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should be dependent on an equivalent deed made out to Garnett, thereby ensuring that each felt impelled to accept the money, because refusing it would jeopardise the offer to the other.Keynes also contributedheavily towards the cost of running the Bell country house, Charleston.Roger Fry was another philanthropic friend to penniless artists: it was partly their plight that persuaded him to start the Omega Workshop in 1913, as a way of providing hard-up artists with a minimal income.A similar enlightened attitude prevailed when Helen Anrep, Fry’s mistress, was left after his death in reduced circumstances – an unmarried ‘widow’; Vanessa Bell and others clubbed together to buy her a reconditioned refrigerator.
    The story is well known of how Virginia Woolf and Ottoline Morrell – deeply impressed by reading The Waste Land – set up a fund to release T.S.Eliot from the necessity of working in a bank (help which he rejected as insufficient).It is only one among many heartening examples of altruism in the artistic community.Long before he was famous, Lytton Strachey was supported financially by his friend Harry Norton.The painter Dorothy Brett regularly paid Mark Gertler’s rent for him.The editor Edward Garnett, having located a cheap cottage for W.H.Davies to live and write in, paid for the poet’s fuel and light out of his own pocket.Numbers of young artists – Gertler, Nash, Meninsky, the poets Rupert Brooke and Isaac Rosenberg – had reason to be grateful to the patron Eddie Marsh, who bought their work, had them to stay and helped them out in innumerable ways.Edward Wads worth was a painter who had inherited a fortune, and he and his wife Fanny entirely supported the Vorticist leader Wyndham Lewis during his most impoverished period.But Lewis found it hard being an object of charity.Regrettably, one week the expected sum of money failed to materialise, whereupon Lewis scrawled an ungracious postcard to his benefactors bearing the words:
    Where’s the fucking stipend?
Lewis
    Lewis later became dependent on the reluctant charity of Dick Wyndham (no relation), an aspiring artist of substantial independent means, who felt exploited by Lewis’s rapacity.The writer took revenge on his patron, portraying him in The Apes of God (1930) as a vile charlatan with deviant sexual tastes, and that was the end of that friendship.
    Patronage took many forms.Dick Wyndham’s cousin David Tennant, a cultured socialite, made life easier for artists in the way he knew best, by starting the Gargoyle Club, which he specifically aimed at a Bohemian clientèle, keeping the prices deliberately low.Rudolf Stulik, the Austrian patron of the famous Eiffel Tower restaurant, applied a Robin Hood principle, charging people what he thought they could afford.The tactic eventuallybankrupted him, and though the artists set up a fund to bale him out, he was forced to leave his restaurant.

Illustration from “The Most Wondrous and Valiant Brett” – Dora Carrington.
Carrington pays homage to her friend Brett, at work in her sparse studio.The
gas ring at floor level was a common feature of rented rooms.
    Established writers like Edmund Gosse, George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy were notably generous to younger authors in distress, producing loans and handouts.They were also luminaries of the Royal Literary Fund, which gave grants to writen in desperate straits: in 1910 £ 1,650 was raised to help authors who had ‘turned their back on the prospect of pecuniary gain’.There was of course no certainty of subsidy for all; in 1925 Liam O’Flaherty was rescued from the brink by a cheque for £ 200, but in 1938 Dylan Thomas was turned down.
    Unfortunately there was no equivalent fund for artists, and with no state-funded safety-net, the Bohemian social network could be a lifeline for those who were desperate.Somebody usually knew somebody who could help, rally others, organise a temporary whip-round – even if they themselves were little