george clausen - The Fine Art Society

Transcription

george clausen
The Rustic Image
10 October to 8 November 201
—*—
the fine art society
Dealers since 1876
148 New Bond Street · London W1S 2JT
+44 (0)20 7629 5116 · art@faslondon.com
www.faslondon.com
kenneth mcconkey
GEORGE
CLAUSEN
the rustic image
London · 2012
2 GEORGE CL AUSEN
FOREWORD
[Fig.1] Photograph of George Clausen
painting The Little Cottage, 1928
4 GEORGE CL AUSEN
In 1979, to coincide with the Royal Academy’s PostImpressionism exhibition and anticipate the large Sir
George Clausen touring show, The Fine Art Society staged
The Rustic Image, an exhibition surveying rural themes in
British Painting. Of the eighty pictures by forty-two artists
represented, nine were by Clausen. Not only did it demonstrate the painter’s central importance in British art at
the turn of the twentieth century, but the exhibition also
reflected a time-honoured relationship. Clausen’s work had
first been shown at The Fine Art Society in the early years of
the century and through his longstanding friendship with
the society’s manager, Ernest Procter Dawbarn, he became
a regular exhibitor. As Kenneth McConkey points out in
his monograph, they remained in contact until a couple of
years before the artist’s death in 1944 at the age of 92.
The original Rustic Image show featured Clausen’s
great Allotment Gardens on its catalogue cover and also
contained his splendid pastel, A Sheepfold in Evening, both
of which reappeared in the retrospective exhibition of
1980. To these have been added The Ploughboy, A Village
Girl, The Breakfast Table, The Mowers, The Dark Barn and
The Student along with two of his impressive sequence of
misty morning landscapes shown at the 1920 Academy, and
other important canvases, prints and drawings, to form the
present exhibition. We extend our thanks to the artist’s
descendants, private collectors and the staffs of Brighton,
Dumfries, Lincoln and Norwich museums and galleries,
and the Art Workers’ Guild who have helped make this
exhibition possible.
Our gratitude needs also to be expressed to Kenneth
McConkey for writing this catalogue for us. His monograph, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life,
is published by Atelier Books, The Fine Art Society’s
imprint, to coincide with the exhibition.
Patrick Bourne
THE FINE ART SOCIETY 5
INTRODUCTION:
‘… THE GREAT MOVING FORCES OF NATURE …’
I [Fig.2] Allotment Gardens, 1899, 108 x 136 cm, Private Collection, no.26
t is the October season somewhere in the south
of England and three farm workers are digging the
vegetable patch [fig.2]. Potatoes, the last crop to be lifted,
were topped earlier in the year and left in the soil until now.
The single small hayrick built during the summer will feed
one or two animals and provide a modicum of ground cover
for next year’s soft fruit. And the sinking sun tells us that
these labourers’ allotments are dug in the evening when
their employer’s work is done.
Far away in the corridors of Westminster, allotments like
this one are the subject of hot debate. Britain can no longer
feed its population and as industry booms, financiers grow
rich and banks crash, public health is a long-running topic
of concern. The inexorable drift from the countryside to
cities must be arrested. Recruiting sergeants are reporting
that the troops enlisted from the ever encroaching factory
belts to fight colonial wars, are puny, prone to sickness
and no match for the Boers. Joseph Chamberlain, a former
mayor of Birmingham, had brought forward a Bill in
Parliament empowering councils to establish allotments
in rural areas because it was clear that a country labourer
could feed his family from his own produce, and hopefully,
remain healthy and strong on the land. It was not a new
idea. In some counties, clergymen had already subdivided
the ‘glebes’, lands owned by the church, at peppercorn
rents. Those parishioners who took up such plots were,
like the three in George Clausen’s Allotment Gardens, often
thought to spend more time and energy on their own
quarter acre than on the farmers’ fields. But the allotment
movement was growing and it even made modest gains
in cities.
Clausen’s canvas was sent from deepest Essex to the
Royal Academy in 1899 and notwithstanding its topicality
there were predictable things to say about it. It came from
someone who, eighteen years ago, had turned his back
on the London art world – an artist who not only lived in
the country, but made a virtue of it by only painting its
rustic inhabitants. He had been a firebrand, following the
latest ugly ‘French fakements’; and as a notorious ‘Chelsea
conspirator’, had sought the reform, if not the complete
overthrow of the Academy. Now, at the end of the century,
while he had lost none of his reforming zeal and his allegiance to rural subject matter was undimmed, he was being
courted by Burlington House.
He came from a London immigrant household – his
father was Danish and his mother, Highland Scots. His
early pictures of the 1870s were Hague School pastiches
and sub-Tissot city scenes. Moving as a young artist to the
expanding suburb of Hampstead, he frequently observed
road-builders wearing country smocks who had come up
the lanes from Colney Hatch and Hendon to find work. The
recent unionization of rural labour drew attention to poor
wages and living conditions on the land and the population
drift into towns and cities, which had been going on for
fifty years, was gathering pace.
Yet the new suburbia was not for him. After his marriage
in 1881 Clausen and his wife, Agnes, took the risky decision
to leave London, to live and work in the country. His flight
from the city was however, no retreat. Out in Hertfordshire,
he later recalled, ‘One saw people doing simple things under
good conditions of lighting … Nothing was made easy for
you: you had to dig out what you wanted’. We scrutinize his
early peasant portraits, presented with monastic rigidity,
searching for interpretation. The nineteenth century had a
language for this. Shallow foreheads, furrowed mouths and
flared nostrils cast the old fieldworker as a simian relic, a
marginal figure who brought muddy boots into the drawing
room. Clausen’s pictures of peasants came from the ‘school
of the ugly’ – but the purpose of the branding them in this
way was not necessarily to initiate a debate about beauty.
Victorian plutocrats knew what was beautiful. It came in
the whiplash curves of Burne-Jones’s briar roses and in the
hackneyed ‘poetry’ of Benjamin Leader’s landscapes.
No, the debate was more to do with the ‘modern realism’
and there was nothing like it in English painting. ‘The
bottom crust of society’, as one of his first little canvases
reveals, was not to be romanticised. There was nothing
pretty about root vegetables. December (no.5) in formal
terms, predicts Allotment Gardens. A man and woman face
one another on a frosty field, topping and tailing turnips to
feed the sheep. In days gone by a woman was able to take
a few of these coarse vegetables home to make a stew, but
since the passing of the Poaching Act, some tougher landowners regarded this ancient right as theft.
To the young artist however, such simple scenes were
a revelation. For the first time Clausen was able to integrate figures and setting perfectly. There was no sense that
labourers sketched on one day, were pasted on to a field
that had been sketched on another. So naturalistic was the
result that it immediately questioned the sham rusticity of
his British and French counterparts. Clausen was an anthropologist, a cool recorder, a note-taker, a maker of documentaries. Curious about cameras that were still a primitive
technology of limited use, he photographed labourers going
about their work but was shrewd enough to realize that
the images they produced were no substitute for on-thespot observation. He too must stand in the field and, with
frozen fingers, make notes in his sketchbook. Drawing was
essential. Coordination of eye and hand in the formation
of an image in the mind was both intellectual and expressive. The impress of line on the page carried conviction
and authenticity.
His influences were obvious. In the early eighties the
student talk was all about recent developments in French
art. Bastien-Lepage, Lhermitte and a host of younger
Salon painters had adopted and modernized paysanneries,
peasant genre scenes made popular by the older generation. Jean-François Millet, whose painting The Angelus, was
to change hands for a staggering 530,000 francs in 1889,
was frequently reproduced and Clausen was to acquire
his own collection of the artist’s etchings. But this was
only a starting point and there were, as he quickly realized, important differences between French peasants and
those he watched in English fields. For one thing, ‘Jacques
Bonhomme’ answered to the call of the Angelus bell while
the English ‘Hodge’ was less susceptible – even if he had
been exposed to Methodist missionaries. And as Allotment
Gardens would confirm, in ‘darkest England’ evening labour
was not interrupted by a call to prayer.
December paved the way for ever more confident pictures
of fieldworkers – larger and more ambitious canvases such
8 GEORGE CL AUSEN
as Winter Work, Day Dreams and the magisterial Labourers
after Dinner, an uncompromising depiction of a weary gang
sitting by a campfire at the edge of a field. At the same time
he started to produce head studies of individual characters
– woodcutters, ploughboys, crow starvers, the prettiest
of whom were village girls. However, when, to his great
surprise, The Girl at the Gate [fig.3] was purchased by the
Chantrey Bequest for the National Gallery in 1889, he had
already begun to realize that rural Naturalism, for all its
conviction, was not enough.
As he critiqued the ‘naturalistic photography’ claimed
as a fine art by Peter Henry Emerson, documentary objectivity and the ‘truth’ of the instantaneous perception,
gradually gave away to more complex goals. Painting could
do much more than a photograph and its representation of
lived experience might be more subtly conceived. Colours
changed with the light and the seasons. Time series could be
collapsed into a single image that conveyed the full swing of
a scythe or the turn of a plough. Painting could be stretched
out to show the way in which a labourer moved like a
machine and was caught in a rhythmic process. And behind
this there was the even greater goal of demonstrating the
interdependency of figures who formed a human chain.
These issues first emerged with The Mowers (no.17),
developed with The Harvest (see no.24) and rose to a level
of complexity in pictures such as Sons of the Soil. Innocently
descriptive titles such as Building the Rick [fig.4], carried the
tropes of social harmony, of homo additus naturae. There
were reports at the turn of the century that steam-powered
conveyor belts could speed up the process, but these were
big contraptions that were difficult to manoeuvre on a
small holding. With minimum disruption the rickmaster’s
gang might roll up the first haywain and set to work as they
always had done. Richard Jefferies likened the rickmaster
to a centurion commanding his troops. He gives orders
and has high expectations of his men. They move smartly
[Fig.3] The Girl at the Gate, 1889, 171.5 x 138.5 cm
© Tate, London 2012
[Fig.4] Building the Rick, 1907, 105.5 x 129 cm
Birmingham City Art Galleries
into place laying out sheaves of hay in a timely fashion and
this expediency extends down through the chain to the
lad who leads the next cartload into the rickyard. All move
to an undrawn master plan. This ideal social and economic
microcosm embodied a threatened way of life – yet for the
present, the ‘great rooted blossomer’ on the right, shields
yeoman, tenant farmer and labourer alike. Back then,
Thomas Hardy was frequently invoked in connection with
Clausen’s work. But where Hardy is universally celebrated
today, Clausen is the property of the few.
Building the Rick was shown at the Royal Academy
summer exhibition – not exactly the battleground of
the avant-garde. Yet there remained older Academicians
whose commercial interests were threatened, and who still
regarded this controversial exhibitor as a ‘near anarchist’.
Recently appointed Professor of Painting, Clausen had
now been producing pictures of fieldworkers for twentyfive years and he showed no signs of changing tack. What
started out as daring, factual on-the-spot reporting, had
gradually been transformed into a national archetype, an
image of healthy, outdoor labour that in 1907, exposed
the poverty of thought and emotion everywhere else in
the exhibition.
But he was inside the system and for many young
radicals Clausen was the only reason to visit the Academy
shows. So crowded were his lectures that extra seating had
to be found and for a month of the year he found himself
in the Life Room instructing the students, casting his
thoughts about line, form and local colour into words –
something a painter seldom does – and tracing their origins
back to classical sculpture that he had studied at the British
Museum and on Art Workers’ Guild holidays to Greece
and Italy. He considered the great mural painters of the
Renaissance and greatly admired the Raphael Stanze in
the Vatican. His labourers and their home fields were not
devoid of ancient heroism.
