that the title ‘may be intended to represent the breakdown of civilisation, old and new, culture and art, before the senseless, startled, blaring coarseness of jazz’, a view adopted by others, at the time and since.^[32] Souter told the Daily News that the title was a pun and commented to the Newcastle Evening Chronicle that it referred to an old African dance.^[33]

More recently the idea that the painting represents a broad shift in contemporary cultural barriers – social, racial, sexual and geographical as well as musical – a process which began after WW1, has been widespread.^[34] Blake’s opinion is that ‘Souter was so effective in suggesting the downfall of Western cultural tradition, the undermining of Europe’s social fabric, and the ascendancy of Africa to political dominance that his painting caused a scandal’.^[35]

A traditional representation of seduction

The subject-matter of Souter’s work may be placed within a long artistic tradition. A man playing a woodwind instrument (most commonly a form of pipe) to a woman is a commonplace scene in the arts dating back centuries and in most cases it is a trope for seduction. It derives from Ovid who, in the Metamorphoses – a well-known text to which artists and writers had been referring for centuries – described the invention of the first woodwind instrument by Pan, the ancient Greek god of nature.^[36] Pan created the syrinx from reeds into which the nymph Syrinx fled for shelter to escape his clutches. Two recurrent themes developed in art from this episode. Representations of the lustful Pan and unwilling Syrinx, in which Pan is almost invariably dark-skinned and Syrinx white, became a popular classical theme enabling commentary on the passions. Well-known examples are Nicolas Poussin’s Pan and Syrinx (1637–38) and Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Bruegel the Younger’s Pan and Syrinx (1640).^[37] And a male figure (often a shepherd) playing a pipe to a woman came to indicate seduction, with the form of the single pipe (most frequently a flute) lending itself readily to phallic interpretation.^[38] Examples include Titian’s Nymph and Shepherd (1590), Rembrandt’s The Flute Player (1642), and Boucher’s Shepherd piping to a Shepherdess (circa 1745).^[39] This phallic theme had been developed from the end of the 19th century: musically by Rimsky Korsakov in Scheherazade (1888), in which a woman is drawn to her lover playing a flute outside; and in literature by George du Maurier in Trilby (1894), in which Svengali plays a flageolet to Trilby; and by DH Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod (1922) in which flute-playing Aaron seduces the Marquesa. Perhaps the most important precedent where Souter’s work is concerned is Henri Rousseau’s The Dream of 1910 (Pl 2), in which a black man plays a pipe to a naked white woman, a work that caused a sensation when exhibited at the 20th Salon des Indépendants in Paris.^[40]

2 The Dream by Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), 1910. Oil on canvas, 204.5 cm × 298.5 cm (80.5 in × 117.5 in). Museum of Modern Art, New York, Accession 252.1954

It could be argued that Souter’s woman, like Rousseau’s, is ‘an otherwise inaccessible woman brought under control’ by the music. ^[41] These precedents support Souter’s comment that he was surprised about the fuss and did not seek controversy.^[42]

Souter combined and updated both themes which developed from the Pan and Syrinx story. The swarthy Pan became a modern black musician. And his saxophone – being also, like the flute, a woodwind instrument – is notably the first woodwind instrument since Pan’s invention to have been designed, as distinct from having evolved.^[43] According to Froggatt, it was the first time an image of a saxophone had appeared in the Summer Exhibition.^[44]

Unlike pipes, which acquired a sexual symbolism over millennia, the saxophone had not acquired a similar mythology by 1926, and so in one sense its appearance tends to reduce the inherent sexuality of the trope. However, by the 1920s the instrument had become associated with dance bands and jazz, a black art form which many considered degenerate and dangerously sensual. The result is a change in the traditional dynamic: updating the simple man-seduces-girl narrative to reflect cultural change.

Another of Souter’s innovations was to include a dancing woman, rather than repeat the traditional formula in which the woman is in repose. Like the addition of the saxophone, dancing reflects contemporary culture. As a result of changes in musical styles, there was a rapid increase in the number of dance halls provided for young people at this time.^[45] One contemporary commentator on the effect of syncopated jazz said the music ‘aroused the desire to dance to an extent unknown in the previous history of mankind’.^[46] Also, Souter abandoned the traditionally outdoor natural setting of such scenes in favour of an indoor storage room. The musician sits on a broken statue signalling that cultural standards, beliefs and values of earlier ages are now unwanted and have been discarded.^[47] Former idols now merely provide a base from which new ideas are being projected. The ‘sweet tones’ which Pan produced from his reed flute are replaced by the rougher tones from a saxophone reed; the mode of communication between man and woman is now jazz.

