George Clausen and Thomas Derrick

Four styles

The last four images (if you are viewing posts chronologically) – the three of schoolgirls and The Student – show GC’s very different styles in 1880, 1889, 1909 and (perhaps) 1932.

The best of these pictures, for me, is The Student. It has the fine sobriety which comes into some of his work around 1908-9, which could be said to mark the beginning of late Clausen and even the beginning of the truest Clausen, although for the purpose of the categories shown on the right I take “late” as beginning around 1918. The 1932 picture (if that is the date) is not in that manner: there are no simple divisions into periods.

The market hasn’t yet understood late Clausen, as is shown by the dramatically different prices fetched by pictures in the 1889 style (even more than the 1880 style) compared with the “late” work.

The Roadside Tree, or Going to School

Clausen isn’t really a painter for galleries. His pictures look better in houses. Even when you think from an illustration that they are going to be large, they often turn out to be small. Whatever its size, this oil at Napier, New Zealand, I presume at the Hawke’s Bay Museum, would look wonderful in a child’s playroom. TD was hardly a gallery artist at all.

I’m not sure of the date of The Roadside Tree. The tree reminds one of his style around 1906 and Building the Rick. The road and the early morning setting suggest the 20s. The schoolgirls look Edwardian – but the one in the white socks looks later. The background promises a hot day, and has some of the spread and serenity of the Wycliffe mural in St Stephen’s Hall. So I’d go for a date in the 20s. The blue circle on the lower left of the photograph indicates damage either to the original picture or the photograph.

Afterthought: this may be the 1932 Royal Academy painting The Road to School. Royal Academy Pictures could confirm that. Done, in that case, around the age of 80. Kenneth McConkey has commented that The Roadside Tree is 50.3 x 60.7 cms.

The Roadside Tree

Gombrich on Clausen

On his Royal Academy lectures (here and elsewhere), BBC Radio 3, The Priority of Pattern, third of four talks on The Primitive and Its Value in Art (unimaginable title now), broadcast 1 March 1979:

These lectures are, to me, as moving in their honesty as they are interesting as a historical document.

More on this and its context later.

Kenneth Clark on D-Day

A year later, on 6 June 1944, D-Day, Kenneth Clark wrote to Clausen c/o the Derricks at Cold Ash proposing a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery.

In his draft reply, dated 10 June, Clausen accepted the suggestion “with great pride”, adding that

I think such an exhibition as you suggest would be more appropriate when I am dead and indifferent to praise or censure! However, I will help you all I can [...]

Quoted in the 1980 catalogue (which doesn’t mention the D-Day coincidence). These two letters also are described as “coll. the artist’s descendants”, and I’d like to know where they are now and see them, if only to better understand Clark’s opinion of GC, which must have been favourable. Perhaps he made the suggestion partly at Bone’s prompting. In 1944 the National Gallery still embraced the Tate.

But peace came and, apart from the inevitable posthumous slump in reputation, the mood of 1945 could not have been less conducive to a long look back towards Victorian England. GC had died in November and Clark’s idea was not pursued. In 1949 the Arts Council put on a small show (the catalogue doesn’t state where it took place) called A Time of Harvest, Pastels and Drawings by Sir George Clausen, R.A., with 34 pictures.

After that there was no public exhibition until Kenneth McConkey’s major one in four cities in 1980. GC’s reputation was kept alive by dealers, notably The Fine Art Society. It’s hard to say that 1980 transformed it. His works are still too scattered, and are uneven in quality, and there are more styles and phases than most people can grasp easily. The current auction record for a Clausen is £710,850, set for the 1882 Gleaners (oil) at Christie’s, December 2004.

Biographers’ temptations

Chiu (several posts below) was obviously influenced by Clausen, but when we are told he was a pupil, we need to be careful. What teaching was Clausen exactly doing at the RA in the 20s? 

Charles Sims, who had lost his son in the war and ended his own life in 1928, resigned the Keepership in November 1926 and Clausen was appointed temporary Director of the Schools for the Lent term of 1927. (He had been Professor of Painting from 1903 to 1906.) So that may have been Clausen’s locus standi for being a teacher of Chiu, which Chiu’s intended biographer claims that he was.

Although it seems clear that he knew Urushibara, how well did he know him? I’ve looked at an insurance inventory of GC’s house in 1938 and he owned a couple of prints by him: a footnote to my Japanese printmaker postings, just below. That isn’t evidence. GC is a tough subject for a biographer because there is so little epistolatory evidence of his relations with the great and good, or even merely talented. He didn’t have extended documented relationships with them. Perhaps his letters held by the Royal Academy and in a few other places will prove this point wrong. I haven’t studied them. But he is usually retiring and off-camera, so you don’t find GC in the indexes of books that often.

I’ve done a dozen postings about close parallels between Clausen’s painting and Hardy’s writing (June and July archives). But there’s no evidence that he knew Hardy. He must have met him: you can see that because they are both on the lists of Royal Academy receptions. They co-signed at least two letters to The Times. He may have had long conversations with him, but there is no way of telling. There was no pilgrimage to Hardy, such as Holst made. Did GC even know Holst, his country neighbour? I’ll look at that later, too. I know of only one meeting with Whistler. There were no friendships with artists in Paris. He did not even meet Bastien-Lepage.