At the same time having moved back to London, the
metropolis began to work its charms, even though the
‘city man’ going to his office, was less interesting than the
ploughman. He would travel down to the riverside to paint
10 GEORGE CL AUSEN
watercolours of St Paul’s and the shot towers of Lambeth
and Battersea. But he needed serenity and it was looking
out on the unprepossessing streets and back gardens of St
John’s Wood in the small hours that renewed his vision.
In the city Clausen was much in demand and he longed
for the Tilty and Clavering fields. One day in 1917, as he was
pushing his bike up Duton Hill, he noticed a cottage for sale
and being sufficiently in funds, he purchased it. ‘Hillside’
quickly became his country retreat and was let out to other
artists when he could not be there. By 1920 he was poised
to return to the Academy with a new vision of rural life.
The lanes were silent now, save for a shepherd boy driving
his sheep at dawn to new pasture before the school bell
sounded. An old wagon might stop to take empty barrels
from the local inn or the ploughman might pass the time
[Fig.5] The English People, in spite of prosecution for heresy,
persist in gathering secretly to read aloud Wycliffe’s English Bible, 1927,
304.8 x 442 cm, © Palace of Westminster Collection, WOA 2603
of day with a traveller. The gangs of gleaners and racing
harvesters had gone, and the forges and wheelwright’s
shops were closing, to be replaced by petrol pumps. But the
great elemental things – trees, fields and sky – remained,
and the more he looked the more entrancing the vision
became. ‘One has a kind of helpless intoxication in looking
at them!’, he wrote, ‘… when one is looking at the sky, going
right up into it, things on earth are subordinate and indefinite …’ He was hoping to take the mind through the misty
morning to find equanimity in abstraction. Looking at trees
one was less ‘concerned with the representation of timber’
than with the ‘great moving forces of Nature’.
By a twist of fate, the painter who in old age achieved
a giddy pantheism in his inter-war landscapes ended up in
the corridors of power. In 1925 he was commissioned to
paint one of the panels in St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of
Westminster, his task to depict the English people meeting
in secret to hear a reading of Wycliffe’s translation of the
Bible [fig.5]. He was no history painter, but no one was
more capable than he of addressing the English people.
The message was simple; they had recently been colonized,
subjected to feudal lords and conscripted into foreign
wars, but they demanded secular and religious freedom.
For its insistence on ‘the right to read what you wanted to
read’ the great scene has been a seminal influence on the
thinking of the Labour politician, Tony Benn who wrote,
‘I … have a copy of it at home and draw comfort from the
courage of those who have risked their lives by defying the
law as the only way to enjoy the freedom in which they
believed passionately’ (The Guardian Magazine, 2 September
2006, p.78).
Clausen would have appreciated the continuity between
these fifteenth century Britons and the women and men of
his own day. It was not the Bible per se, but the willingness
to defy authority for one’s beliefs that he admired. But this
does not make a great painter. Talent, sedentary toil, acuity
of observation, the harmony of hand and eye, and visual
thinking about colour, shape and form does.
1 · The Flower Seller, Trafalgar Square
Oil on canvas, 24 x 15 in, 61 x 38.2 cm
Signed and dated ‘G. Clausen 1879’ (lower right)
Provenance: With Williams and Sons, 1959; ; Sotheby’s 19 November 1985, lot 21
George Clausen’s The Flower Seller, Trafalgar Square, portrays
an encounter in one of the most famous urban spaces in the
world. It was described by Henry James as ‘a grimy desert’ in
the 1880s, the focal point for beggars, prostitutes and street
traders spilling out from Covent Garden to mingle with
foreign tourists. It also acted as the flashpoint for political
demonstrations. Here the young Clausen came in 1879 to
produce studies for the first of a sequence of canvases on
the theme of flower sellers. Looking into the square from
its Whitehall approach, he focused upon the much-eroded
pedestal of the equestrian statue of King Charles I by
Hubert Le Sueur, cast in 1633. This had been placed on the
original site of the Charing Cross, which for centuries was
regarded as the true centre of London. Standing to the left
of Nelson’s Column, it remains much as it was in Clausen’s
day[fig.6].
In the background on the right, beyond a couple stepping down from the pavement, is the familiar profile of
St Martin-in-the-Fields, while on the left, behind the
policeman, is the more anonymous east wing of the
National Gallery. The young painter was very familiar
with the latter – his father had taken him there as boy, to
sketch from paintings in the collection. The young painter
was also alive to current trends, particularly in the work
of the successful French expatriate James-Jacques-Joseph
Tissot who specialized in London park and street scenes.
The potential target of Clausen’s flower-seller’s advances
is an elegant young woman, who recalls Tissot’s celebrated
model, Mrs Kathleen Newton. Having strayed from the
leafy precincts of Regents Park and Hampstead, she cuts a
silhouette as dramatic as that of a courtesan in a Japanese
print and the young painter may well have been looking at
this newly fascinating visual source. However, her modishness mattered less than the silent social commentary
implied in the juxtaposition of a ‘modern’ un-chaperoned
woman and a vagabond flower girl.
The child could be a character from Henry Mayhew’s
exhaustive study of costers in London Labour and the
12 GEORGE CL AUSEN
London Poor (1861–5). These took on a dramatic form in
Gustave Doré’s London, A Pilgrimage, (1872), a work that
brought the teeming city of Little Dorrit and Edwin Drood
graphically to life. Here the flower sellers, huddled on
the pavement, are shown as little more than beggars. A
reporter in The Graphic accounted for their proliferation as
a direct result of the development of the railways and the
fact that fresh flowers could now be brought to the city
centre cheaply. Flower girls, we are told, came in ‘various
grades’ – the ‘well-dressed young ladies who abide in trim
shops’ and the ‘ragged, miserable children who merely
use the flowers they carry as an excuse for beggary’ (The
Graphic, 22 June 1872, p.574). It was one of the latter that
Clausen chose to depict – a barefoot vagrant who, while she
attempts to engage a passer-by, comes under the scrutiny of
a policeman.
[Fig.6] The pedestal,
Whitehall, 2010, photograph, the author
2 · The Morning Walk
Oil on canvas, 12 x 8 in, 30.5 x 20.3 cm
Signed and dated ‘G. CLAUSEN 1881’ (lower right)
Provenance: with The Fine Art Society, London, March 1954; to Major E.O. Kay.*
By the end of 1878 Clausen had moved from Fulham to
Hampstead and although he continued to produce Dutchstyle genre pictures, new elements entered his work. He
now aspired to what one critic described as ‘studio arrangements of decorative drapery’, often depicting an elegant,
unidentified model whose bone structure and dark eyes
recall the facial type of Tissot’s Mrs Newton, who lived
nearby. Clausen deployed his model in two ways. She
appears firstly in a group of interiors that culminate in
1880 with La Pensée (Glasgow Museums). The influences
of French art are, if anything, more obvious in the second
series – a group of street scenes that began in 1879 with The
Flower Seller, Trafalgar Square, (no.1). Within a short time,
these London genre pictures concentrated on the newlybuilt streets near his Hampstead studio.
Clausen’s ambitions for this group of pictures were clear
from the start. In an art world dominated by the grand
manner classicism of Frederic Leighton, and Clausen’s
erstwhile teacher, Edwin Lumsden Long, he was striking
out for modernity. He had witnessed the emergence of
a second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism with the arrival of
Edward Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, but
[Fig.7] A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, 1881, Bury Art Gallery
14 GEORGE CL AUSEN
this too was rejected in favour of a more audacious form of
social recording which, in the first instance, was practiced
by illustrators to The Graphic such as Frank Holl, Hubert von
Herkomer and Luke Fildes. The Hampstead series which
began with the present work, continued with Schoolgirls,
(Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), and culminated
with A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, 1881 [fig.7], a large
canvas destined for the Royal Academy in 1881.
This contains a variety of typical street characters,
including a group of road builders – one of whom, a country
labourer wearing a smock, appears in the background of
The Morning Walk. Respectable young mothers with their
children make an uneasy pairing with these rough individuals. Significantly, the present picture also contains an
indication of the child who was to occupy centre-stage in
the Academy canvas. While French contemporaries such
as Jean-François Raffaelli would often represent the city’s
hinterland as a place of danger and depravity, the new
London street in the present picture contains no such
menace for Clausen’s elegant young woman taking her
morning walk. The documentarist sensibility that developed in this sophisticated scene was to underscore his
later allegiance to the rustic naturalism of Bastien-Lepage
after 1881.
* A notable connoisseur, Kay’s portrait was painted by Stanley
Spencer (see Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer, catalogue raisonné, 1992,
Phaidon, no.316), and his collection was exhibited at Graves Art
Gallery, Sheffield in 1953.
AGNES MARY CLAUSEN (1856–1944)
3 · The Lazy Boy
Oil on canvas, 13½ x 11½ in, 34.3 x 29.2 cm
Signed ‘A. Clausen’
Exhibited: London, Society of British Artists, Summer Exhibition,
1882, no.678
Lent by a Private Collector
Clausen married Agnes Mary Webster (1856–1944) in 1881.
They met through the close friendship he formed with her
elder brother, Alfred, when they were students together at
the Government Art Training School at South Kensington.
The Websters hailed from Kings Lynn where their father
was a newspaper reporter who later became editor of the
Lynn Advertiser. When Alfred was studying for his art
teacher’s certificate at the Government School in 1876–7,
Agnes had enrolled in the women’s classes, and as the
present work indicates, she was very talented.
Sadly, very few pictures by Agnes Mary Clausen
have survived, but the present resplendent watercolour
painted shortly after their move to Childwick Green in
Hertfordshire, demonstrates her commitment to ‘modern
realism’. Recalling Herkomer’s paintings of peasant children, it reveals for the first time the orchard setting that
would become very familiar in her husband’s work over the
next few years. The chickens are those, found in his larger
oil paintings, In the Orchard, 1881 (Salford Art Gallery) and
Springtime, 1882 (Private Collection). However, where
these pictures document apple gathering and the return of
spring foliage, Agnes implies a narrative in the picture of a
boy lounging by the orchard gate – apparently heedless of
the task ahead.
16 GEORGE CL AUSEN
4 · Boy and Man (The Return from the Fields)
Watercolour on paper, 14 x 10 in, 35.5 x 25.5 cm
Signed lower left, ‘G. CLAUSEN 1882’
Provenance: with The Fine Art Society, c.1969
Exhibited: London, Institute of Painters in Watercolours, 1882,
no.138 as Boy and Man; London, The Fine Art Society, Channel Packet,
1969, no.27 (illus. in cat); Bradford, London, Bristol and Newcastle,
Sir George Clausen RA , 1852–1944, 1980, no.26 (illus. in cat)
Literature: The Academy, 22 April 1882, p.291; ‘Art Notes’, The
Magazine of Art, 1882, p.xxx; Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen
RA , 1852–1944, 1980, (exhibition catalogue, Bradford and Tyne and
Wear Museums, p.35, illus.)