There are significant historical precedents for the basic features of Souter’s artwork and important cultural reasons for his changes. The result is an extraordinary presentation of traditional issues in a contemporary setting.

The saxophone and jazz

Souter’s knowledge of saxophones was minimal. If he could play one he did not own one. And there were limited pictorial sources to assist him in depicting the instrument.^[48] In order to ensure accurate representation, he hired one, evidently an alto saxophone.^[49] The alto was an appropriate choice. Its sonority – warm, lyrical and wistful – accords with the ethereal nature of the scene. Given the entranced woman would probably be moving rather slowly, Souter may have had in mind that his solo performer was playing a cantabile passage, to which the alto saxophone is well suited.

The saxophone had been invented by Adolphe Sax in the early 1840s and quickly became popular in military bands and classical orchestras. The instrument was accepted slowly in popular music: Kling’s Modern Orchestration and Instrumentation (1902) considered that ‘the peculiar tone-quality of the Saxophone does not fit it for use in dance music’.^[50] And it was not appropriate in ragtime, a mainly piano or piano/banjo/fiddle genre from the American deep south popular in Souter’s formative teenage years. But musical and dancing styles changed quickly and a variety of influences appeared for which jazz became a ‘catch-all label’ and for which the saxophone was suited.^[51] The instrument flourished in jazz bands after WW1 and into the 1920s, a period which the contemporary author F Scott Fitzgerald labelled the ‘jazz age’.^[52] Souter would have been aware that the genre was promoted in the UK by visiting American bands – for example, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, both of which performed for King George V at Buckingham Palace. Despite this regal approval many considered jazz a threat to long-established, white, European norms because it featured ‘improvisation over traditional structure, performer over composer, and black American experience over white sensibilities’.^[53] Much has been written about this musical backcloth to Souter’s work.^[54] The saxophone came to be associated with people working in dubious environments – an inevitability caused by limited opportunities for black musicians to work, constraining them to redlight areas and clubs – and acquired a seedy reputation despite classical composers continuing to write for it.^[55]

At the time he was painting The Breakdown, Souter was also exposed to a more structured style of dance music developed by Paul Whiteman and taken up by others such as Jack Hylton, whose popular dance band played a highly orchestrated and extremely competent, syncopated form acceptable to white audiences.^[56] Hylton warned that jazz should not corrupt ‘our music’ and thought that the crudeness of jazz had to be perfected.^[57]

Styles were confused, however, by musicians moving from one type of band to another. Bandleaders recruited them from all backgrounds as the need arose. Souter’s saxophonist could be associated with any type of contemporary band. Many laymen, perhaps even Souter, did not appreciate the differences.

It is unclear exactly how Souter sought to convey the effect of black influence on the arts. The image does not give the impression that the art of jazz was especially dangerous to society. The musician is generic, a well-dressed professional (unlike Rousseau’s black musician and many woodwind instrument players in earlier examples of this seduction genre). The saxophone is merely a token contemporary woodwind which, in a changing musical world, updated and revitalized the traditional man-with-woodwind-and-naked-woman scene exemplified a few years earlier by Rousseau. Souter’s image did, however, suggest to many contemporary viewers that the black musician is scheming, creating a malign influence over the woman, an observation which directs the viewer from jazz to racism.

Racism and imperialism

As previously indicated, contrast in skin colour between a dark male and a white female – heightened by female nudity – had for centuries been a common and accepted feature of classical themes such as Pan and Syrinx. Colour symbolism served to underline the idea of the passions as deep and hard to control while suggesting the threat they posed to virtue. It was Souter’s updating of the theme that alarmed viewers. While the musician is not presented in a disrespectful or callous way, not portrayed as a black downtrodden underdog, and not exoticised for the amusement of white viewers, he was open to racist abuse simply by virtue of his colour. The musician exposed the racist views of many in the press and those who were part of the contemporary imperial-capitalist system. A frequently quoted criticism was made by ‘Lady Reading’ (presumably Stella Isaacs, the Marchioness of Reading). She used what is now considered racist terminology when, on seeing the painting on her return from India, she was reported as saying ‘it would make ruling our natives difficult’.^[58] Without the sanitizing lens of overtly classical or art-historical reference, the painting was shocking: literally a professional and clothed black jazz musician controlling the movements of an entranced/drugged naked white woman in a storeroom littered with fragments of classical sculpture and, through his glance, appearing to invite the viewer’s collusion.

