Clifford was one of the group of young artists (also including Walter Crane and Robert Bateman) who were inspired by Burne-Jones in the late 1860s and were dubbed by critics the 'Poetry without Grammar School'. Exhibiting at the Royal Academy, the Dudley Gallery, the Grosvenor Gallery and elsewhere, he painted subject pictures, landscapes and portraits, generally of aristocratic sitters. In 1887 he visited Father Damien in Molokai, taking a picture by Burne-Jones as a gift from the artist to the celebrated leper-priest. He himself did much work for the Church Army. His pictures are mainly in watercolour with bodycolour, a technique he learnt from Burne-Jones, many of whose early watercolours he copied