Lent by The Ellis Campbell Collection
In 1882 The Academy described a small drawing of two
labourers ‘trudging homeward in the twilight with faggots
on their back’ which was included in the current exhibition
of the Institute of Painters in Watercolours. The critic was
impressed by its ‘breadth of treatment’ and declared it ‘like
a Millet’. The Magazine of Art concurred. Clausen’s was ‘the
most artistic work on the walls … a small drawing; but it is
so strong, and at the same time so tender and full of feeling,
that it arrests attention more powerfully than all the other
pictures together’.
These approving remarks refer to Boy and Man, a
groundbreaking work that avoids the false sentiment which
often accompanied such scenes. There was no last gleam
in the sunset; no proud oaks or elms in the setting and
no heroic poses in the figures. Reference to Jean-François
Millet is apposite. In the previous year, Alfred Sensier had
published his biography of the French painter and The Fine
Art Society had issued a bound set of twenty facsimiles
[Fig.8] Gossips, c.1881–2, Bury Art Gallery
18 GEORGE CL AUSEN
of Millet’s etchings and woodcuts.* These publications
signaled a turning-point in British consciousness of Millet’s
work. Clausen would for instance have seen in reproduction
Millet’s dramatic drawing of The Old Woodcutter bearing his
bundle of faggots and a monochrome gouache [fig.8] tends
to confirm this.
From Clausen’s standpoint, critical approval of Boy
and Man was a vindication of his decision to move to the
country. Among the first things he saw in the following
months was the winter activity of thinning woodlands, to
provide young saplings for strengthening fences and hedges,
as well as winter fuel. It brought the painter of bourgeois
interiors and Hampstead street scenes literally down to
earth. He later recalled that, in the country ‘one saw people
doing simple things under good conditions of lighting …
nothing was made easy for you: you had to dig out what you
wanted’.†
The spring season of the following year provided the first
opportunity to test Clausen’s new work on critics. Paintings
of labourers and gleaners were to follow Boy and Man almost
immediately in the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor
Gallery and for the next twenty-three years the artist’s
commitment to recording rural life remained unshaken.
While Millet seemed an obvious source for Boy and Man and
its successors, its linear and tonal precision suggests a wide
range of influences. Clausen had studied the watercolours
of Fred Walker and Hubert von Herkomer; he had looked
at the rural panoramas of John Robertson Reid; but it was
the French painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose work was
most inspiring. Bastien-Lepage had stripped away the Old
Master chiaroscuro from Millet’s peasants, and placing them
en plein air, had recorded their activity with photographic
accuracy. This ‘Naturalism’ or ‘modern realism’, for Clausen’s
generation, was the ultimate modernity. There was however,
much more to say about the workmen trudging across the
bleak landscape. In 1882, the artist produced a small, related
oil painting of a woodman and his helper on a country lane
and this was followed by two etchings and the magisterial, The End of a Winter’s Day (unlocated) shown at the
Grosvenor Gallery in 1885.
* Jean-François Millet, Twenty Etchings and Woodcuts in Facsimile, with a
biography by William Ernest Henley, 1881 (The Fine Art Society).
† Sir George Clausen, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, Artwork, no.25, Spring
1931, p.19.
5 · December
Oil on canvas, 9½ x 12 in, 24 x 125/8 cm
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’
Provenance: The Fine Art Society, 1969; Anthony Rampton Esq.
Exhibited: London, The Fine Art Society, Channel Packet, 1969, no.18
(illus. in cat); London, Royal Academy of Arts, Bradford, Bristol and
Newcastle City Art Galleries, Sir George Clausen, RA , 1852–1944, 1980,
no.32 (illus. in cat. p.39)
Literature: Kenneth McConkey, ‘Figures in a Field, George Clausen’s
Winter Work’, in Art at Auction, 1982–3, pp.72–5
Although he was fascinated by the work of Bastien-Lepage,
Clausen was aware of J.-F. Millet’s classic canvases from his
student years. With the simultaneous publication of Alfred
Sensier’s biography and W.E. Henley’s essay on Millet
for The Fine Art Society, the French painter remained in
currency. The following year, The Magazine of Art (vol 5,
p.221) issued an engraving of l’Angelus (Musée d’Orsay,
Paris), his most popular painting. Thus, Clausen started life
in the country with a comprehensive range of visual references and as he observed two figures solemnly preparing
turnips for sheep fodder, he may well have reflected on
the differences between field work in England and la vie
rustique. He had in any case, just returned from Quimperlé
to Hertfordshire, having painted a full length study of a
Breton Girl carrying a Jar (Victoria and Albert Museum). In
his brief sojourn in the artists’ colony he had seen British
and American contemporaries working en plein air from
peasant models. Their conviction that naturalistic representation of real life was the only direction for modern
painting confirmed his move from London to the country
in the previous year. One of the tenets of Bastien-Lepage,
was that a painter, following Millet’s retreat to Barbizon,
should find his own corner of the world and paint it with
the religious zeal of a hermit. This could not happen in
Brittany where one was jockeying with others, and in the
early weeks of winter he returned to Childwick Green.
Undaunted by the weather he set off for the turnip field
with sketchbook in hand and the result was the present
gem-like canvas. Where previously he had married figures
to settings, here for the first time, it seemed as though
the field workers had almost grown out of the stubble on
which they stood. The effect was enhanced by distortion
in the treatment of figures whose legs and feet become
20 GEORGE CL AUSEN
progressively out of proportion as they reach the earth.
This led Bruce Laughton, writing for the Fine Art Society
in 1969, to query the use of lenses and the medium of
photography. Whilst it is true that Clausen used a camera
around this time, no ensemble photograph similar to
December exists. Given his commitment to sketching on the
spot, it is likely that he regarded the medium as no more
than an additional source, and unlike Dagnan-Bouveret
and Jules-Alexis Meunier, he appears not to have resorted
to photographic transcription. Indeed the views he later
expressed on the subject to Peter Henry Emerson would
tend to confirm this.
There can be no doubt of the importance of this tiny
picture. It served as the basis for Winter Work (Tate Britain),
his Grosvenor Gallery exhibit of 1883, and the general
subject matter of sheep husbandry was one to which he
would return in later years (see nos.14 & 42).
6 · Study for ‘Going Home’
8 · Orchard Scene
Graphite, 7¼ x 6¾¾ in, 18.4 x 16.5 cm
Oil on canvas, 13 x 113/8 in, 33 x 29 cm
7 · Going Home
Etching on paper, 4¼ x 3¼ in, 10.8 x 8.2 cm
Signed lower right, ‘George Clausen’ and inscribed ‘2’
Literature: Frank Gibson, ‘The Etchings and Lithographs of George
Clausen RA’, Print Collectors’ Quarterly, vol.8, 1921, pp.205, 212
Following the favourable notices for Boy and Man (no.4),
Clausen explored the idea of painting a woodman at dusk
returning heavily laden to his cabin. He is in every case,
accompanied by a boy. The small plate etched here was
repeated on a larger scale the following year and developed into a definitive oil version, The End of a Winter’s Day,
1885 (unlocated), which he sent, to great acclaim, to the
Grosvenor Gallery in 1885.
Provenance: Given by Miss Joan Webster, 1957
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, Bradford, Bristol and
no.40 (illus. in cat. p.41); London, Barbican Art Gallery, Impressionism
in Britain, 1995, no.28 (illus. in cat, p.108)
Lent by Lincolnshire Museums, Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Throughout the 1880s, Clausen produced many orchard
studies in Hertfordshire and Berkshire. These were
intended as settings for works such as The Shepherdess,
1885 (Liverpool Museums, Walker Art Gallery) and Girl in
an Orchard, 1887 (Private Collection). The painter treated
these works as technical experiments – using different
brush sizes and, on occasion, palette knives.
The present example is likely to date from around 1885
when he was living temporarily at St Albans.
9 · The Ploughboy (The Farmer’s Boy)
Oil on canvas, 22 x 15¾ in, 56 x 40 cm
Signed centre left, ‘G. Glausen 1888, to D.C. Thomson in friendship,
1891’, along bottom edge, ‘AND WE HAVE THE PAYNE AND
TRAVEYLE, RAYN AND WYNDE IN THE FIELDS’
Provenance: The artist; David Croal Thomson; to Gracefield Board of
Management; Dumfriesshire Educational Trust
Exhibited: Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1922, no.199 as The
Shepherd, (lent by D. Croal Thomson Esq); Newcastle, Sheffield,
Paisley and Aberdeen, Peasantries, 1981 (exhibition catalogue), no.49
(illus. in cat); Tokyo, Tokushima, Osaka, British Impressionism, 1996
(exhibition catalogue), no.9 (illus. in cat.)
Lent by Gracefield Art Centre, Dumfries
Clausen first addressed the theme of ploughing in his St
Albans sketchbook in 1884, using the motif for one of his
first etchings – an ex libris label. It lay fallow until after
his move to Cookham Dean when, in 1889, he painted
Ploughing [fig.9], a definitive treatment of the theme which
was delivered to the Grosvenor Gallery in 1889.
Prior to this, he selected the ploughboy clad in sackcloth
for special study. Two versions of the present canvas were
painted in the preceding year – the present example and a
larger work, also shown at the Grosvenor Gallery.
The Dumfries version, with its background simplified to
a rich, suggestive impasto, has the added interest of an early
English inscription. Emblazoned across the bottom edge of
the canvas is a line from one of John Ball’s rousing speeches
during the Peasants Revolt in the fourteenth century –
‘AN D W E HAV E T H E PAY N E A N D T R AV E Y L E, R AYNE
AN D W Y N D E I N T H E F E L D S’. At that moment, when
‘Free Speech’ riots were raging in Trafalgar Square, William
Morris’s Socialist League were trumpeting the activities
of the Kentish peasant leaders, Ball and Wat Tyler. Morris
delighted in the romance of Froissart’s Chronicles, one of
the early histories of the Peasants Revolt, and revived it in
his ‘A Dream of John Ball’, published in Commonweal. The
full quotation from which Clausen’s inscription is drawn,
contrasts the ‘pore cloth’ of the peasant and his meagre
rations with the ‘velvet and chamlet furred with grise …
wynes and spyces’, worn and eaten by his master.*
It comes as something of a surprise to discover that
three years later, the painter gave this small version of The
Ploughboy to his dealer, David Croal Thomson, who at this
point was general manager of the London branch of Goupil
24 GEORGE CL AUSEN
and Co. An ambitious Scots art journalist, Thomson had
joined the company from The Art Journal two years before,
and he was to become a lifelong friend of the painter.
Although, at times, Thomson joined the chorus demanding
prettier, more saleable subjects, he was a solid supporter
whose personal enthusiasm for Millet and the artists of the
Barbizon School, Clausen shared. When the larger version
of The Ploughboy was unveiled at the Grosvenor in 1888, The
Art Journal described it as,
… the high water mark of realism in the gallery; the reliefs of the
various objects from the ensemble are marvellously subtle and
natural, the modelling perfect in its way, without any attempt
at grandeur or emotional effect. The style and technique is that
of Bastien-Lepage, but the work is done with a mastery which
no other picture in the exhibition quite reaches … (The Art
Journal, 1888, p.188)
*‘They are clothed in velvet and chamlet furred with grise, and we
be vestured in pore clothe; they have their wynes, spyces and good
breed; they dwell in fayre houses, and we have payne and traveyle,
rayne and wynde in the feldes; and by that that cometh of our labours
they kepe and maynteyne their estates: we be called their bondmen,
and without we do redilye them service, we be beaten; and we have
no soverayne to whom we may complayne, not that wyll here us nor
do us right’, quoted from Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France
and Spain, (1967 ed., New York, AMS Press, trans Sir John Bourchiers
and Lord Berners) in Michael Holzman, ‘The Encouragement and
Warning of History: William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball’, in Florence
S. Boos and Carol G. Silver eds, Socialism and the Literary Artistry of
William Morris, 1990 (Columbia and London, University of Missouri
Press), p.102.