I’ll be documenting the encounters of other younger artists with Clausen as far as I can. They are interesting because they confirm his reputation of being sympathetic to the young: his former mentor Leighton may have been his role model here. But they aren’t always evidence of the relations of either teacher or close friend.

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?

Trevor Nunn

Sir Trevor Nunn, The Independent on Sunday, June 25 (article not online):

Which painting most corresponds with your vision of yourself?

The rural paintings of George Clausen. These paintings speak to me with an uncanny sense of déjà vu. Clausen was the first to actually go out and paint people, and work, as it really was, rather than idealising it or making sketches to take back to the studio. My mother and her family worked on the land. And so I look at those paintings and I do see myself as still, in some way, belonging to a small labouring community.

A Winter Morning

RA 1906. This was supposed to be a comment on the last post, but I don’t have a good colour image, so here it is in black and white. McConkey, 1980, op cit:

The Academy echoed a familiar critical gambit which was also applied to Stott and La Thangue, in that it found “Millet’s subjects with Monet’s truth to natural colour” in this work of 1906. This underestimated Clausen’s genuine achievement. He was not a pasticheur and Winter Morning could not be mistaken for a work by Monet. At a time when Monet had given everything for effects of light and colour, Clausen retained a naturalist painter’s sense of the scene before him.

A Winter Morning

The White Peacock

George Moore on GC’s Labourers - After Dinner in Modern Painting, quoted below:

A handful of dry facts instead of a passionate impression of life in its envelope of mystery and suggestion.

DH Lawrence on Clausen, putting words into the mouth of Lettie in The White Peacock (1911), his first novel, the work of a genius if not a work of genius, whatever you think of Lawrence:

“But,” said Lettie, “he is a real realist; he makes common things beautiful, he sees the mystery and magnificence that envelops (sic) us even when we work menially.”

“Mystery” and “envelope” in both sentences.

George Moore on The Mowers

This year Mr. Clausen seems to have shaken himself free from his early education, and he exhibits a picture conceived in an entirely different spirit in this Academy. Turning to my notes I find it thus described:

“A small canvas containing three mowers in a flowering meadow. Two are mowing; the third, a little to the left, sharpens his scythe. The sky is deep and lowering – a sultry summer day, a little unpleasant in colour, but true. At the end of the meadow the trees gleam. The earth is wrapped in a hot mist, the result of the heat, and through it the sun sheds a somewhat diffused and oven-like heat. There are heavy clouds overhead, for the gleam that passes over the three white shirts is transitory and uncertain. The handling is woolly and unpleasant, but handling can be overlooked when a canvas exhales a deep sensation of life. The movement of mowing – I should have said movements, for the men mow differently; one is older than the other – is admirably expressed. And the principal figure, though placed in the immediate foreground, is in and not out of the atmosphere. The difficulty of the trousers has been overcome by generalisation; the garment has not been copied patch by patch. The distribution of light is admirable; nowhere does it escape from the frame. J. F. Millet has painted many a worse picture.”

Modern Painters, op cit. Mowers is at the Usher Gallery, Lincoln. He calls it a “small canvas”. By the standards of the time, it was. It is actually 40 inches by 34. From a photograph one might expect it to be much larger: rarely is a Clausen larger than we expect. This is not a catalogue raisonné, so I’m not giving measurements each time.

“There are heavy clouds overhead, for the gleam that passes over the three white shirts is transitory and uncertain”: that is well-observed by Moore and is an effect that could not have been attempted, let alone achieved, in the realistic paintings of the previous decade.

“The difficulty of the trousers” applies to all impressionism. How do you deal with certain kinds of detail? If a figure is in the foreground, do you “suggest” a face? How do you do that? Impressionists were not schematisers. (The answer in Clausen is, it doesn’t always work.) If you paint a face exactly, how do you modulate to more impressionistic parts of the canvas? Monet avoids the problem by rarely showing figures. (But then perversely sets himself the task of cathedrals.) Clausen wants more movement and light – to that degree he has become an impressionist – but he retains solidity of form. In the Mowers he shows the faces as profiles, though they are partly hidden. There is sharp detail in the grass and flowers and clear lines in the fence in the background, the scythes and the red band on the mower’s hat. These lines are accents which allow him to generalise in other passages, though the fence and the red highlight on clothing are taken from his pre-“impressionist” works.

Moore was not the only critic to praise the work. McConkey, 1980, op cit:

The Saturday Review devoted a full column to the picture which it felt “accosts us with the very smile of nature”.

“Mr. Clausen has hovered no little time about the skirts of the success he has achieved this year. He has long been a student of nature, now he has discovered beauty … .”

I do have a thumbnail image of Labourers, with which Moore contrasts the Mowers (last post but one), so here it is for what little it is worth: it gives an idea. The Woman of the Fields is in it.

Labourers - After Dinner