Introduction

Michael Thomas Harvey Sadler was born on 25 December 1888, the only child of the educational pioneer and art patron Sir Michael Ernest Sadler (1861–1943), Chancellor of Leeds University and renowned collector of post-Impressionist paintings. The son later adopted an early variant of the family name, Sadleir, as a nom de plume to distinguish himself from the father. Sadleir was educated at Rugby School and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied History and befriended JMM. Having already published a volume of his own poetry in 1907, Lappalien, Sadleir helped JMM establish the little magazine Rhythm in 1911 while they were still undergraduates, bringing to the venture not only his father’s financial backing (£50) but also his connections to the post-Impressionist art world. In 1911, the two men travelled to Paris to ask the artist J. D. Fergusson if they could use his painting Rhythm – which they had seen in the Autumn Salon – as both the title and cover image for the magazine they were planning to publish. Although it was Fergusson who served as art editor for the first year, sourcing visual contributions to Rhythm, it was Sadleir who should be credited with explaining and promoting these trends in modern art to readers in articles that helped to secure the magazine’s place as an important disseminator of Modernism in Britain. In the first issue, published in June 1911, Sadleir praised the work of Anne Estelle Rice in an article titled ‘Fauvism and a Fauve’, admiring her ‘rhythmical’ use of ‘strong flowing line’ and the decorative effect created by ‘massed colour’ (impossible to reproduce in the two-tone printing of the magazine, of course). Other modern artists discussed by Sadleir in the pages of Rhythm include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, André Derain and Wassily Kandinsky, whose Über das Geistige in der Kunst Sadleir translated into English as The Art of Spiritual Harmony, published in 1914.

KM’s first contributions to Rhythm were printed in March 1912, and by the next issue, which began a new volume of the magazine, she was listed as an assistant editor alongside Sadleir.