Lady Reading’s comment was in line with contemporary opinions deriving from prevailing racial theories of which Souter would have been aware. Those of Robert Knox, expressed in The Races of Men (1850) which related ideas inherited from the classification theories of the 18th century, remained well known and were supplemented later in the 19th century by the arguments of Francis Galton – for whom black people were considered genetically inferior – and the cultural relativism of Mary Kingsley. There were dissenters, including John Stuart Mill, but broadly speaking the 19th century embedded scientific racism as ‘common sense’.^[59] Imperial masters assumed that race determined achievement, that those of African origin were restricted to servitude, and that the European aristocracies were rulers by divine right.^[60]

Contemporary racist perceptions are reflected in the relative postures of the figures in the painting. These are a reversal of those in Rousseau’s image: here the woman stands straight and the musician is hunched – a poor playing posture. Souter’s image reflects the relationship between posture and moral degradation which arose during the 19th century and continued into the early 20th. Good posture was associated with civilized behaviour, exemplified by this report in The Lancet in 1922: ‘As a general rule the more civilized the people the better is the carriage.’^[61] It has since been suggested that good posture ‘is evoked to represent the ideal, the beautiful, the perfect body’.^[62] Given the white woman’s perfect posture and the black musician’s slouch there is a clear implication that Souter consciously developed his characters’ postures to reflect contemporary imperial, cultural norms. The contrast would have enhanced the impression of threat and the racist response.

To show a black man controlling a white woman was to imply a scheming, sly character with malintent. The image relates rising power and agency in the previously subjugated, in tandem with suggestions of white degeneracy, etiolation and the destruction of western ideals. That the musician is playing a saxophone, an instrument which had dubious associations, is secondary but adds to the concerns.^[63] The working man is in control, yet the frivolous girl has nominal white authority. The class system is inverted, and so too is the imperial idea that Britain had a civilizing influence in the Empire.^[64] The painting could from this perspective be an allegory in Marxist terms of future imperial decline: the vacuous young girl, representing the future, is losing control and signals dim prospects for the imperial-capitalist system. If this interpretation were intentional, then when and where Souter acquired political ideals of this nature is unclear: he was perhaps impressed, as many were, by contemporary events in Russia or experiences during WW1.

By the beginning of WW1, imperialism was an essential part of patriotism: the Empire permeated national consciousness. Multiple influences (the Elementary Education Act (1870), military campaigns and so on) had led to a strongly jingoist, racist culture in accord with the ‘common sense’ racism of the times. Circumstances were changing, however, and by 1926 when Souter was painting The Breakdown, Britain’s dominance was declining. The Imperial Conference (1923) resulted in the Empire moving towards becoming a Commonwealth, with less control from London. But tensions remained, with South Africa, with British support, expressing concern about the possibility that black people would from that point swamp white.^[65]

It was inevitable that such an issue would disturb the aristocracy, diplomatic staff, and captains of industry, who were collectively responsible for managing the Empire – who would have made up most of those attending the private view at the Royal Academy.^[66] Their very ability, roles and sources of wealth were being questioned. At that point The Breakdown acquired political significance. Only the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette recognized this when it made the profound observation, which has not been addressed to date by commentators, that the fallen statue is of Britannia and that the painting is a ‘gloomy prophecy in paint’.^[67]

While Souter inserted some racist features in the painting and in doing so aroused racist opinions among those who viewed it, it is difficult to determine whether the painting was a platform for Souter’s personal opinions. It may have been, but equally he may have sought to use the exposure of contemporary racism to promote the need for social, political and economic change. The issue cannot be resolved until more information about Souter’s personality becomes available.

The Academy President, Dicksee, held strong racist opinions. In a speech reported on 25 January 1925 he stated that ‘our ideal of beauty must be the white man’s … if we have to bear the white man’s burden, in Heaven’s name let us at least keep his ideals’.^[68] He was also forcefully opposed to jazz, saying it is a threat to ‘the very Britishness of Britain’.^[69] With such views he would have sympathized with the subsequent furore in parts of the press. The Hanging Committee however, which Dicksee chaired, selected the painting. Perhaps he had seen the work only in terms of historical depictions of seduction. Dicksee’s attitude to Souter’s work was evidently complicated and cannot now, in the absence of documented details, be properly analysed.

