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

Norman Rockwell and French realism

I wouldn’t normally have made that connection, but it’s hard not to when you look at Marie Bashkirtseff’s Un meeting (1884, early use of franglais). Bashkirtseff (1858-1884) was a pupil/acquaintance of Bastien-Lepage (which Clausen never was) who died in Paris of tuberculosis before her 26th birthday, and a few days before Bastien. She was born in the Ukraine to Russian nobility. After a childhood of travel, she studied painting at Robert-Fleury’s studio at the Académie Julian from, I think, 1877, where Clausen appeared for a few months, I believe around 1883: his last brush with a continental education. Was she still there and did he meet her? Some accounts of Bashkirtseff give her date of birth as 1860: I have not sifted this.

André Theuriet’s Jules Bastien-Lepage and His Art: A Memoir, T Fisher Unwin, London, 1892; Macmillan, New York, 1892, illustrated, has three “Supplementary articles”: one by Sickert, Modern Realism in Painting; one by Clausen, Jules Bastien-Lepage as Artist; and one by Mathilde Blind, A Study of Marie Bashkirtseff. Clausen’s contribution is one of his two published pieces on Bastien: the other appeared in The Scottish Art Review in 1888.

Bashkirtseff’s diaries, begun in her early adolescence, offer “a frank picture of her artistic and emotional development and a strikingly modern psychological self-portrait of a young, gifted mind in the process of development”. Mathilde Blind was their original translator; there is a recent translation, I Am the Most Interesting Book of All, by Phyllis Howard Kernberger. Her correspondence with Maupassant has also been published.

Bashkirtseff, Un meeting

An imitator of the newest French fakements

After GC’s 7 August 1886 letter to The Times with Hunt and Crane advocating reform of the Royal Academy, the painter Luke Fildes wrote to his brother-in-law Henry Woods, who was working in Venice:

I suppose you have read the correspondence and articles this last two weeks in the “Times” about the R.A. I am confidentially informed we are all to be done away with. Messrs. Crane, Clausen and Holman Hunt have appealed to give us another chance, but I believe they are very firm, and though they admit they have no personal objection to some of the Academicians, being personal friends of theirs, still they will not raise their hands to stem the torrent of indignation that is sweeping us away […].

To which Woods replied:

My God! When I think whilst I have been sweating and trying to work out here, my Academy has been, and is, in danger still, bombarded with rotten eggs. An imitator of the newest French fakements, and painter of corns and dirty nails, a purveyor of affected muck for infant snobs, and worst of all, the painter of the Flight into Egypt. I wonder who has stirred up all this?

One would like more of this! They sound like a particular pair of stuffed dermots. (Fildes at least had a social conscience.)

The “purveyor of affected muck for infant snobs” was obviously Crane. Clausen was the “imitator of the newest French fakements, and painter of corns and dirty nails”. Holman Hunt’s offence, I assume, had been to apply excessive naturalism to religious subjects.

From LV Fildes, Luke Fildes, RA, A Victorian Painter, Michael Joseph, London, 1968.

William Clausen

I speculated whether WC had been to the South Kensington schools. He had. Here’s what GC says in his Autobiographical Notes, op cit.

I had an elder brother who had talent: he died young. My father encouraged us boys to draw, and used to take us to the British Museum, the National Gallery, and South Kensington Museum. [...]

We drew at an art-school in the evenings and often spent our half-holidays sketching; and though we took it as a matter of course that drawing was in some way to help us to get a living, the idea of painting pictures seemed to me as far away and unattainable as the moon! I had the old-fashioned idea that painting had to be learnt, and there was no prospect of that for us. My brother, in due time, worked under my father: later he gained a National Scholarship at South Kensington and became a decorative artist.

When I left school, at fifteen, I went daily to South Kensington Museum, and drew furniture, ironwork, Renaissance sculpture, etc., and attended the Art School in the evenings.

Soon there was a vacancy in the drawing office of the firm where my father was employed, and I was taken on.

