George Clausen and Thomas Derrick

Schoolgirls, Haverstock Hill

More schoolgirls, though rather mature ones, with milkmaid and flower-seller, from 1880, at the Yale Center for British Art. This is one of a series of pictures of women in London streets done mainly in 1880 and early 1881, though we see one even in the watercolour Flora of 1883. The series includes Winter Afternoon, London and In the Street, and the major statement in this vein, A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill. They look straight at us in a dead-pan way, painted by a still single young man. He married in the summer of 1881 and left London. By 1882 the interest would have been entirely with the milkmaid or, in Spring Morning, with the road-diggers.

This picture, like Spring Morning, is good classroom material. What do we see here? What does this picture tell us about Victorian social divisions? Illustrated in Judith Flanders’s The Victorian House, Harper Collins, London, 2003.

Schoolgirls

A Schoolgirl

Back to the late 1880s. This was sold at Christie’s a year or two ago and is the kind of Clausen that fetches the money. I think (not all agree) that this is his daughter Meg (1884-1946), though it might be the only time he showed her as a child outside the family or not in a pure portrait.

A Schoolgirl

Stonepickers – Midday

I said that Stonepickers - Midday would have appealed to Van Gogh. It would have done to Brangwyn, too – one of the most underrated of all British 20th century artists and craftsmen.

A Rainy Day

Here is a similar, but more robust, watercolour from 1886. This is at the Usher Gallery in Lincoln. I have no way of knowing that the colours either here or in the last post are anywhere near right whatever your browser and screen (I suspect they aren’t), as I haven’t seen the originals. But what these images show is Clausen’s poetry and sensitivity in this medium.

A Rainy Day, 1886

Christie’s

Three GC oils have been auctioned in London since this blog started last October: an early one, Gathering Potatoes, at Bonham’s; a late one, Our Blacksmith, at Sotheby’s; and a middle one, The Dark Barn, at Christie’s. I will write about The Dark Barn soon. There have been some watercolours, including this one at Christie’s in December, from 1884. You can just see a team ploughing. This image looks horribly over-saturated on Safari and about right on other browsers on my Mac PowerBook right now.

Pattern

Gombrich, below, refers to pattern (this post doesn’t quote him). GC was at his most avant-garde between 1882 and 1884. Even in one of his very first pictures done in the country, an awkward one (unresolved colour and lighting issues, not only fault of a poor scan), In the Orchard (1882), the background is beginning to turn into mere vertical pattern in a way which an artist such as Klimt took much further. But you can see it even in Clausen.

What did the influence of Japanese prints mean in practice? Flatter modeling, among other things, and the admission of greater purely decorative qualities, more overall patterning, into picture-making. The Pre-Raphaelites had introduced decorative elements into their pictures (I don’t know anything about the interaction, if any, of the influences of Italian primitives and Japanese prints on any of them) – but the turning of the background itself into a vertical decorative panel – the lifting of the horizon – must have been considered modern.

In the Orchard, 1882

Salonfähigkeit

The grey chest hair of the stonepicker below (the same colour as the stones) must have been just as disconcerting as the corns and dirty nails of the Woman of the Fields. These pictures were not, to use a German word, salonfähig, presentable. Come to think of it, had grey chest hair ever been painted in art before?

Stonepickers – Midday

With reference to Nunn, Clausen of course did start to sentimentalise when he began to take sketchbooks back to the studio, and even before that. But here is his Stonepickers – Midday, a watercolour from 1882. With its restricted tonal range, this is perhaps a better work than his ambitious Stonepickers in oil (1887) at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. Van Gogh would have admired it – and did admire Clausen. It was acquired by the V&A in auction a few years ago, I think from Christie’s, and for only £15,000.

Stonepickers - Midday

An earlier Mowers

Here’s something strange. There is a watercolour Mowers, shown below. I don’t know where it is now. It’s practically the same picture as the oil, a bit clumsier, though the mower in the background is missing. The main figure stands differently. Clausen was proud of having got the stance exactly right in the oil. The grass in the left foreground is wonderfully done. You need to enlarge it. This is obviously a watercolour sketch for the main painting.

No, it isn’t. The next thing we notice is the date: 1885, clearly inscribed and I assume not faked. This is six years before the oil. So it’s not a “version” of it, nor by any normal definition a study for it.

Doesn’t this make nonsense of the idea that the 1891 Mowers represented a new departure, as all the critics felt, and I’ve been pointing out in the last ten posts?

Not either. It shows that in a watercolour Clausen was able to test ideas that he didn’t yet care or dare, or didn’t know how, to commit to canvas. Working quickly in watercolour, he could paint moving figures on a sunny day. Working slowly in oil, directly from nature, his method then, he chose grey days when the light was not changing, and painted static figures.

So The Mowers has its roots deep in another decade, when Clausen was painting in oil in a very different way. When he eventually changed his style in oil, he took up an idea from an old watercolour.

No 74 in McConkey’s 1980 catalogue, op cit, a pencil drawing lent to the exhibition by Plymouth Art Gallery, is surely not a sketch for the oil painting, as the catalogue says, but for the watercolour. The catalogue does not mention the watercolour.

A thought in passing: it must have been technically easier, when it came to landscapes, to be a simple impressionist like Steer than to adopt a modified impressionism which always had to be reconciled with attention to solid forms. Sometimes GC’s pictures fail, but he is setting himself difficult tasks.

One shouldn’t call The Mowers Clausen’s first “impressionist” oil in too glib a way. He’d been experimenting with colour already in some paintings in ways that left Bastien behind. An oil sketch like Souvenir of Marlow Regatta is also highly impressionistic, though not typical.

Anyone would recognise some of the family child portraits done just before The Mowers as impressionist (whereas the sentimental A Little Child, Leeds City Art Gallery, had been Bastienish, with an impressionistic background). The orchard and blossom paintings of the mid-1880s had been impressionistic. There are impressionist influences in paintings that precede the Bastien era. There are no simple transitions or definitions, but Bastien was the main influence for a decade and he encouraged an interest in realism. And introducing movement and light together on the scale of The Mowers was new.

Winter Work

In case the difference between GC’s Mowers style and his earlier realistic style still isn’t clear, compare The Mowers with this tour de force of his “brutal” period. Winter Work was never shown at the Royal Academy and might have gone down better than Labourers - After Dinner if it had been. GC painted it in 1883-4 at Childwickbury near St Albans, where he was living. (The Tate acquired it in 1983.)

The workers are topping and tailing swedes for sheep fodder. A Woman of the Fields is there. The girl is (and looks rather like) an afterthought: she was painted in after the canvas was finished.

A propos the Woman and her nationalities, AD writes:

A Woman of the Fields could most certainly have lived on the Swabian Alb – right up to the time after the war. I have always felt that I know this woman.

I know what she means. There’s that Swabian display of folded hands. Veined obduracy.

I’ve just realised what I think she seems, which is Berber.

This Winter Work image looks best after downloading to a desktop, and then at full screen size.