The contemporary racist climate could have led the authorities (and indeed Lady Reading) to interpret the painting in the following way. The ‘white woman’ was an important imperial metaphor. Empress Victoria had styled herself mother of the Empire and white European women were encouraged into motherhood to further imperial interests and to act as a civilizing influence in the colonies, where the subjugation of women was heavily criticized and used by colonial powers to justify their continued rule.^[70] The ‘white woman’ was an emblem of stability, wealth, tradition, fair play and authority. For her to be led astray by a colonial person, whom in all circumstances she should be commanding, should be unthinkable. Yet here she is, naked and exposed. Far from being a respectable protector of the Empire she is in need of protection herself. Entranced in a room full of relics, she is out of control and oblivious to events in the real world. She has descended into dreamland, all capability of rational action now lost. The Empire is dancing to someone else’s degenerate tune and the emphatic light from the (unseen) window suggests the sun will in due course set. A large statue of Britannia, once a symbol of imperial strength, now lies shattered, reinforcing the dystopian allegory. Souter’s source may well be Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias (1818) in which the remaining part of a statue serves as a reminder that temporal authority is transient. Similarly, the black musician’s breath blowing through the saxophone conveys the idea that a wind of change is coming from the Colonies. The wind of change metaphor was actually used later (on 3 February 1960) by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in relation to the decolonization of Africa.

The removal of the painting from public view

Dicksee endorsed the selection of Souter’s painting despite his racist views. But he quickly became aware of the implications of hanging the painting. Strong opinions, favourable and unfavourable, were spread by the press. The Halifax Evening Courier reported that ‘in an hour it became the most discussed work of art in London’.^[71] Neither Dicksee and his Committee nor politicians could have remained immune to the furore. Initially, ministers would have considered such an issue unworthy of serious attention. They had far more pressing things to do, notably at that time the struggle with international issues arising from the creation of the League of Nations in 1919, problems in the coal industry, the general strike called on 1 May, and declining public interest in imperial affairs. A painting of a naked woman dancing to music from a black saxophonist would have been low down the list. The situation changed, however, when Dicksee received a letter from a Mrs Stone, a person whose position was clearly important but who is now obscure. In this letter, now lost but referred to in the minutes of an Academy Council meeting on 4 May, she protested ‘against the exhibition of Souter’s painting and said the matter would be laid before the Secretary of State who would send his opinion’.^[72] She was referring to Leo (Leopold) Amery, Secretary of State for the Colonies in the then Conservative government. The minutes are unclear about exactly what Mrs Stone wanted Amery to opine, but his involvement, rather than that of another minister, signalled an imperial concern.

The matter fell initially to the Under-Secretary of State, William Ormsby-Gore, who met the Academy Secretary, Walter Rangeley Lamb, on 3 May. Lamb reported to the 4 May meeting that Ormsby-Gore would seek Amery’s opinion and if Amery considered public display of the painting unhelpful to Colonial affairs it would be removed.^[73] Amery and Ormsby-Gore acted promptly to have the painting removed, presumably with the approval of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. On 8 May Lamb wrote to Souter informing him of Amery’s view, with which he was obliged to comply, adding that the painting would be removed in the ‘interests of Empire’, for ‘a reason purely of State not of art’, and that it would be returned to his home address.^[74] Lamb added that the Academy was authorized to post these words in the vacant wall space: ‘Withdrawn at request of Colonial Office’.^[75]

The Colonial Office told the Gloucestershire Echo on 14 May that the ‘reasons for their action are obvious and no statement upon the matter will be made’.^[76] The reasons were not obvious to most people and the circumstances suggest an attempt to avoid public accountability. The authorities did not wish to disclose details. It would not have been politically desirable to tell the public, many of whom thought the Empire ‘common sense’ and relied upon it for their wealth, that the Academy was exhibiting a painting showing it destined to fail like the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, none of which survived WW1.

