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george clausenThe Rustic Image

10 October to 8 November 201—*—

the fine art societyDealers since 1876

148 New Bond Street · London W1S 2JT+44 (0)20 7629 5116 · [email protected]

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2 GEORGE CLAUSEN

kenneth mcconkey

GEORGE CLAUSEN

the rustic image

the fine art societyLondon · 2012

4 GEORGE CLAUSEN THE FINE ART SOCIETY 5

[Fig.1] Photograph of George Clausen painting The Little Cottage, 1928

In 1979, to coincide with the Royal Academy’s Post-Impressionism 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 demon-strate 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 mono-graph, 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

FOREWORD

THE FINE ART SOCIETY 7

It 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 alle-giance 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

INTRODUCTION: ‘… THE GREAT MOVING FORCES OF NATURE …’

[Fig.2] Allotment Gardens, 1899, 108 x 136 cm, Private Collection, no.26


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

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 twenty-five 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

[Fig.4] Building the Rick, 1907, 105.5 x 129 cmBirmingham City Art Galleries

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 land-owners 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 inte-grate 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 anthro-pologist, a cool recorder, a note-taker, a maker of documen-taries. 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-the-spot 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 expres-sive. 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 genera-tion. 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 real-ized, 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

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 objec-tivity 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

[Fig.3] The Girl at the Gate, 1889, 171.5 x 138.5 cm© Tate, London 2012

10 GEORGE CLAUSEN THE FINE ART SOCIETY 1 1

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 indefi-nite …’ 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.

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

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

12 GEORGE CLAUSEN

1 · the flower seller, trafalgar square

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.

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 step-ping 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 modish-ness 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

[Fig.6] The pedestal, Whitehall, 2010, photo-graph, the author

14 GEORGE CLAUSEN

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 Dutch-style genre pictures, new elements entered his work. He now aspired to what one critic described as ‘studio arrange-ments 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 newly-built 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

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 indi-viduals. 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 devel-oped 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.

16 GEORGE CLAUSEN

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 chil-dren, 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.

18 GEORGE CLAUSEN

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 R A , 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 R A , 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

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 magiste-rial, 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.

20 GEORGE CLAUSEN

5 · decemBer

Oil on canvas, 9½ x 12 in, 24 x 12 5/8 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, R A , 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 refer-ences 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 repre-sentation 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

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).

THE FINE ART SOCIETY 23

6 · study for ‘going home’

Graphite, 7¼ x 6¾¾ in, 18.4 x 16.5 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 devel-oped 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.

8 · orchard scene

Oil on canvas, 13 x 11 3/8 in, 33 x 29 cm


Provenance: Given by Miss Joan Webster, 1957

Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, Bradford, Bristol and Newcastle City Art Galleries, Sir George Clausen, R A , 1852–1944, 1980, 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.

24 GEORGE CLAUSEN

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 – ‘AND WE HAVE THE PAYNE AND TRAVEYLE, RAYNE AND WYNDE IN THE FELDS’. 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 [Fig.9] Ploughing, 1889, Aberdeen Art Gallery

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.

26 GEORGE CLAUSEN

10 · little rose

[Fig.10] Day Dreams, 1883, Private Collection

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.

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].

28 GEORGE CLAUSEN

11 · a Village girl (rose grimsdale)


Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’; lower left, ‘to R. Crafton Greenin 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 objec-tivity. 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.

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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 folk-lore 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 proces-sion 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.

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 MP, a former Lord Mayor of Birmingham.


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, R A , 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 eighteenth-century 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.

34 GEORGE CLAUSEN

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 R A , 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 break-fast 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 back-ground is the large Dutch cabinet which the painter had acquired on one of his early forays in the Low Countries.

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 transpar-ency 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 composi-tion 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.

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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 life-long 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 stage-craft – moving the eye from windfalls in the foreground, past the figure to her sunbonnet and the trees beyond – is retained.

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17 · the mowers

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 water-shed. 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 arche-type which had been created in 1892.


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 Newcastle City Art Galleries, Sir George Clausen, R A , 1852–1944, 1980, 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 manage-ment of the labouring classes than on the change in the artist’s style. The Saturday Review was typical in observing

[Fig.11] Diagram for ‘The Mowers’, 1902, from The Magazine of Art, 1902, p.279

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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.

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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 resolu-tion 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 (unlo-cated). 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


22 · self Portrait

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.

