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Lot Essay
After his move to Widdington in Essex in the summer of 1891, George Clausen had a new terrain to explore. Living on the edge of the village he was surrounded by rolling hills and cornfields, and while he had work to complete for the forthcoming spring, he also faced the challenge of finding new models. One of these was a local girl, Emily Wright, known as ‘Emmy’, the daughter of a bricklayer, and she replaced Rose Grimsdale, his favourite model at Cookham Dean.
At this point, Clausen’s work was changing in a dramatic way as he increasingly rejected plein air naturalism in favour of a more impressionistic style. The square brush handling and tonal painting of his years at Childwick Green and Cookham Dean disappears and he favours strong colour, dramatic contrasts and a more consciously sculpted surface texture. This has been read as an obvious rapprochement with Impressionism, even though he remained acutely aware of the importance of Bastien-Lepage to his generation. This continuing admiration became apparent when around 1895 he began to contemplate a picture of two country girls resting in the fields. One would be sleeping while the other would face the sun, perhaps awoken by the sound of birds or the fresh summer breeze. The ensemble – resting fieldworkers, one of whom is asleep – had been famously treated by Bastien-Lepage in Les Foins, 1878 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
Before it was finally abandoned, Summer in the Fields (c. 1895-7, private collection, sold in these rooms, 19 November 2004) became one of Clausen’s most studied paintings.
Drawings for it are contained in the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Holbourne Museum, Bath, and a small oil painting of the sleeping girl passed through The Fine Art Society in the 1980s. Until the appearance of the present oil, there were however, no independent oil paintings of the principal figure. This, more than the canvas itself, demonstrates Clausen’s struggle. While the related drawings give clear delineation of the form, A Girl’s Head provides an insistent reading of her ruddy complexion. Here is no china-doll smoothness, but a fresh, windblown face that turns towards the light (see Study for ‘Summer in the Fields, c. 1895-6, Holbourne Museum, Bath).
Indeed the dense working of the flesh tones in this case produces a vibrant expressionism. Few pictures by Clausen contain this sense of urgency – as though the colour relationships he sought to capture were so fleeting that he must seize them with little regard for the polite conventions of finish. With what emphasis he shapes the right contour of Emmy’s forehead, while not neglecting the subtle modelling across the bridge of the nose. Look too at the brilliant flicks of paint that describe her hair and the subdued bluish flesh colour that takes the eye off into the field beyond. Parr claimed to have rescued this picture when the artist had cast it aside – what a service he did for posterity!
KMc.
At this point, Clausen’s work was changing in a dramatic way as he increasingly rejected plein air naturalism in favour of a more impressionistic style. The square brush handling and tonal painting of his years at Childwick Green and Cookham Dean disappears and he favours strong colour, dramatic contrasts and a more consciously sculpted surface texture. This has been read as an obvious rapprochement with Impressionism, even though he remained acutely aware of the importance of Bastien-Lepage to his generation. This continuing admiration became apparent when around 1895 he began to contemplate a picture of two country girls resting in the fields. One would be sleeping while the other would face the sun, perhaps awoken by the sound of birds or the fresh summer breeze. The ensemble – resting fieldworkers, one of whom is asleep – had been famously treated by Bastien-Lepage in Les Foins, 1878 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
Before it was finally abandoned, Summer in the Fields (c. 1895-7, private collection, sold in these rooms, 19 November 2004) became one of Clausen’s most studied paintings.
Drawings for it are contained in the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Holbourne Museum, Bath, and a small oil painting of the sleeping girl passed through The Fine Art Society in the 1980s. Until the appearance of the present oil, there were however, no independent oil paintings of the principal figure. This, more than the canvas itself, demonstrates Clausen’s struggle. While the related drawings give clear delineation of the form, A Girl’s Head provides an insistent reading of her ruddy complexion. Here is no china-doll smoothness, but a fresh, windblown face that turns towards the light (see Study for ‘Summer in the Fields, c. 1895-6, Holbourne Museum, Bath).
Indeed the dense working of the flesh tones in this case produces a vibrant expressionism. Few pictures by Clausen contain this sense of urgency – as though the colour relationships he sought to capture were so fleeting that he must seize them with little regard for the polite conventions of finish. With what emphasis he shapes the right contour of Emmy’s forehead, while not neglecting the subtle modelling across the bridge of the nose. Look too at the brilliant flicks of paint that describe her hair and the subdued bluish flesh colour that takes the eye off into the field beyond. Parr claimed to have rescued this picture when the artist had cast it aside – what a service he did for posterity!
KMc.