There is a question upon which authority the removal was undertaken.^[77] The most relevant legislation was the Obscene Publications Act (25 August 1857), an act for more effectively preventing the ‘Sale of Obscene Books, Pictures, Prints and other Articles’.^[78] It led to the ‘Hicklin test’: whether the offending article served to deprave and corrupt. Many suggested that Souter’s painting did just that, but obscenity would have been difficult to prove and the tedious process of litigation would have stimulated unwanted publicity for the Academy. The pressure on the Academy, then, was not legal but administrative and would have been discreet. Dicksee, who was no stranger to controversy, would have been compliant.^[79] The alternative was not attractive. Non-compliance would have risked an embarrassing dispute which might have disturbed the Academy’s Royal Charter and, in the last resort, its association with the government, the owner of Burlington House. The Academy succumbed to political pressure. It was better to remove the painting from display and hope that the episode would soon be forgotten.^[80]

The pressure was, nevertheless, an act of censorship of a work of art, an unwise step for any democratically elected authority to take because it raises the profile of the censored object. In this case, government action raised Souter’s profile significantly and turned The Breakdown into a notorious work of art. It is doubtful whether the painting would be remembered now were it not for the government’s action which, however, gave rise to few contemporary complaints: only the Daily News reflected that it is ‘a dangerous principle that any government department should act as a censor of the arts’.^[81]

Amery and Ormsby-Gore were clearly responsible for approving the drafting of this later anodyne and unconvincing entry in the Royal Academy Annual Report for 1926:

At the request of the Secretary for the Dominions an oil painting (No. 600) entitled ‘The Breakdown’, by J. B. Souter, was removed from the Exhibition on 8 May, as the subject (a nude woman dancing to a saxophone played by a negro, who was seated on an overthrown Greek statue) was considered to be obnoxious to British subjects living abroad in daily contact with a coloured population.^[82]

Amery did not mention the subject in his published diary.^[83] And no paper record has been found in government files in the National Archives. Similarly, any written communication with Dicksee that may have taken place is now lost, because he did not maintain an office at the Academy and his documentation was not retained in Academy files. He was a very private man who instructed his family to destroy his personal and official correspondence after his death.^[84] The secretive Souter Estate is the only remaining source of potentially relevant documents.

Souter subsequently went to great lengths to distance himself from the controversy. He consistently said that he did not ‘set out to be controversial’ and ‘was surprised about the fuss’.^[85] Was he in reality so naïve? Was he really being honest? Probably not entirely, given his vague explanations and desire for mystery in art. It was anyway better for him to be cautious and humble and claim a simple interpretation than admit that he intended to paint an allegory of the demise of the Empire. He could hardly have acted otherwise if he wished to remain on good terms with potential clients among the upper classes for his portraiture, and with the Academy to which indeed he was to submit paintings in the future. In later years, post WW2, when the Empire actually was in decay and fewer people understood imperial matters, his painting would have been accepted, and so he felt able to repaint it, even though, earlier, following its rejection, he wrote to the Daily News to say it would never be exhibited again and curiously added, ‘I can see my homily is capable of misinterpretation.’^[86]

That Souter thought his painting a moralizing discourse is another peculiar feature of the whole affair. This comment differs from his other explanations of the painting and implies that he did in fact seek to convey a social, political, perhaps even a religious, message. It is entirely possible that Souter wished to stress either that ethnic-oriented culture could encourage imperial change and promote equality or that the imperial-capitalist system should be overthrown. Accordingly, the lighting in the scene suggests it is the white population that is being enlightened. This possibility flies in the face of those who see only a degenerate imperative in the work.

The painting is remarkable on many levels. At its most basic, it propelled the interpretation of Ovid’s story into the twentieth century. In other respects it reflects 1920s cultural norms, notably in popular music, fashion, female independence and increasing ethnic integration. It also, and there can be no doubt about this, suggests that the imperial web which had for so long assisted Britain could be, and arguably should be, nearing collapse. This conclusion necessarily raises questions about the social and political views of the artist. Despite his strong assurance, it is difficult to accept that he was not updating Ovid’s story about spiritual change to relate the need for a new world order, an idea developed perhaps in the light of contemporary events in Russia. Souter dealt with the controversy generated by his painting by offering a variety of explanations about its purpose. In the absence of further evidence of any overarching intention, the painting must remain a mystery – which he would have appreciated.

It is a matter for debate whether Souter’s standing as an artist suffered from the episode. According to Matthew it did: drawing on information held in the Souter Estate she wrote, ‘As a result of this withdrawal of “The Breakdown” he was denied the development and possible acclaim he deserved.’^[87] But, while Souter was never nominated an Academician, the episode did his reputation no harm. According to the Dundee Evening Telegraph Souter now had ‘greatness thrust upon him’.^[88] He continued to work as a society portrait artist and to submit regularly to the Academy Summer Exhibition.