[Fig.9] Ploughing, 1889, Aberdeen Art Gallery
10 · Little Rose
Pastel on paper, 20⅛ x 14 in, 51.1 x 35.6 cm
Signed lower left, ‘G. CLAUSEN 1889’
Exhibited: London, Grosvenor Gallery, Pastel Exhibition, 1889
In December 1889 The Magazine of Art announced that a
Society of British Pastellists had been formed under the
patronage of Sir Coutts Lindsay, owner of the Grosvenor
Gallery. Lindsay, having consistently supported the
avant-garde in Britain, was increasingly interested in the
new movements emerging in Europe and being a Clausen
supporter, he asked the painter – along with Arthur
Hacker, Solomon J. Solomon and William Llewellyn to join
a committee to manage what would be a series of regular
annual winter exhibitions.
Clausen’s interest in pastel up to this point was mostly
confined to sketchbooks and only occasionally did he
produce finished pieces such as Feeding Sheep (Whitworth
Art Gallery, University of Manchester) from 1884 onwards.
The medium allowed him to draw in colour, although unlike
field boxes for oil and watercolour painting, it was not easily
portable. He had nevertheless observed the popularity of
pastels in France and being interested in Degas, may well
have admired his vigorous use of the medium.
[Fig.10] Day Dreams, 1883, Private Collection
26 GEORGE CL AUSEN
Little Rose represents Rose Grimsdale, a girl who began
to pose at this time and who remained a regular model
(see nos 11 and 12) until Clausen moved his family from
Cookham Dean to Widdington. While her last appearance
was as Brown Eyes, (Tate Britain), shown alongside The
Mowers (no.17) at the Royal Academy in 1892, sketches of
Rose continued to inform the painter’s work throughout
the nineties. Despite the crop-gathering that appears to
be going on around her, Rose is caught in a moment of
reverie fingering wild flowers – much as the girl does in Day
Dreams, 1883 [fig.10].
11 · A Village Girl (Rose Grimsdale)
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’; lower left, ‘to R. Crafton Green
in Friendship, 1896’
Provenance: R. Crafton Green by 1896; thence by descent
Throughout the 1880s, Clausen was under pressure to relax
his principles and forsake the ‘school of the Ugly’. There
was a ready market for pretty pictures of country girls, but
much less interest in aged rustics or strong young male
farmhands. In the closing years for the nineteenth century,
for male artists and their audiences beauty resided in the
natural world and in childhood innocence. With works such
as A Village Maiden (Private Collection) the painter showed
that he could confront these issues with no loss of objectivity. His children were individuals, even if their names
were not disclosed. This was the case with Rose Grimsdale,
a girl who began to pose for Clausen in 1889.
Her first appearances were as A Schoolgirl (Private
Collection), a picture that recalled Bastien-Lepage’s La
Petite Coquette, and was much admired when it appeared
at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. He had also produced
a fine pastel, Little Rose (no.10), which featured at the
Grosvenor Gallery’s winter pastel exhibition. In these
and A Village Girl we begin to note important changes in
Clausen’s style. Use of the new medium encouraged greater
freedom in the handling of colour. Carried forward into his
painting, this meant greater subtlety in the observation of
local tints and a stronger emphasis on selective focus. Thus
a field or hedgerow might be added in summary fashion
while concentration is devoted to facial features.
Although painted around 1889–90, A Village Girl
remained in the painter’s studio until it was given to
R. Crafton Green, a young artist friend of the painter six
years later. The circumstances of the gift remain obscure.
28 GEORGE CL AUSEN
12 · A Girl’s Head
Etching, 4¾ x 3¼ in, 12.1 x 8.2 cm
Signed lower right, ‘George Clausen’ in pencil
Literatur: Frank Gibson, ‘The Etchings and Lithographs of George
Clausen RA’, Print Collector’s Quarterly VIII 1921, p.213, no.9,
(apparently an undescribed proof touched with drypoint)
The present plate shows Rose Grimsdale looking up.
Her pose closely replicates Head of a Young Girl, (Private
Collection) a pastel submitted to the Grosvenor Gallery
Pastel Exhibition in 1890 and later purchased by William
Kenrick M P, a former Lord Mayor of Birmingham.
13 · The Daisy Wreath –
A Study in Low Light
Oil on panel, 9¼ x 6¾ in, 23.5 x 17 cm
Signed lower right ‘G. CLAUSEN 1890’
Exhibited: London, The Fine Art Society, Spring ’98, 1998, no.43
In 1883 in a large and important work, The Day Dream
(Private Collection), Clausen showed a country girl sitting
by the side of a field during harvest time, plucking the
petals from a daisy. Sometimes known as ‘He loves me; he
loves me not’, this canvas with its contrasting youthful
and aged fieldworkers, alludes to one aspect of the folklore associated with the humblest of meadow flowers. In
other cases, girls would make daisy chains into fairy rings
and wreaths, fancying that in such play, magic powers
were conferred on their wearers. Clausen referred to these
country customs in an unrealized project showing a procession of children wearing floral garlands several years before
The Dairy Wreath was painted. Its exceptionally delicate
handling of the girl’s features ‘in low light’ singles out the
present picture from his other studies of country children.
30 GEORGE CL AUSEN
14 · Sheepfold in the Evening (Sheepfold at Dusk)
Pastel on paper, 15 x 24 in, 38 x 61 cm
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN 1890’
Provenance: Edward Le Bas; with the Fine Art Society, 1979 and 2006,
when sold to the present owner
Exhibited: London, Grosvenor Gallery, Pastel Exhibition, 1890;
London, The Fine Art Society, The Rustic Image, 1979, no.15 (illus. in
cat); London, Royal Academy of Arts, Bradford, Bristol and Newcastle
City Art Galleries, Sir George Clausen, RA , 1852–1944, 1980, no.68
(illus. in cat)
Sheep husbandry was one of Clausen’s earliest country
themes. In the dark winter days of 1882 he had observed
the field gang at Childwick Green preparing turnips
as sheep fodder in December (no.5) and in 1884, in the
pastel, Feeding Sheep (Whitworth Art Gallery, University
of Manchester), had taken an aerial view of labourers
operating a turnip crusher, similar to that in the present
pastel. A series of drawings and watercolours of shepherds
carrying lambs or sheep hurdles, and an unfinished pastel
showing the gate to the fold (British Museum) completes
the painter’s survey of the activity.
As with other themes, Clausen’s work on sheepfolds
became more atmospheric around 1890. In this he was not
alone. The ‘Pastel Society’ exhibitions at the Grosvenor
Gallery spotlighted the current revival of this eighteenthcentury medium among European avant-garde painters and
at this point he was looking at the work of Degas, whose
Fan: Dancers, 1879, (Tacoma Art Museum, United States)
he owned. Sheepfold in the Evening was to be his largest and
most ambitious pastel to date.
32 GEORGE CL AUSEN
15 · The Breakfast Table
Oil on canvas, 32 x 25½ in, 81.3 x 64.8 cm
Signed top right, ‘G. CLAUSEN 1891–2’
Provenance: The Artist; Studio Sale, Christie’s 10 October 1945;
thence by descent
Exhibited London, Royal Academy, 1891, no.225; Bradford, London,
Bristol and Newcastle, Sir George Clausen RA , 1852–1944, 1980, no.65
(illus. in cat)
Literature: The Athenaeum, 16 May 1891, p.643; The Magazine of Art,
1891, p.251
Collection of the Artist’s Family
Over the winter of 1890–1, before his move from Berkshire
to the northern reaches of Essex, Clausen embarked upon
what was to be an experimental work in a genre that he
had not tackled since he and his wife, Agnes, left London
nine years before. This was an ambitious interior showing
his three eldest children with their mother at the breakfast table. Although they were outgrowing their house at
Cookham Dean, this was, according to visitors such as Roxa
Watson, a happy household.
With this canvas Clausen would return to regular
exhibiting at the Royal Academy, in a move that was eased
by the Academy’s Chantrey trustees’ recent purchase of
The Girl at the Gate (Tate Britain, fig.3). It seemed that
its president, Frederic Leighton, was keen to extend an
olive branch to the most committed of the Academy
reformers. When shown however, The Breakfast Table was
not universally praised. It originally contained a portrait of
the painter’s eldest son, Arthur George Clausen known as
‘Dick’, standing to the right of the table, beside his mother,
looking towards his younger sisters, Meg and Kit, who
occupy the picture’s foreground. Looming in the background is the large Dutch cabinet which the painter had
acquired on one of his early forays in the Low Countries.
34 GEORGE CL AUSEN
Despite Clausen’s careful sketchbook studies, the
composition was not, as The Athenaeum noted, wholly
successful. He had attempted to indicate spatial recession
by reducing the background to the ‘thinness and transparency of watercolour’ according to The Magazine of Art. This
was no doubt an allusion to the shadowy figure of Agnes in
the background. After it was returned from the Academy,
the painter came to the conclusion that the composition was indeed unsatisfactory and he removed at least
twelve inches of canvas from the top and right edges of the
picture, re-signing the work with an extended date. The
salvaged portion containing Dick’s head was re-stretched,
and The Breakfast Table took its present form as a tighter
and more concentrated study of two girls watched over by
their mother.
16 · Idleness
Watercolour on paper, 18 x 13⅛ in, 45.8 x 33 cm
Provenance: Private Collection, New Zealand; to The Fine Art Society,
2002; to the present owner
Exhibited: London, Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, Winter
1891, (ex cat); London, The Fine Art Society, Spring ’02, 2002, no.54
Clausen notes in his account book in the autumn of 1891
that he was taking three pictures to the Royal Society
of Painters in Watercolours winter exhibition, the first
of which was described as ‘Idlenesss (Rose in white in
orchard)’. Since all three were shown ‘ex catalogue’, it
is likely that the society gave him a special invitation
to exhibit his Girl at the Gate (Tate Britain, fig.3) having
recently been acquired for the National Gallery of British
Art by the Chantrey Bequest. He later notes that Idleness
was sold at the exhibition.
Although she lived at Cookham Dean, Clausen
continued to work on the pictures of Rose for a year after
his move to Widdington in Essex. It is she for instance,
who appears in Brown Eyes (Tate Britain), the picture that
accompanied The Mowers (no.17) to the Academy in 1892.
A drawing for her pose is contained in the Royal Academy
collection and a pastel is also known. Clausen also sketched
an oil version of the subject and this was given to his lifelong friend, Goscombe John (National Museum of Wales,
Cardiff). The final oil version, now known as Noon in the
Hayfield was not completed until 1898.
Idleness makes clear the importance of pastel and
watercolour in smoothing Clausen’s transition from the
Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage to light-filled Impressionism.
In the shadowed areas of the orchard floor he looks for
colour that will accentuate the bright yellow-green grasses
where sunlight falls. Although the stylistic traits associated
with the Atelier Julian are eschewed, Lepage’s careful stagecraft – moving the eye from windfalls in the foreground,
past the figure to her sunbonnet and the trees beyond –
is retained.
