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Lot Essay
In 1906, in his second series of lectures to Royal Academy students, their Professor of Painting, George Clausen, addressed the problems of painting en plein air, ‘It is not so very difficult to copy a tree’, he declared, 'but to paint it and make it live ... is a thing few can do well ... How often, when we set about painting a tree ... we lose, even in looking at it, the charm that attracted us! We get confused, I suppose, with the infinity of detail ... We miss it somehow' (George Clausen, Royal Academy Lectures on Painting, London, 1913, p. 101) .
This was the voice of experience. Clausen had worked in the open air for twenty-five years and he embraced the complex structure of tree forms, their shapes and volumes. More particularly he responded to ‘the light shining on it and through it’ and in pictures such as the magisterial Building a Rick 1907 (Birmingham Museums), human industry was enveloped in sunlight broken and scattered through a largely unseen foliage. A similar effect is noteworthy here. In the present instance, looking around and beyond the richly-textured tree trunk – the foreground motif - the space is defined by the unseen canopy it supports, as much as by the hayricks in the distance.
Increased responsibility that came with his Academy chair was one of the reasons behind Clausen’s move back into town from rural Essex in 1905, yet throughout the years up to the outbreak of war, contact with the farms around his former home at Widdington was maintained. He was much in demand as a popular public speaker, and on a number of occasions was called upon to lecture on George Frederick Watts, the recently deceased ‘Victorian Titian’. He would have known A Parasite (1903, private collection, on loan to the Watts Gallery), one of Watts’s last exhibited works showing an aged tree clad in ivy standing beside a clean sapling. While he might reject such obvious allegory, Clausen clearly felt that there was more to say about this vigorous sparkling sunlit elm that made it symbolic. Pantheistic thoughts were left to us – the viewers.
KMc.
This was the voice of experience. Clausen had worked in the open air for twenty-five years and he embraced the complex structure of tree forms, their shapes and volumes. More particularly he responded to ‘the light shining on it and through it’ and in pictures such as the magisterial Building a Rick 1907 (Birmingham Museums), human industry was enveloped in sunlight broken and scattered through a largely unseen foliage. A similar effect is noteworthy here. In the present instance, looking around and beyond the richly-textured tree trunk – the foreground motif - the space is defined by the unseen canopy it supports, as much as by the hayricks in the distance.
Increased responsibility that came with his Academy chair was one of the reasons behind Clausen’s move back into town from rural Essex in 1905, yet throughout the years up to the outbreak of war, contact with the farms around his former home at Widdington was maintained. He was much in demand as a popular public speaker, and on a number of occasions was called upon to lecture on George Frederick Watts, the recently deceased ‘Victorian Titian’. He would have known A Parasite (1903, private collection, on loan to the Watts Gallery), one of Watts’s last exhibited works showing an aged tree clad in ivy standing beside a clean sapling. While he might reject such obvious allegory, Clausen clearly felt that there was more to say about this vigorous sparkling sunlit elm that made it symbolic. Pantheistic thoughts were left to us – the viewers.
KMc.