Acknowledgements. My thanks go to Mark Pomeroy and Jenny Camilleri (Royal Academy of Arts); Charlotte Yeldham (art historian and author); Simon Toll (Senior Director, Sotheby’s); Kelly Kinyera (DACS); Robin Rodger (Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture); Amy Fairley (Perth and Kinross Culture); and the Souter Estate.

Royal Academy Exhibitors 1905–1970: A Dictionary of Artists and their Work in the Summer Exhibitions of the Royal Academy, vol. VI, East Ardley, Yorkshire 1982, p44. ↑
‘Aberdeen Artist’s Story of his Picture’, Aberdeen Press and Journal, 21 May 1926. ↑
The Selection Committee comprised Sir Frank Dicksee (Chairman), Sir Bertram MacKennal, Sir Arthur S. Cope, Wilfred De Glehn, Alfred Turner, William Curtis Green, and Malcolm Osborne. The size of submissions was not recorded by the Academy at that time. ↑
By way of comparison, the later reproduction (51 cm x 53.5 cm) sold in 2018 for £75,000.00 and a pastel study (size 28 cm x 35 cm) sold for £3000.00 in 2012. Pastel was Lot 145, Lyon and Turnbull, Edinburgh, 29 November 2012; Oil was Lot 91, Lyon & Turnbull, Edinburgh, 7 June 2018. ↑
The government action is addressed later. ↑
‘Breakdown may be Broken Up’, Westminster Gazette, 19 May 1926. ↑
The Royal Academy Illustrated, 1926, 91. A 23.5 cm x 30 cm charcoal on buff paper study from 1926 is at the Aberdeen Art Gallery (Ref. ABDAG017849). ↑
Joan Matthew, Booklet prepared for Perth Festival of the Arts, 1990. ↑
Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 May 1926, p1. ↑
‘Academy Problem Picture’, Halifax Evening Courier, 1 May 1926. ↑
‘The Breakdown, Academy Sensation’, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 May 1926. ↑
Jody Blake, Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris 1900–1930, Pennsylvania 1999, p1. ↑
Ibid, p60. ↑
Simon Toll, Frank Dicksee 1853–1928: His Life and Work, Woodbridge 2016, p199. ↑
‘The Breakdown: Not a Problem Picture’, Daily Mail, 3 May 1926. ↑
‘Curious Ingredients’, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 20 May 1926. ↑
The Tuxedo Jazz Band in New Orleans was among the first to adopt white tie dress (in their case with a tuxedo). ↑
Her figure was modelled on the contemporary model Marita Ross (‘Artist Explains What ‘The Breakdown’ Means’, Daily News, 1 May 1926); Ross appeared in six of the exhibition paintings (‘Aberdeen Artist’s Picture’, Sunday Post, 2 May 1926). ↑
Daily News, 1 May 1926; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 May 1926; Eric Partridge, ‘Flapper’, The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang, London 1973, pp324–25; Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs, Basingstoke 1988, pp28–29. ↑
Daily News, 1 May 1926. ↑
Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 May 1926. ↑
Not every commentary is reviewed here. ↑
Halifax Evening Courier, 1 May 1926. ↑
Birmingham Gazette, 1 May 1926. ↑
Western Mail, 4 May 1926. ↑
‘A Glance at the Latest Academy’, Daily Mirror, 1 May 1926, p5. ↑
‘Art and Ethics’, Times, London, 1 May 1926. ↑
Arthur T. Froggatt, ‘Royal Academy of Arts’, The Musical Times, 1 June 1926, pp528–29, item at 528. ↑
Edgar Jackson, ‘The Problems of an Immodest Masterpiece’, Melody Maker, vol. 1, no. 6, June 1926, p1, p3. ↑
Gemma Romain, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle 1716–2018, 1926. The following selection has been extracted from Wikipedia ‘The Breakdown’ (entry accessed March 2024): The New York Times considered it ‘this year’s problem picture’. For the Boston Evening Transcript it was ‘A Racial Outrage’ designed ‘to horrify decent people’. ↑
Manchester Evening News, 1 May 1926. ↑
‘A Problem Picture’, Nottingham Journal, 1 May 1926; Westminster Gazette, 1 May 1926; The Stage, 20 May 1926. See also David Boulton, Jazz in Britain 1935–1958, London 1958, pp165–66; and Catherine Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, Aldershot 2005, p25. ↑
Daily News, 1 May 1926; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 May 1926. ↑
Catherine Tackley, ‘Introduction: The Breakdown’, Rhythm and Reaction: the age of jazz in Britain, Catalogue of Exhibition at Temple Place, January to April 2018, 9; George McKay, ‘Jazz, Race and J. B. Souter’s The Breakdown (1926)’, georgemckay,org (posted 26 January 2018, accessed February 2024). ↑
Blake, pp89–90. ↑