36 GEORGE CL AUSEN
17 · The Mowers
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN, 1891’
Provenance: Sharpley Bainbridge Esq., 1891; his sale February 1922,
lot 109; purchased by the Usher Gallery, Lincoln, 1949
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1892, no.81; Glasgow,
International Exhibition, 1901, n. 358; Manchester, Autumn Exhibition,
1910, no.91; London, Royal Academy of Arts, Bradford, Bristol and
no.72 (illus. in cat. p.62); Nottingham, University Art Gallery, Toil and
Plenty, 1994, no.39; London, Barbican Art Gallery, Impressionism in
Britain, 1995, no.30 (illus. in cat. p.66)
Literature: The Academy, 21 May 1892, p.499; The Art Journal, 1892,
p.220; The Athenaeum, 14 May 1892, p.638; George Moore, ‘The Royal
Academy’, Fortnightly Review, January–June 1892, pp.832–3; The
Magazine of Art, 1892, p.258; The Saturday Review, 7 May 1892, p.537;
The Saturday Review, 14 May 1892, p.568–9; The Speaker, 30 April 1892,
p.528; The Times, 13 May 1892, p.3; Dewey Bates, ‘George Clausen
ARA’, The Studio, vol.5, April 1895, p.7; The Art Journal, 1898, p.274;
The Magazine of Art, 1902, p.279; D[yneley] H[ussey], George Clausen,
1923 (Ernest Benn), pp.17–19; James Laver, Portraits in Oil and Vinegar,
1925 (John Castle), p.88
Lent by the Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Following his move to Widdington in Essex in the summer
of 1891, Clausen radically overhauled his rural naturalism.
After the purchase of The Girl at the Gate, he realized that
posing a peasant girl in a cottage garden under a grey sky,
as Bastien-Lepage was thought to have done, had serious
limitations. It was an insight confirmed by the encounter
with Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc listening to the Voices at
the Exposition Universelle in 1889 which he concluded was
fine in detail, but weak as an overall composition. He was
also interested in figure movement, in the more dynamic
activities of ploughing, reaping, mowing and rick-building,
and in the changing weather conditions under which
they were often conducted. Mowers were, at this point,
regarded as a necessity and a nuisance. Jefferies’ Toilers of
the Field, posthumously published in 1892, tells us that,
having worked hard for the first week of the hay harvest,
they habitually drank their wages at the first weekend and
turned in a poor performance thereafter (The Toilers of the
Field, 1892, MacDonald Futura ed., 1981, pp.24–6).
When Clausen’s picture was shown at the Royal
Academy in 1892, there was less reflection on the management of the labouring classes than on the change in the
artist’s style. The Saturday Review was typical in observing
38 GEORGE CL AUSEN
that in The Mowers the ‘student of nature [has] now …
discovered beauty’. For George Moore, he had ‘shaken
himself free’ of the mannerisms of Bastien-Lepage with a
picture that ‘exhales a deep sensation of life’. It was a watershed. If there were influences at play, Millet and Monet had
taken the upper hand.
Ten years later, Clausen went into print to defend the
accuracy of his observation in the columns of The Magazine
of Art, with a diagram showing the typical mower’s foot
positions and the arc of a scythe [fig.11].
An anonymous observer in 1904, who equated the
‘swish of the steel through the standing grass’ to ‘Nature’s
pattern’ of sounds, ‘in tune with … winds and waters’,
may well have been thinking of Clausen’s canvas when he
concluded that,
… for the eye’s pleasure there is the balanced sway and turn of
the body, the shifting of the light on the muscles of the sunburnt
arms, the easy grace of the man’s knack, almost without effort
it seems to the onlooker … (Anon, ‘The Mower’s Scythe’, The
Saturday Review, 6 July 1904, p.47)
Hilaire Belloc would confirm this description in 1906
declaring that the well-tempered scythe, like the poet’s
pen, will work for you if you hold it correctly and treat it
honourably (Hills and the Sea, 1906, Methuen, 8th ed, 1915,
p.152). These points were made at time when mowers
were increasingly being consigned to the awkward corners
of fields that could not be easily reached by a machine.
Within three years, in The Old Reaper (Manchester City Art
Gallery), Clausen
would tackle the
subject for the last
time – underlining
the importance of
the pictorial archetype which had been
created in 1892.
[Fig.11] Diagram for
‘The Mowers’, 1902, from
The Magazine of Art, 1902,
p.279
18 · The Little Flowers of the Field
Oil on canvas, 16¼ x 22¼ in, 41.3 x 56.5 cm
Signed lower left, ‘G. CLAUSEN, 1893’
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, Post-Impressionism,
1979, no.282; London, Barbican Art Gallery, Impressionism in Britain,
1995, no.31
Following the success of The Mowers Clausen’s interest in
Impressionist effects blossomed. The enthusiasm of ‘new’
critics such as George Moore and D.S. MacColl spilled
over when in 1893, he showed Evening Song at the Royal
Academy. In this evocation of a sunlit field at harvest time,
a local girl, Emmy Wright, lies listening to the song of the
lark. The colours are presented in slashing strokes that
imitate pastel. The matted effect gives off a golden glow. For
Moore it was quite simply the painting that he ‘personally
would choose to possess’ (The Speaker, 22 July 1893, p.573).
The same ‘luminist’ palette persists in The Little Flowers of
the Field. Here Clausen reduces earth-based tones in favour
of bold yellows, reds and greens, as Emmy intently studies a
buttercup. Her healthy sunburned profile radiates against a
rich background of desnsely worked grasses.
40 GEORGE CL AUSEN
19 · Head of a Girl (Emmy Wright)
Oil on panel, 10 x 7¾ in, 25.4 x 19.7 cm
Signed and dated ‘G. CLAUSEN/1894’ lower left; verso, signed and
inscribed, ‘Study/Head of a Girl/George Clausen/1894’
Provenance: Purchased from the artist by Vernon Wethered,* from whom acquired by the present owner’s family
Exhibited: Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute (?)
In 1894, the head study remained Clausen’s most consistent
expression of his commitment to rural life. The names of his
models only survive today, thanks to his account books. At
first they were painted as test pieces; sometimes they were
submitted in Art Union Prize competitions; sometimes they
assumed the elevated status of classic types – a miller’s man,
a woodcutter, an aged ‘toiler’. Sunburnt country children, as
distinct from the waifs and strays of the metropolis, epitomized
a health, vigour and innocence that confirmed the nation’s
strength. In the present instance however, the Head of a Girl
provides confirmation that the painter had achieved a resolution of youthful influences and had moved on.
Although his work was increasingly successful, Clausen was
constantly looking for fresh stimulus in the fields and barns
around the village of Widdington, between Saffron Walden
and Newport and within a short time, the new faces of Essex
labourers and their children began to appear in his work. The
first of these was Emily Wright, known as ‘Emmy’, an eleven
– year-old local girl who modeled for Evening Song, Clausen’s
principal submission to the Royal Academy in 1893. This
picture, more than any other to date, was brandished as proof of
the painter’s conversion to an Impressionism that was ‘neither
Monet nor Lepage’, but characteristically his own (The Speaker,
22 July 1893, p.573). Further canvases such as The Little Flowers
of the Field (no.18) and the present picture, also depicting
Emmy followed.
In 1894 Clausen rang the changes, achieving as much critical
acclaim for his single Academy entry, Turning the Plough (unlocated). He notes in his account book that this was sold almost
immediately and that by 28 May he had received payment of
£200 from ‘Mr Wethered’. A relationship was established and on
3 September he recorded he had received £26.5s from Wethered
for the ‘little head of Emmy Wright’, the present work.
* Vernon Wethered (1865–1952) was born in Bristol and studied at the
Slade School of Fine Art. He showed regularly at the New English Art Club from 1924
42 GEORGE CL AUSEN
20 · Little Margaret
21 · Little Meg
22 · Self Portrait
Etching, 5 x 3 in, 12.7 x 7.6 cm
Etching, 4¾ x 3¼ in, 12.1 x 8.2 cm
Etching 4¾ x 3¼ in, 12 x 8.3 cm
Signed in pencil, lower right, ‘George Clausen’
Signed in the plate, ‘With good wishes for the New Year, George Clausen 1892’
Signed in pencil lower right, ‘George Clausen’
The present etching, unrecorded by Gibson, closely
replicates Clausen’s A Portrait, shown at the New English
Art Club in 1889. The sitter, the artist’s eldest daughter,
Margaret Mary Clausen, known as Meg, was aged 4½ at
the time.
Clausen, RA’, The Print Collector’s Quarterly, vol.VIII 1921, p.215,
no.10/II
Margaret Mary Clausen was aged seven when the present
etching was made as a new year greeting for Clausen’s
friends. It was not unusual for the painter to produce
a small print as a Christmas or new year greeting, and
although he sold his more finished etchings, they too were
often presented to special friends and patrons.
Literature: Frank Gibson, ‘The Etchings and Lithographs
of George Clausen RA’, The Print Collector’s Quarterly
vol.VIII, 1921, p.213, no.8 ii/II
The present plate is likely to have been etched
around 1895, at the time when Clausen was
elected Associate of the Royal Academy.
23 · Ricks by Moonlight
Mezzotint and Drypoint, 3 x 4½ in, 7.7 x 11.4 cm
Signed lower left, ‘George Clausen’
Literature: Frank Gibson, ‘The Etchings and Lithographs
of George Clausen RA’, The Print Collector’s Quarterly vol.
VIII, 1921, pp.203–227, no.11
Much speculation exists concerning Clausen’s
references to haystacks. At first they were
thought to follow the grainstack pictures by
Monet, but pastels in the British Museum
and the Royal Academy show that the painter
was working in rickyards two years before the
French painter’s celebrated series of canvases.
As the present print of 1894 indicates, Clausen
was also keen to pursue the subject matter
into printmaking, experimenting in this case
with mezzotint.
44 GEORGE CL AUSEN
24 · Study for ‘The Harvest’
Oil in canvas, 14 x 18.8 in, 35.5 x 46 cm
Signed lower left ‘G CLAUSEN’, and inscribed lower right, ‘to my
friend, Mark Fisher’
Provenance: with Pyms Gallery, London, c.1985
Collection of the Artist’s Family
In the year of his election to the Academy, Clausen planned
a large frieze of harvesters scything and gathering corn
sheaves. Although composed from a series of separate
studies, the picture would contain classic poses some of
which were derived from Jean-François Millet, but filtered
through his own observation. One such is the back view of
the man with the scythe in the present sketch – the subject
of a finished watercolour (National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne). This figure was removed from the foreground
of the completed oil and the stooping man on the right
of the present study was brought forward to occupy
centre stage.
The present sketch was inscribed to Mark Fisher, the
American expatriate painter who Clausen had known for at
least ten years. He had painted Mrs Fisher in 1888 and his
portrait of her husband (Royal Academy of Arts) reveals an
ebullient larger-than-life figure who followed Clausen to
Essex and had a studio near him at Newport.
46 GEORGE CL AUSEN
25 · Cinderella (Pensive)
Signed centre left, ‘G. CLAUSEN/ 1895’; verso signed with title
and date
Literature: R.A.M. Stevenson, ‘The New Gallery’, Pall Mall Gazette,
27 April 1896, p.3
Exhibited: London, New Gallery, 1896, no.121; Glasgow, Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 1900, no.89
Unlike other head studies in his long sequence of ‘peasant
portraits’, Clausen’s Cinderella shows a girl in a dark
interior, in the glow of firelight. Having started to record
threshing and winnowing scenes in local barns around
1895, he was much preoccupied by the effects of light in
interiors. These experiments continued in the present work
where, to convey a presence, looming in the darkness, the
painter resorts to tiny strokes that reinforce the highlights
rather than the contours of head and hands. This method of
shading local colour with the tip of the brush had developed
from the painter’s use of pastel as a drawing medium in
the previous five years and was to continue in studies such
as The Haymaker, A Study in Shadows (Hugh Lane Gallery,
Dublin) at the turn of the century.