Etching 4¾ x 3¼ in, 12 x 8.3 cm

Signed in pencil lower right, ‘George Clausen’

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.

20 · little margaret 21 · little meg

Etching, 5 x 3 in, 12.7 x 7.6 cm

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.

Etching, 4¾ x 3¼ in, 12.1 x 8.2 cm

Signed in the plate, ‘With good wishes for the New Year, George Clausen 1892’

Literature: Frank Gibson, ‘The Etchings and Lithographs of George 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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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26 · allotment gardens

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 them-selves 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 …

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 R A , 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 compar-ison. The French peasant was devout, if not superstitious, while his down-to-earth English counterpart was a free-thinker.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 back-bone 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 [Fig.12] Twilight, October, c.1900, Private Collection

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28 · the dark Barn

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 primi-tive 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.

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, Franco-British 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 meta-phorically 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 observa-tion 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


29 · the Barn door

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’


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.

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 R A , 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

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.

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30 · the little Brown Jug


Signed and dated lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’

Exhibited: London, Goupil Gallery, Pictures by George Clausen A R A , 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 manage-ment under William Marchant offered the chance of a solo exhibition to show smaller paintings, alongside drawings and watercolours. Here he would display still-life paint-ings 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.


32 · roses and cornflowers in a glass Vase

Oil on canvas board, 12 x 11½ in30.5 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 still-lifes 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.

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 R A , 1852–1944, 1980, no.93 (illus. in cat)

Literature: The Morning Leader, 6 January 1906


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.

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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, inau-gurates 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 consid-ered ‘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.


34 · sePtemBer morning 35 · Journey By night

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’


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 composi-tion gives more presence to the sky and the twinkling firmament.

Etching, 5 x 7 in, 12.5 x 17.7 cm

Signed and inscribed in pencil, ‘George Clausen to Miss Ella Roberts, with good wishes for 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).

Etching and mezzotint, 4¾ x 6¼ in, 12 x 15.9 cm

Signed and inscribed in pencil, ‘George Clausen to Matt and Mrs Coulson with good wishes Xmas 1911’


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.


38 · self-Portrait

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.

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.

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 success-fully 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).

[Fig.13] Industry, Perth Museumand Art Gallery, Scotland


40 · the Vale of clwyd

Watercolour on paper, 10.5 x 12.25 in, 26.7 x 31.1 cm

Signed lower right, ‘G . CLAUSEN’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.

39 · filling sacks

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.

Etching, 11 3/8 x 9 3/8 in, 8.9 x 24 cm

Signed in pencil ‘George Clausen’ and inscribed lower right, ‘To R.H.K. 1922’

Literature: Frank Gibson, ‘The Etchings and Lithographs of George 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

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41 · woman Braiding her hair (female nude)

Oil on canvas board, 19¾ x 13 3/8 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 unlo-cated). 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.

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[Fig.14] The Shepherd Boy, Sunrise, 1920, Private Collection

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

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 collec-tion 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.

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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 possi-bility 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

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 atten-tion 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.

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44 · twilight


Signed lower right, ‘G. CLAUSEN’; verso, ‘Twilight, G. CLAUSEN’

By the 1920s the hot Impressionist palette which charac-terized 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 counter-point and the roadside trees find their own harmonies.

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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-intro-duction 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’.

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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 domes-ticity of the back streets of Maida Vale’ where the combina-tion 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.

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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 watercol-ours 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 – meas-uring 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.


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 ‘agita-tions’ of city life while ‘in the country one could look at a tree day after day without disturbance and get to under-stand 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.

48 · landscaPe with haystacks

Watercolour on paper, 9.75 x 12 in, 24.8 x 30.5 cm


Like Philip Wilson Steer, Clausen relied heavily on water-colour 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 relation-ship 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.

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 R A , 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.

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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 recog-nized was dying with the light and being re-made anew.

Such a little picture would be a perfect gift for a grand-daughter, Elizabeth, (1917–2010) one of the children of his eldest son, Arthur George Clausen, known as ‘Dick’, and his wife Annie Catherine Kent.

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

isbn 978 1 907052 16 3

Designed and typeset in Brioni by Dalrymple Printed in Belgium by DeckersSnoeck

Front cover: detail from A Village Girl (Rose Grimsdale), no.11Frontispiece: Self Portrait, no.22Back cover: Sunset, no.47

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