Ovid, Metamorphoses (circa 8 CE), trans FJ Miller, book 6, vol 1 (of 2), Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA 1971), pp51–53. ↑
Nicolas Poussin, Pan and Syrinx (1637–38), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Bruegel the Younger, Pan and Syrinx (1640), Royal Collection Trust, London. ↑
It has been suggested that the flute’s association with the phallus appeared so frequently in paintings with amorous content that ‘there can be no doubt about its connotation’ (Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p48, p52). ↑
Titian, Nymph and Shepherd (1590), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Rembrandt, The Flute Player (1642), Museum of Modern Art, New York; Boucher, Shepherd piping to a Shepherdess (circa 1745), Wallace Collection, London. ↑
Frances Morris, Christopher Green, Nancy Ireson, Claire Flèches-Thory, eds, Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, exh cat., London 2005, pp162–63. The painting is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. ↑
Ibid, p189. ↑
Aberdeen Press and Journal, 21 May 1926; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 May 1926. ↑
Neville H Fletcher and Thomas D Rossing, ‘The Saxophone’, The Physics of Musical Instruments, New York etc 1991, pp420–21. ↑
Froggatt, 528. Laura Knight’s painting The Saxophone Player was also selected and hung (no. 416). ↑
John Baxendale, ‘into Another Kind of Life in Which Anything Might Happen: Popular Music and Late Modernity, 1910–1930’, Popular Music, vol 14, no. 2 (2 May 1995), pp137–54, item at 141. ↑
RWS Mendl, The Appeal of Jazz, London 1927, p118. ↑
If it is a scroll in the statues hand, no one has bothered to unroll it and read the forgotten wisdom written on it; if it is the broken handle of a weapon held by Minerva, a goddess of war, then violence is now over, in favour of a new period of peace and love. See ‘Minerva’, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, MC Howatson, ed, Oxford revd 1997, p366. ↑
With the exception perhaps of twentieth-century photographic portraiture, few saxophones appear in pictorial art. Winternitz mentions the instrument on only three occasions, all briefly, and the Art UK database shows only 21 related paintings, few of which date from the 1920s. ↑
Matthew, Perth, 1990. It was hired from a branch of Lewin Bros. which claimed to be Britain’s largest retail musical instrument dealers (head office at 12 Moor Street, London). The company imported saxophones, typically manufactured by Martin in Indiana, which were then badged with the Lewin Bros. name. ↑
Quoted Anthony Baines, ‘The Saxophone’, The New Oxford Companion to Music, Denis Arnold, ed, vol 2 (K–Z), Oxford 1995 edition, pp1616–19, item at 1616. ↑
Baxendall, pp137–54, 140; see also Mark Hustwitt, ‘Caught in a Whirlpool of Aching Sound: The Production of Dance Music in Britain in the 1920s’, Popular Music, vol. 3 (1983), pp7–31. ↑
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age, New York 1922, pp53–87. ↑
Quote from ‘The Devil’s music: 1920s Jazz’, PBS America, 2 February 2000. ↑
It has been suggested that ‘the reaction to the painting epitomise[d] the response to this new jazz music’ with ‘huge popular enthusiasm’ mixed with ‘an undercurrent of suspicion that this was a dangerous new art form subverting decent society’ (Catherine Tackley, ‘Racist undertones of Britain’s Jazz Age explored in exhibition’, quoted Maey Kennedy, The Guardian, 24 January2018; see also Carly Shearer, ’The Threat of Jazz: John Bulloch Souter’s The Breakdown’, lyonandturnbull.com (posted 24 April 2018, accessed March 2024). ↑
For example, Debussy’s Rhapsodie pour orchestre et saxophone premiered 1919. The suggestion that the saxophone is ‘not quite decent in symphonic music is as inaccurate as it is snobbish’, ‘Saxophone’, Oxford Dictionary of Music, Michael Kennedy, ed, Oxford 1990 reprint, p627. ↑
Godbolt suggests The Southern Syncopated Orchestra, an all-black band which also visited the UK in the early 1920s, were an example of the new semi-symphonic style (Jim Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain 1919–1950, London 1984 revd 2005, pp1–18. ↑
Jack Hylton, ‘The Prophets of Doom’, Melody Maker, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1926, pp14–15, item at 14. ↑
Matthew, Perth, 1990. ↑