During these years, Clausen was under contract to
Goupil and Co, the celebrated international dealership,
managed in London by David Croal Thomson (see no.
9). A regular visitor to Clausen’s studio at Widdington,
Thomson would take the painter’s smaller works in return
for payments on account. Such a visit on 20 October 1895,
when the dealer ‘priced’ eight pictures and four ‘pochades’,
is noted in the artist’s account book. One of the eight,
Pensive, showed a teenage girl named Lizzie Deller. Beside
the entry, the artist has written in tiny, almost illegible
script, the word ‘Cinderella’, the title later adopted for the
picture and possibly suggested by Thomson.
48 GEORGE CL AUSEN
The picture was then dispatched from Goupil’s to the
New Gallery the following spring where it was noted by the
important ‘new’ critic, R.A.M. Stevenson who remarked
that Cinderella’s sensitive handling revealed ‘a creature
exquisitely tender in nature …’ Neither the artist, nor his
dealer could have predicted that Charles Hallé, founder
and co-owner of the New Gallery, intended to exhibit a
much more prosaic treatment of the same subject which
was more prominently displayed and deflected the critical
attention that Clausen’s work should have received. His
taste for experiment, for the continued fascination for light
and colour, had seen Bastien-Lepage’s naturalism melt
into an Impressionist palette, and its angular drawing style
into a subtler appreciation of light and shade – technical
features that, in the present head study, spoke to the critic
in all their refinement.
26 · Allotment Gardens
Oil on canvas, 40¼ x 54¾ in, 107.3 x 139 cm
Provenance: Sharpley Bainbridge; his sale, Chrisite’s 10 February 1922
lot 108, as Potato Gathers; to Hibbard; Hugh Blaker n.d.; J. Heritage
Peters, n.d.; Lord Lambton; with The Fine Art Society, 1979; to the
present owner
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1899, no.115; Manchester, City
Art Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, 1910; London, The Fine Art Society,
The Rustic Image, 1979, no.9; Bradford, London, Bristol and Newcastle,
Sir George Clausen RA , 1852–1944, 1980, no.84
Literature: The Athenaeum, 27 May 1899, p.663; The Graphic, 6 May
1899, p.578; The Magazine of Art, 1899, p.388; The Saturday Review,
6 May 1899, p.566; The Times, 29 April 1899, p.14; The Art Journal, 1911,
p.279
When it appeared at the Royal Academy in 1899, The
Times reviewer dubbed the painter of Allotment Gardens,
a ‘ruralist’ – an artist who was so deeply submerged in
country life that no other genre matched his sensibilities.
‘Nothing’, the writer said, ‘more true, more vigorous, more
full of knowledge of form and of a subtle sense of light and
shade has ever been painted by Mr Clausen than his fine
picture called Allotment Gardens’. Other reviewers, thinking
of l’Angelus (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) invoked Jean-François
Millet, but only The Saturday Review pursued the comparison. The French peasant was devout, if not superstitious,
while his down-to-earth English counterpart was a freethinker.
The Biblical air that Millet found in his own people outweighs
what Mr Clausen with is ability and honesty might draw from
the English Hodge.
Writers such as Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies had,
in recent years, described ‘the English Hodge’, as the backbone of the rural community. Depicting the ‘Dorsetshire
Labourer’ in the summer of 1883, Hardy attacked the
common misconceptions about country ‘workfolk’. When
you got to know them, he asserted, they were individuals,
‘some clever … some stupid, some wanton, some austere;
some mutely Miltonic, some Cromwellian …’(Longman’s
Magazine, vol.2, July 1883). Although Methodism had
swept the southern counties it carried none of the weight
of Catholicism among the French paysannerie.
In one important respect however, Clausen’s picture
50 GEORGE CL AUSEN
does allude to an aspect of French agricultural practice
which social reformers sought to introduce in England. It
was often observed that small holdings in France effectively
held peasants on the land, and attempts were made through
legislation on the introduction of allotments to bring
greater stability to the British rural community. Jefferies
praised the clergy of his district who converted glebe land
into in allotments, rented at £4 per annum (The Toilers of
the Field, 1892, MacDonald Futura ed., 1981, pp.148–9).
Even if their wages were poor, workfolk could feed themselves from a small plot. These vegetable gardens must, as
Clausen’s painting indicates, be dug in the evenings when
the farmer’s work is done. And in the present instance, it is
late in the season when potatoes are being lifted. Clausen
was to develop this theme in a number of variants over the
following four years. In 1900 for instance, he produced the
closely related Twilight, October [fig.12] and for the Academy
of 1904, A Frosty March Morning (Tate Britain).
Both works take their cue from Allotment Gardens –
the former employing the same models. In a larger sense
however, the canvases display a consciousness of social
change. The century, indeed the whole Victorian era was
drawing to a close …
[Fig.12] Twilight, October, c.1900, Private Collection
28 · The Dark Barn
Oil on canvas, 30⅛ x 25¾ in, 76.5 x 64.5 cm
Signed and dated lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN 1900’
Provenance: C.T. Harris Esq. JP, by 1908*
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1900, no.291.; London, FrancoBritish Exhibition, 1908, no.137 (lent by C.T. Harris JP); London,
Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1910, no.529 (lent by C.T. Harris JP);
Manchester City Art Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, 1910, no.121 (lent
by C.T Harris JP)
Literature: Frank Rinder, ‘The Royal Academy’, The Art Journal,
1900, p.174; ‘The Royal Academy – Second Notice’, The Athenaeum,
12 May 1900, p.597.; DSM [D.S. MacColl], ‘The Academy II – The Poor
Man’s Tea’, The Saturday Review, 19 May 1900, p.614.; Royal Academy
Pictures, 1900, p.106; Henry Blackburn, The Academy Notes, 1900,
p.17; Sir Isidore Spielmann (compiler), Souvenir of the Fine Art Section,
Franco-British Exhibition, 1908 (under the auspices of the British Art
committee), following p.140 (illus)
In 1900 Clausen exhibited The Dark Barn, his second major
barn interior. The first, in 1897, was merely an introduction
to what became one of his signature themes. In the present
picture, the labourers are operating a hand-cranked sifting
machine – the final stage in a process which began with the
skilled and dangerous job of flailing. The grain left on the
threshing floor was then winnowed to remove the husks,
before the sifting and sacking which we see here. When the
picture was shown, the fact that only a quarter of annual
British grain consumption was home-produced was hotly
debated and the condition of ancient barns like this metaphorically captured the condition of England.
Although many failed to recognize its true import,
critics generally approved this new departure in Clausen’s
work. The painter of the Essex fields had found an indoor
theme which for D.S. MacColl, ‘throbs with close observation in all its dusty tones’. For The Art Journal, the present
picture was ‘more subtle – on the whole more delightful’
than his other Academy exhibits and its critic noted that,
‘little light penetrates into this rickety timbered structure,
where figures are at work, and it is in the partial diffusion of
this light … that Mr Clausen triumphs’.
The old winnowing process depicted by Millet was now
appropriated to become the subject of The Golden Barn, 1901
(Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), In the Barn, 1902 (Leeds
City Art Galleries) and The Barn Door, 1904 (see no.29).
Later variants on the theme include Clausen’s Academy
52 GEORGE CL AUSEN
Diploma picture, Interior of an Old Barn, 1908, (Royal
Academy of Arts) and he conflated the whole activity into
two etchings, Dressing Wheat and Filling Sacks, both of
which were shown at the Academy in 1912 (see no.39).
In a Christian society, Clausen’s imagery provided an
unintended counterpoint to great Victorian hymns in
which ‘God’s almighty hand’ brings ‘warmth to swell the
grain’. The social consequence of works like The Dark Barn
cannot therefore be under-estimated. Although religious
themes never appealed to Clausen, he greatly admired
Rembrandt’s Adoration of the Shepherds (National Gallery,
London) because it represented a section of a stable interior
– similar to his Essex barns.
In front of the picture, he declared that the Dutch
master seemed to take ‘his suggestion from some very
ordinary scene, and to carry it on in his mind and make
it significant’. The idea for the painting came from the
interesting light and shade in ‘something he happened
to see in a stable’ (Royal Academy Lectures on Painting,
1913, p.83). Whether or not this was true for Rembrandt,
it was certainly true for Clausen – for although the men
were thoroughly studied, they carried on their primitive task in the shadows and what must have seemed a
‘very ordinary scene’, became one of immense social and
cultural significance.
* Charles Thomas Harris JP, who lived at 109 Denmark Hill, in south
London, was a keen Clausen collector who at the time of his death
owned eight oil paintings and five drawings by the artist. Of his eight
pictures five were either Academy pieces or equivalents and could
be regarded as important works. Of these five, three are in public
collections, The Shepherdess, 1885 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool),
Dusk 1903 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne) and Building the
Rick, 1908 (Birmingham City Art Gallery). After his death, Harris’s
collection was sold at Christie’, 27–28 November 1913, and the
proceeds donated to King’s College Hospital Removal Fund.
27 · A Barn Interior
Graphite on paper, 10 x 8 in, 25.4 x 20. 5 cm
Signed lower left, ‘G. CLAUSEN’
Provenance: John Russell Taylor Esq.
Exhibited: Bradford, London, Bristol and Newcastle, Sir George
Clausen RA , 1852–1944, 1980, no.83
In 1897 when he exhibited The Old Barn in the Royal
Academy, George Clausen arrived at what was to be the
source of major works from 1900 onwards. From 1884,
barn interiors featured in his sketchbooks and throughout
54 GEORGE CL AUSEN
29 · The Barn Door
the following decade he painted studies of men threshing
and winnowing, but this was the first important canvas
to fully engage the dramatic setting of these activities.
Showing two labourers filling sacks of grain to be taken to
the local mill, this canvas conveyed Clausen’s knowledge
of the work of French rustic naturalist painters such as
Jean-François Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage. However
the ancient barns which stood around his home at Bishop’s
Farm, Widdington, near Newport in Essex provided a
unique environment.
Etching, 6⅛ x 4¾ in, 15.5 x 12 cm
Signed in pencil and inscribed ‘George Clausen to Matt Coulson with
every good wish Xmas 1910’
Clausen RA’, The Print Collector’s Quarterly vol.VIII, 1921, pp.203–227,
no.15
The present etching replicates Clausen’s The Barn Door
(Private Collection) shown at the Royal Academy in 1906 –
the actual picture having been painted two years earlier. It
shows men loading sacks of grain over the Barn ‘leep board’
and on to a waggon.
30 · The Little Brown Jug
Signed and dated lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’
Exhibited: London, Goupil Gallery, Pictures by George Clausen
ARA , 1902
While by 1902 Clausen had reconciled himself to the
Academy, he recognized that its walls could never truly
represent the range of his work. To do this he must seek
other opportunities and although he had discontinued his
contract with the Goupil Gallery in 1897, its new management under William Marchant offered the chance of a solo
exhibition to show smaller paintings, alongside drawings
and watercolours. Here he would display still-life paintings alongside peasant portraits, village nocturnes and
fieldworker subjects.