GC in due course got his own scholarship, and attended South Kensington full-time from 1873 to 1875. I’ll say more about his studies on another occasion. William, being a year and a half older, was probably there a little earlier.

But whereas George was committed by 1876 to fine art, William, as we have seen, remained a decorative artist. He placed an ad appealing for work in The Times of 21 May 1877, while he was living in Fulham, perhaps newly-married: touching, this voice, in the competitive clamour and clangour of Victorian London, of a man who would die at only 31. You can see it here, surrounded by notices about cooks and governesses, with the word Clausen highlighted, and download the whole page, in all its unreformed typographical immensity, here.

GC and secessions

In 1893, ’4 or ’5 Clausen’s Haying, an early Childwick Green work, now in Ontario, was shown at the Secession exhibition in Munich. I think that was the first time Clausen was shown there. The Munich Secession was the first of the three secessions in the German-speaking world in the 1890s. They were withdrawals from the official academies: independent exhibiting societies, anti-academic and broad and international in outlook. And what a resonance that word Secession has!

Munich’s was founded in 1892, Vienna’s in 1897, Berlin’s in 1898. Conservative Britain’s was the New English Art Club, which Clausen helped to found, and instigate, in 1886. The Munich Secession was the least radical of the German secessions, because it began in a less culturally repressive environment than Vienna’s and Berlin’s.

The German and foreign artists chosen to exhibit tended to avoid modern life, urban themes and powerful emotive content in their work, preferring lyrical, evocative subjects rooted in nature.

I can no longer find the site from which I took that, but Clausen’s work perhaps fitted into the Munich ambience better than it would have done in Vienna or Berlin. The Munich Secessionists, we are told, favoured moderately, not very, progressive work. The same site suggested that the Munich Secession may even have been less welcoming to the avant-garde than the Künstlergenossenschaft itself.

Gauguin, Van Gogh, Jan Toorop, James Ensor, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch and Hodler, did not participate in the Munich Secession exhibitions of the 1890s. Among those who did were Trübner, Liebermann, Franz von Stuck, Fernand Khnopff and Eugène Carrière. By contrast, the more broadly-based Künstlergenossenschaft continued to exhibit together both the old and the new, and both academic and avant-garde.

It’s not very surprising that Van Gogh did not participate, since he died in July 1890. But he was unknown anyway. After many splits and further withdrawals, the Munich and Vienna Secessions still officially exist, as does the New English Art Club; Berlin’s petered out in 1913.

Clausen may have exhibited more than once in Munich in the 1890s, but I do not know whether he went there. Was he shown in Vienna and Berlin? I have read that he was shown at the Vienna Secession, but I have not established whether this is true.

But can one really compare the New English Art Club with the Vienna Secession, which contained work that was not only an extremity of the belle époque, but looked forward to the most bracing artistic currents of the twentieth century? The Vienna Secession was a seed of extremely radical, but also particularly coherent, thinking about art.

It’s hard to call the earlier New English Art Club seminal, though it absorbed and then rejected more radical elements, led by Sickert. But it was a secession. And not everything in Vienna was radical.

Some of the tenets of the Viennese, such as a refusal to make distinctions between art and craft, or high art and low art, or art and life, or art for the rich and art for the poor, had long been explicit or implicit in the thinking of the leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement in England and elsewhere. And in the particular area of reform of the applied arts, we were first.

The refusal to distinguish between art and life could lead one, depending on one’s inclination, into the purest aestheticism and the most engaged socialism.

Not a simple-lifer

Anna Gruetzner Robins has an essay about Clausen’s stay in Childwick Green between 1881 and 1885 in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940, ed David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell, Yale University Press for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London) and The Yale Center for British Art, 2002.

The title – Living the Simple Life: George Clausen at Childwick Green, St Alban’s – is totally misleading. Clausen moved to the country in 1881 for only two reasons: because it was cheaper, and to paint. He was modest enough, but he was never a simple-lifer. Thomas Derrick was – or thought he was.

(Nor was modesty necessarily a characteristic of simple-lifers.)