Michael Yudell, ‘A Eugenic Foundation’, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century, New York 2014) pp13–30; Mike Cole, Racism and the Tory Party: from Disraeli to Johnson, New York 2023, pp33–75. ↑
Robert Knox, ‘The Dark Races of Men’, The Races of Men, London 1850), pp215–317, p231. See also Bernard M Magubane, Race and the Construction of the Dispensible Other, Pretoria 2007). ↑
J Knox Thompson, ‘The Erect Posture’, The Lancet, 14 January 1922, pp107–109, item is at 107. ↑
Sander L Gilman, ‘Stand Up Straight: Notes toward a history of posture’, Insights, Durham University, 2012, vol. 5, no. 7, Introduction, p5. ↑
Shearer. ↑
The issues addressed here are expanded by Christopher Fyfe, Race, Empire and Post-Empire, Africanus Horton Memorial Lecture, University of Edinburgh, 1980. ↑
Paul B Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics, Cambridge 1990), 2nd edn, 64–65; Wikipedia ‘1923 Imperial Conference’ (entry accessed June 2024). ↑
Times, 1 May 1926. ↑
Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 4 May 1926. ↑
Toll, pp199–200. ↑
Ibid, p207. ↑
Dionna Richardson, ‘If You See Something, Say Something: Imperial Origins of White Women’s Modern Racial Profiling’, uakron.academia.edu (2019, accessed July 2024); Wikipedia ‘Imperial Feminism’ (entry accessed July 2024). ↑
Halifax Evening Courier, 1 May 1926. ↑
Manuscript minutes of Royal Academy Council Meeting, 4 May 1926. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Ibid. Souter and his wife were living at 9 Queen’s Park Mansions, Brook Green, London. ↑
Letter Lamb to Souter, 8 May 1926, quoted Matthew, 1990. ↑
‘Academy Picture Removed’, Gloucestershire Echo, 14 May 1926. ↑
Neither the old common law offence of disturbing the King’s peace, nor the Defence of the Realm Act (1914) were appropriate. The latter had been applied by Lieutenant Colonel A. N. Lee (who from 1916 was official British censor on war art) to censor C. R. W. Nevinson’s painting Paths of Glory (1917). Lee’s restrictions were challenged when the painting was subsequently exhibited by Nevinson in 1918 (Nevinson, C. R. W. ‘Paths of Glory’, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Picures of War by C. R. W. Nevinson (official artist on the Western Front), Ernest Brown and Phillips, The Leicester Galleries, London, 1918, Item 29, p11). ↑
Obscene Publications Act, A Collection of the Public General Statutes, London, 1857, pp813–16. ↑
Dicksee and the public at large were outraged by Epstein’s stone memorial to the novelist and ornithologist WH Hudson. Dicksee considered the nude sculpture (called Rima) obscene and wrote to The Morning Post (printed 18 November 1925) demanding its ‘immediate removal … from public view’ on grounds that it was inappropriate, repellent and a piece of artistic anarchy. Supporters of Epstein and Academy students protested and ‘the rift between traditional and progressive artists widened’ (quotations from Toll, p199). ↑
Visitors to the exhibition numbered 137,149 over the period (well down on the previous six-year average of 163,292) and many were frustrated not to see a painting which had received so much press coverage. (‘Academy Late Start’, Dundee Courier, 20 May 1926; Romain, Chronicle, 1926). ↑
Daily News, 12 May 1926. ↑
Annual Report from The Council of the Royal Academy etc. 1926, published 1927, 13. The Dominions Office was separated from the Colonial Office on 11 June 1925, which explains why the issue was raised by the Colonial Office while the Dominions Office is mentioned in the Report. Leo Amery was Secretary of State for both Departments. ↑
It is evident from the diaries that he was busy on Cabinet matters to do with the general strike. (Leopold Amery, The Leo Amery Diaries 1896–1929, John Barnes and David Nicholson, eds,, vol 1 (of 3) (London, etc 1980), 2–8 May, pp450–54). ↑
I am grateful to Simon Toll, Senor Director, Sotheby’s. London, for this information. ↑
Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 May 1926; Aberdeen Press and Journal, 21 May 1926. ↑
Daily News 19 May 1926 newspaper cutting, on the website of the Rendezvous Gallery, Aberdeen (accessed February 2024, now deleted). ↑
Matthew, Perth, 1990. ↑
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 20 May 1926. ↑

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