The old cottager shown in The Little Brown Jug differs
considerably from Clausen’s earlier peasant portraits in its
Rembrandtesque palette, and where the earlier figures were
presented as for documentary photographs, this character
is shown in the act of pouring his ale in the dark corner of a
village inn.
56 GEORGE CL AUSEN
31 · Two Girls arranging Roses
Oil on canvas, 24 x 29¾ in, 63 x 75.5 cm
Signed lower left, ‘G. CLAUSEN’
Provenance: Artist’s studio sale, 9 October 1945 to Lord
Clwyd; thence by descent to the present owner
Exhibited: London, Carfax Gallery, 1906, no.37, as Roses;
Bradford, London, Bristol and Newcastle, Sir George Clausen
RA , 1852–1944, 1980, no.93 (illus. in cat)
Literature: The Morning Leader, 6 January 1906
58 GEORGE CL AUSEN
While the present work dates from 1899, it is likely to have been
reworked closer to the time of its exhibition at the Carfax Gallery.
It may even be the case that the figure of Meg on the right of
the picture was added at this later date, while that of Kit was the
remnant of an earlier working. In 1906 the delicacy and charm of
Two Girls arranging Roses was greatly admired and Clausen was
felt to have lifted his work out of the category of mere exhibition
pictures into ‘the region of serenity and unadulterated beauty’. To
some extent the picture expresses something of his admiration for
Fantin-Latour, whose work he was purchasing around this time for
the Felton Bequest at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.
32 · Roses and Cornflowers in a Glass Vase
Oil on canvas board, 12 x 11½ in
30.5 x 29.2 cm
Provenance: Given by the artist on the
occasion of the marriage of Richard
Clausen and Nancy Kent and thence by descent
Clausen’s solo Goupil Gallery exhibitions of 1902 and 1904
revealed a much broader range of activity than was possible with
Royal Academy exhibits. He had been painting portraits and stilllifes as well as the now familiar rural subjects. Although there
were pastels of flowers produced around 1890, it seems that no oil
paintings of the subject had been exhibited up to this point. It was
a theme that encouraged the painter work out colour harmonies.
While his interest was academic – looking back to Chardin and
Fantin-Latour – this strand of his work grew in popularity with
the small patrons he hoped to encourage, and he was to continue
painting flowers until the last years of his life.
33 · The Student
Oil on canvas, 25½ x 30 in, 64.2 x 76.5 cm
Signed, lower right, ‘GEORGE CLAUSEN’
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1909, no.454; Glasgow, Royal
Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 1910, no.213
Literature: Pall Mall Pictures, 1909, p.16; ‘Black and White’ Pictures at
the Royal Academy, 1909, p.52; The Art Journal, 1909, p.168
Lent by Brighton and Hove Museums
The Student, a picture of the painter’s eldest daughter, Meg,
drawing from a plaster cast of a classical sculpture, inaugurates an important series of interiors of which Twilight,
Interior (Leeds City Art Galleries) and The Visit (Private
Collection) are the most important. Meg was a student at
Regent Street Polytechnic after the Clausens’ move from
Widdington back to London in the summer of 1905 and she
would later marry the illustrator Thomas Derrick.
Matched with Interior of an Old Barn, the artist’s
Diploma picture for the Royal Academy and shown
alongside The Old Reaper (Manchester City Art Galleries),
The Student contributed to what The Art Journal considered ‘really a very excellent Clausen year’. Like Two Girls
arranging Roses, the ensemble echoes Fantin-Latour in
both subject matter and in the way framed prints are used
to break up the background. Clausen’s visual scholarship
in this regard, much impressed younger exponents of the
genre such as Harold Knight and Harold Harvey.
60 GEORGE CL AUSEN
34 · September Morning
35 · Journey by Night
Etching, 5 x 7 in, 12.5 x 17.7 cm
Etching and mezzotint, 4¾ x 6¼ in, 12 x 15.9 cm
Signed and inscribed in pencil, ‘George Clausen to Miss Ella
Roberts, with good wishes for Xmas 1911'
Signed and inscribed in pencil, ‘George Clausen to Matt and Mrs Coulson
with good wishes Xmas 1911’
Literature: Frank Gibson, ‘The Etchings and Lithographs of
George Clausen RA’,The Print Collector’s Quarterly vol.VIII
pp.203–227 1921 no.18
Ella Roberts was the daughter-in-law of Hannah
Rushton Caine and her husband, J. Herbert Roberts MP
(later Lord Clwyd).
Clausen RA’, The Print Collector’s Quarterly vol.VIII, 1921, pp.203–227,
no.19
First shown in 1905, A Journey by Night shows a farmhand
leading a cart loaded with corn. The afterglow effect is achieved
by fanning strokes of a mezzotint ‘rocker’ which have been
burnished to create the dark silhouettes of the man and
his carthorse.
36 · A Starry Night
Etching and aquatint, 7 x 5 in,
17.8 x 12.7 cm
Signed and inscribed in pencil, ‘George
Clausen to Matt and Mrs Coulson with
good wishes Xmas 1911’
Literature: Frank Gibson, ‘The Etchings
and Lithographs of George Clausen RA’,
The Print Collector’s Quarterly vol.VIII,
1921, pp.203–227, no.23
The present print closely follows
the forms and subject matter of The
Stars coming out (National Galleries
of Scotland), shown at the Royal
Academy in 1912. Painting and
print differ only in the fact that the
latter, being an upright composition gives more presence to the sky
and the twinkling firmament.
62 GEORGE CL AUSEN
37 · Nude Study for ‘Industry’
Conté crayon, 17 x 13½ in, 43.2 x 34.3 cm
Signed in pencil, lower right ‘G. Clausen’
This powerful nude study illustrates Clausen’s growing
interest in mural painting, prior to the outbreak of the First
World War. Like many artists of the younger generation, he
looked back to Puvis de Chavannes to find a precedent for
these investigations – although he was well aware of Puvis’
Renaissance sources. The mural for which the present
study was made, if it was ever completed, has not survived.
38 · Self-Portrait
Our only evidence of it lies in compositional drawings and a
small oil sketch [fig.14]. The precise symbolism – the birth of
industry in field cultivation set in a vaguely classical world –
took the painter away from his usual subject matter and from
the naturalism that characterized his work up to this point.
It was an abstracted language which he deployed successfully during the war in semi-symbolist works, although for
him, the principal opportunity to address modern industrial
production came with the magisterial In the Gun Factory,
Woolwich Arsenal, 1919 (Imperial War Museum).
Oil on canvas, 23.5 x 20 in, 60 x 50 cm
Lent by the Art Workers’ Guild
Clausen was elected honoris causa to the Art Workers’
Guild in 1893, and led a number of its discussions on fine
art topics. He joined the guild’s committee in 1908 and
was elected Master for the 1909 session. He presented his
Self-Portrait to the guild a few years later and a number
of other portraits of masters followed – including that
of Thomas Okey, the writer on country crafts who would
become Cambridge University’s first professor of Italian
in 1919.
The artist painted self-portraits at regular intervals
throughout his career. That donated to the guild contains
something of the classical severity that was entering
Clausen’s work in the years leading up to the Great War.
It was to some extent the byproduct of holidays in Greece
and Italy with other guildsmen where the self-taught Okey
would pass on his specialist knowledge of ancient history.
[Fig.13] Industry, Perth Museum
and Art Gallery, Scotland
64 GEORGE CL AUSEN
39 · Filling Sacks
Etching, 113/8 x 93/8 in, 8.9 x 24 cm
Signed in pencil ‘George Clausen’ and inscribed lower right, ‘To R.H.K. 1922’
Clausen RA’, The Print Collector’s Quarterly vol.VIII, 1921, p.221, no.29
One of Clausen’s Academy exhibits in 1916 was the oil
painting, Filling Sacks. It shows two men loading grain into
sacks following the threshing and winnowing process. The
scene takes place in the barn at Deer’s Farm, Clavering, one
of the artist’s favourite haunts. The picture was purchased
40 · The Vale of Clwyd
by Kojiro Matsukata, one of Clausen’s new Japanese
collectors, and it has since disappeared. As is often the case
however, the development of the subject can be traced in
preparatory drawings and watercolours, and in this instance
by a large etching that while it reverses the composition,
replicates it entirely. This was one of two etchings of barn
interiors first shown at the Royal Academy in 1912. Its
companion piece, Dressing Wheat, shows the earlier process
– men operating a hand-cranked sifting machine. From this
point, the sacks will be loaded onto wagons to be taken to
the mill, the subject of an earlier, smaller etching of c.1906.
Watercolour on paper, 10.5 x 12.25 in, 26.7 x 31.1 cm
66 GEORGE CL AUSEN
During the First World War Clausen remained in close
contact with Herbert Roberts, Member of Parliament for
Clwyd. Roberts had built a gothic mansion, ‘Bryngwenalt’,
in his Welsh constituency and the painter went to stay with
him in 1916. Here he painted watercolours of the beautiful
Vale of Clwyd in preparation for a large haunting landscape,
featuring one of his most dramatic skies. This is anticipated
in the present watercolour in which pigment is delicately
washed on to the surface and trees are indicated with mere
blobs of Hookers Green.
41 · Woman Braiding her Hair
(Female Nude)
Oil on canvas board, 19¾ x 133/8 in, 50 x 34 cm
The direct result of Clausen’s growing interest in classicism
was a series of half-length nudes that began with The Little
Faun, 1910 and continued with Primavera, 1914 (both unlocated). The latter picture achieved notoriety when it was
attacked by a suffragette. Undeterred, Clausen continued
his formal investigations, echoing the muralist style of
Puvis de Chavannnes. His paint handling was drier now and
his palette more tonal, and such figures as that in Woman
Braiding her Hair might fit comfortably into grand schemes
such as that carried out for G.P. Norton at High Royd, his
country house near Huddersfield. Numerous drawings for
the subject exist in the Royal Academy and
in private collections.
68 GEORGE CL AUSEN
42 · Shepherd Boy, Sunrise
Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 in, 71.6 x 92 cm
Provenance: Lord Clwyd by descent; Private Collection, USA
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy 1920, no.3
In the Royal Academy of 1920 Clausen unveiled four misty
morning landscapes that inaugurated a new phase of his
work. The dry muralist technique of the war years was now
applied to Essex scenes painted in the environs of Hillside,
the house he had recently purchased on Duton Hill.
Although he remained in London until after the outbreak
of the Second World War, this Essex retreat led him back to
his earliest experiences in the countryside. Shepherd boys
for instance, had been painted in the Hertfordshire fields
over thirty years earlier, but where they were seen in full
daylight, in the ‘modern realist’ manner of Bastien-Lepage,
that of 1920 drives his sheep along a country lane in a cool
dawn light that presents him almost in silhouette.
The praise for these pictures was tempered by the
inference that Clausen had given himself over to a kind of
commercialism and that Shepherd Boy, Sunrise, along with
The Roadside Tree, (unlocated), Village Inn, Misty Morning
(no.43) and Turn of the Road, Sunrise, were the product of
a mechanical formula. This hostility came principally from
[Fig.14] The Shepherd Boy, Sunrise, 1920, Private Collection
70 GEORGE CL AUSEN
the modernist critic John Middleton Murry, for whom
Clausen was an establishment figure speaking for an older
generation. His views were not universally shared. The
Times, for instance, considered that Clausen’s pictures
‘would fill any room with the bloom of nature’ and that he
‘… always makes a fresh effort which is essential to a work
of art and without which the work of a master even, is dull’
(The Times, 13 May 1920, p.20).
This, the largest of the four landscapes in the Academy,
was purchased by Clausen’s patron, Herbert Roberts, Lord
Clwyd, who had, by 1920, acquired a comprehensive collection of the artist’s work, starting with The Little Haymakers.
At the same time as he produced the larger Academy-piece,
Clausen also painted a small version of the composition
which also found its way into the Roberts family (fig.13).
This is identical to the large version, except for the
obvious alteration to the framing trees – an additional
slender trunk being added on the right and a pollarded
stump with a tree in full leaf added on the left.
43 · Village Inn, Misty Morning
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’; inscribed verso ‘A VILLAGE
INN, MISTY MORNING, G CLAUSEN’
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1920, no.167
Literature Royal Academy Pictures 1920 p.12 (illus)
Provenance: Mr Bauer, by April 1920
Before the Great War, critics had begun to notice that
subtle changes were occurring in Clausen’s work. Heroic
foreground figures such as those in The Boy and the Man,
of 1908 (Bradford Art Galleries and Museums) were less in
evidence and the grand, monumental landscape with two
farm-workers, In the Fields in June, 1914 [fig.14] indicated
the direction. Although man and boy might still be at work
in the open field, their presence is dwarfed by the huge
Essex skyscape – its scudding clouds presaging the reports
of war.
The magnitude of the conflict was at first difficult
to comprehend and like many artists of his generation,
Clausen in Renaissance 1915 (destroyed), resorted to a
symbolic language through which to convey the possibility of rebirth. He quickly realized that this was less
than satisfactory, and although he was later to work in
Woolwich Arsenal and in the devastated fields of northern
France, the powerful sense remained that in Essex, he had
[Fig.15] In the Fields in June, 1914, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
72 GEORGE CL AUSEN
all the ingredients required to make an imagery of renewal.
Atmospheric skies, the peculiar qualities of light and simple
gradations of tone characterized this change. With his
country studio on Duton Hill, Clausen was now to be seen
pushing his bicycle around the neighboring hamlets of
Tilty and Clavering looking for suitable motifs. A clump of
trees, an attractive cottage, a village inn, seen in the silver
twilight or rose-pink dawn was sufficient to hold his attention and the four pictures delivered to the Royal Academy
exhibition of 1920 acted as a kind of manifesto.
Of the group, Village Inn, Misty Morning was the first to
appeal to a collector. On 25 January 1920, Clausen received
a visit from his former student, the painter Flora Lion,
accompanied by a Mr Bauer who agreed to purchase Village
Inn, Misty Morning when it appeared in the forthcoming
Royal Academy exhibition. Accordingly the artist wrote to
him after its dispatch on 6 April and received payment three
days later.
44 · Twilight
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’; verso, ‘Twilight, G. CLAUSEN’
By the 1920s the hot Impressionist palette which characterized the Clausen of the 1890s had all but disappeared.
His musicality was now structured by tonal gradations,
sensitively perceived. Here, as Dyneley Hussey remarked,
the ‘scale of tone relationship must not be put out of tune
by a discordant note of colour’. Hills and sky are described
in smooth creamy pigment and traced upon them are the
sensuous undulations of birches and beeches – line and
shape. In the calm of twilight, there is an intimacy in these
observations that comes from easy familiarity. The forms
are rhymed out to the extent that point echoes counterpoint and the roadside trees find their own harmonies.
74 G E O R G E C L A U S E N
45 · Morning in November
Oil on canvas, 20 x 24½ in, 51 x 62 cm
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN, 1922’; verso, on label, signed and
inscribed with title and the artist’s address
Provenance: Watson Art Galleries, Montreal, 1934; KK Forbes,
Toronto; Sotheby’s, 7 June 2005; to the present owner
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1922, no.499
Literature: D[yneley] H[ussey], George Clausen, 1923 (Ernest Benn),
illus. plate 28
Within two years, Clausen’s landscapes saw the re-introduction of colour. The tonal gradation taking the eye from
foreground, through middle distance to background is
retained while in works like Morning in November and
The Road, Winter Morning, 1923 (Tate Britain), the hoar
frost brings brings out unexpected notes of colour in the
fields. Hussey, (1923, p.27) writing at this time noted ‘an
advance in delicacy of feeling’ and while heroic haymakers
had disappeared, there was great ‘beauty of design’ and
‘spaciousness of the landscape’ that ‘… make ample
compensation for the loss’. The fugitive ‘Impressionist’
flicker of sunshine falling through the canopy of foliage has
also been replaced and only the discarded plough remains
as a reminder of the toil involved in a productive landscape.
‘Few parts of the world’, wrote James Laver (Portraits in Oil
and Vinegar, 1925, p.89), ‘are more suitable for a long and
careful study of the various beauties of filtered sunshine …
some of Clausen’s most recent canvases, painted very dryly,
as is his manner, have all the shimmering iridescence of
mother o’ pearl’.
76 GEORGE CL AUSEN
46 · A Winter Morning in London
Signed lower right ‘g. CLAUSEN’; verso, signed, dated and inscribed
with title, ‘A WIN TER MORNING IN LONDON, G. CLAUSEN,
1924’, and in pencil ‘£78– 15s’
Provenance: The Artist; thence by descent
After his move to London in the summer of 1905, Clausen
continued to maintain contact with his familiar Essex
haunts and at times he complained about the hours he
was obliged to spend on his professorial duties at the Royal
Academy. Nevertheless, within four years, the poetry of the
city had caught his eye once more and he wrote to Havard
Thomas,
… we try to keep our souls alive by living as quietly as one can
– that tranquil mind you speak of, is a damned difficult thing
to keep here. Lots of things I see in town that I’d like to paint –
in the country one could look at a tree day after day without
disturbance and get to understand it, but [in town] one is in the
midst of agitations …
Nevertheless the calm of north London suburbia in
particular, and views from his house in Carlton Hill became
a constant theme. The first of these, From a London Back
Window in Winter (unlocated) appeared at the Academy
in 1910 and the series continued until 1940 when My
Back Garden (Tate Britain) was purchased by the Chantrey
Bequest. Clausen was fascinated by the fall of winter light
on what Laurence Housman described as ‘the dull domesticity of the back streets of Maida Vale’ where the combination of flat windowless walls took him on a journey into
abstraction. Unlike the countryside, this was an unpeopled
world whose quite roads were not yet lined with motor cars.
78 GEORGE CL AUSEN
47 · Sunset
Provenance: With The Fine Art Society, May 1985; Private Collection
Around 1930 Clausen worked increasingly at the edges of
the day when the sun was rising or fading. For his watercolours he would go out half an hour before dawn or dusk and
remain on the motif for half an hour after the event. The
same was essentially true for small oil sketches, one of the
most striking of which is the present Sunset. The picture
shows that the painter had a perfect sense of pitch – measuring the tones as the evening casts the landscape into a
blue monochrome – and then, with superb self-assurance,
placing the orange orb of the sun in the sky, hovering about
the horizon.
80 GEORGE CL AUSEN
48 · Landscape with Haystacks
Watercolour on paper, 9.75 x 12 in, 24.8 x 30.5 cm
82 GEORGE CL AUSEN
Like Philip Wilson Steer, Clausen relied heavily on watercolour throughout the latter part of his long career. In his
youth he had controlled the medium, and as in Boy and Man,
(no.4), rejected the random effects it would sometimes
produce. Only after the 1890s did he begin to see a relationship between it and the Impressionism he was currently
developing. He would pack his watercolour kit when setting
off on Art Workers’ Guild holidays in the early years of the
century – painting on the Parthenon and in St Mark’s in
Venice. After 1910 when he was looking more closely at
landscape did the medium prove invaluable and in many
instances watercolour versions of later oil paintings exist.
A number of variants of Landscape with Haystacks exist
during the years up to, during and after the Great War. The
present example, with its dramatic sky-scape is likely to date
from the early Twenties.
49 · Landscape with Trees
Watercolour on paper, 13.5 x 16.5 in, 34.3 x 41.9 cm
Signed lower left, ‘G . Clausen’
Coralled in committee meetings in London, Clausen’s mind
would often return to the serenity of the Essex countryside.
On one occasion he wrote to Havard Thomas, of the ‘agitations’ of city life while ‘in the country one could look at a
tree day after day without disturbance and get to understand it …’ Trees, in his later years, came to symbolize the
long duration of nature with its cycles of growth and decay.
In the present Landscape with Trees, land is given much
less space than sky and the long building in the middle
distance may well be an Essex barn. The tall framing tree
on the right indicates that Clausen was not afraid to tackle
majestic scenes of the type that Alfred East was known for.
50 · Bright Flowers
Oil on canvas, 17 x 13 in, 43.2 x 33 cm
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’; verso inscribed ‘BRIGH T
FLOWERS/G. CLAUSEN’; also inscribed verso ‘casein ground
painted with china wood oil August 1927’.
Provenance: Gifted from the collection of Walter Holles of Wiltshire
to his niece Poppy Johnson of Reading, June 1964; David and Anne
Peace 1984, thence by descent
Exhibited: London, Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of Sir George
Clausen RA , Barbizon House, 1928, no.6
When not working on the motif during his final years,
Clausen continued to produce flower-pieces. In the years of
his youth, it was a neglected genre. With William Nicholson,
he must be credited with its revival (see no.32) – to such an
extent that flower studies dominated many of the smaller
mixed exhibitions of the inter-war period. In Metroland,
flower paintings brought colour into the drawing rooms of
suburban villas. As one who believed fervently in art-for-all,
this task was not to be downgraded, and the ‘bright flowers’
he described in the present canvas brought hues on to his
palette that were unusual and largely unused.
51 · Duton Hill, Sunset
Oil on panel, 9 x 13 in, 22.9 x 33 cm
Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’; verso, ‘Duton Hill Sunset’ (twice);
on label in the artist’s hand ‘To dear Betty, with love/ from Grandpa
and Grandma/ November 1938’
Small landscape and garden sketches fill Clausen’s final
years. Old habits of mind would not be broken. Even in old
age he would face up to a challenge. There were new things
to discover and this profound sense of constant renewal
characterizes Duton Hill, Sunset. The world that he recognized was dying with the light and being re-made anew.
Such a little picture would be a perfect gift for a granddaughter, Elizabeth, (1917–2010) one of the children of his
eldest son, Arthur George Clausen, known as ‘Dick’, and his
wife Annie Catherine Kent.
86 GEORGE CL AUSEN
Published by The Fine Art Society
in an edition of 1,000 copies for the exhibition
George Clausen: The Rustic Image held at 148 New Bond Street,
London W1, from 10 October to 8 November 2012
Publication © The Fine Art Society 2012
Text © Kenneth McConkey 2012
is b n 9 7 8 1 9 0 7 0 5 2 1 6 3
Designed and typeset in Brioni by Dalrymple
Printed in Belgium by DeckersSnoeck
Front cover: detail from A Village Girl (Rose Grimsdale), no.11
Frontispiece: Self Portrait, no.22
Back cover: Sunset, no.47
Dealers since 1876
148 New Bond Street · London W1S 2JT
+44 (0)20 7629 5116 · art@faslondon.com
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george clausen - The Fine Art Society

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