Sir George Clausen, R.A., R.W.S., R.I. 1852-1944

Sharpley Bainbridge Esq. of Hatfield House, London, his sale Christie's, 10 February 1922, lot 107 to 'Jackson';
GB Blair Esq. by 1925;
Miss E. M. Challoner, until 1976, her sale Sotheby's, 9 March 1976, lot 52;
Professor Philip Rieff, Philadelphia, by whom loaned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art

London, Royal Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, 1883, no. 161;
London, New English Art Club, Retrospective Exhibition, 1925, no. 289

The Academy, 22 December 1883, p. 421-2;
The Athenaeum, 22 December 1883, p. 821;
The Magazine of Art, vol vii, 1884, p. 162;
The Saturday Review, 22 December 1883, p. 798;
Anon, 'The Collection of Sharpley Bainbridge Esq. JP, Lincoln', The Art Journal, 1898, p. 228;
JM Gibbon, 'Painters of the Light, An Interview with George Clausen ARA', Black and White, 8 July 1905, p. 42;
Anon, 'New English Art Club - A Retrospective Exhibition', The Times, 3 January 1925, p. 8;
Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen, RA, 1852-1944, 1980, exhibition catalogue, Bradford and Tyne and Wear Museums, p. 29, repr. 30;
Kenneth McConkey, 'Figures in a Field: Sir George Clausen's Winter Work', in Sotheby's Art at Auction, 1982-3, 1983, p. xx;
Kenneth McConkey, 'Rustic Naturlaism in Britain', in GP Weisberg ed., The European Tradition, 1982, p. 222;
Jeanne Sheehy, Walter Osborne, 1984, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, p. 166;
Kenneth McConkey, The New English, A History of the New English Art Club, 2006, p. 28, repr. 154;
Kenneth McConkey, 'Un petit cercle de thuriféraires: Bastien-Lepage et la Grande Bretagne', in 48/14, La revue du Musée d'Orsay, no. 24, Printemps 2007, repr. p. 30

The following condition report has been provided by Hamish Dewar Fine Art Conservation, 14 Mason's Yard, St James's, London, SW1Y 6BU, tel; 0207 930 4004. hamish@hamishdewar.co.uk STRUCTURAL CONDITION The artist's canvas is unlined on what would appear to be the original stretcher and is providing a sound and robust structural support. The vertical stretcher-bar lines are visible, as are some fine lines of craquelure, but these are stable and do not require any structural intervention. PAINT SURFACE The paint surface has an even but discoloured varnish layer which is confirmed by inspection under ultra-violet light, which shows how discoloured the varnish has become and how beneficial cleaning should be. Ultra-violet light also shows a number of retouchings scattered across the paint surface, the great majority of which are clearly excessive and crudely applied and I would be confident that should they be removed, many would be found to be, at least partially, unnecessary. The most significant of these retouchings are: 1) On the left vertical framing edge and around the other framing and turnover egdes. 2) Areas on the white dress of the girl who is seated on the right of the composition, the lines strengthening the outline of her figure, as well as the basket behind her on the grass. There are other small, scattered retouchings. There are some fine lines of stable craquelure and slight paint separation which is typical of the artist's and all of which are stable and not visually distracting. SUMMARY The painting therefore appears to be in very good and stable condition and should be considerably enhanced by cleaning, restoration and revarnishing which should also significantly reduce the amount of retouching.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

In 1880, while he was living in Hampstead, George Clausen visited the Grosvenor Gallery where he saw a group of nine works by the French painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage.  The most important of these was Les Foins (The Hay Harvest), 1878 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), a controversial painting of two exhausted field-workers. Whilst earlier French and British painters had idealized happy harversters, Bastien-Lepage recorded the effects of human toil with graphic intensity. In London in 1880, this exciting picture divided critical opinion. Although reporters in the popular press railed against it, a circle of young painters - referred to as 'a little knot of worshippers' - gathered round it regularly to debate its merits. The young Clausen, exhibiting in the same show, is likely to have been prominent in the group (Clausen showed La Pensé in the Grosvenor Gallery of 1880).

The encounter with Les Foins was a contributory factor in encouraging him to move house the following year to Childwick Green, near St Albans in Hertfordshire. This escape from the city suburbs was a 'liberation'; the Hampstead street scenes on which he had been working were abandoned in favour of close observation of the daily doings of field workers. At Childwick Green he later recalled; 'One saw people doing simple things under good conditions of lighting ... nothing was made easy for you: you had to dig out what you wanted.' (George Clausen, 'Autobiographical Notes' Artwork, no. 25, Spring 1931, p. 19)

The first fruits of this radical change of direction were shown in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1882 with Gleaners, (Private collection). A trip to Quimperlé in Brittany during the autumn of that year reinforced his convictions as a 'plein air' painter, and he returned to the Hertfordshire fields during the winter frosts, with renewed energy. The results of these studies were shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883 in a canvas entitled Winter Work (Fig. 2, sold in these rooms, 3 November 1982, lot 37).

It was immediately clear to critics that Clausen was measuring himself against Bastien-Lepage and that he was looking for a theme comparable to Les Foins. He found this in two pictures, the poetic Day Dreams and the more prosaic Labourers after Dinner (Fig. 3). The first represents a noonday rest in mid-summer, while the latter, a winter camp-fire. Day Dreams was ready for the first exhibition of the Society of Painters in Oil Colours (ROI) in November 1883, while Labourers ... had its airing six months later at the Royal Academy of 1884. The Institute of Painters in Oil Colours was formed in 1883 by Sir James Linton, its first President, as a companion winter exhibition initially for the work of those artists who showed at the Institute of Painters in Watercolours. It came about because Linton, having failed to unite the two rival watercolour societies, needed further attractions for the new galleries which he had opened in Piccadilly. Day Dreams was the most important picture in the first exhibition.

Both pictures presented potentially uncomfortable reminders of Les Foins, but Day Dreams in particular, drew the attention of other artists. The Irish painter, Walter Osborne, for instance singled it out in his annotated copy of the ROI catalogue which contained Clausen's line illustration. It seems likely that Dorothy Tennant, who had hosted Bastien-Lepage on his visits to London, had this to hand when she painted what almost amounts to a pastiche of the female figure in her Bank Holiday, 1884 (Fig. 4, sold in these rooms, 13 November 1985, lot 1). The Canadian painter William Brymner, who attended the atelier Julian with Clausen in the autumn of 1883 wrote to his mother that the picture 'seems, from newspaper and other accounts, to be the best thing in the exhibition' (Letter dated 15 January 1884). Scots contemporaries who tracked Clausen's work north of the border immediately got the message. EA Walton's The Daydream, 1885 (National Gallery of Scotland) and James Guthrie's In the Orchard, 1886 (Private collection) re-cast the Bastien-Lepage prototype in terms of rustic love.

More intelligent critics of the day, like Frederick Wedmore, took time to explain Clausen's importance to their readers; 'He is a naturalist in the sense of M Bastien-Lepage. He would be more popular already if he had allowed his observation to be directed to any appreciable extent to the beauty of women or of children. But he cares above all things for character, and he has foregone, even to an unjustifiable extent, the facile fascinations of grace.' Referring specifically to Day Dreams he continues; 'This year however, he presents us with a carefully studied picture, which includes one specimen of humanity more agreeable than any which he usually vouchsafes. The young woman is not a 'lady' or even pretty; she is a peasant suffered to display the refinement which, even in the life of the fields, may be the possession of youth, if not womanhood. An old crone sits by her on the herbage; in the background mowers are cutting the last grass of a scanty meadow. The expressions of the old woman absorbed in her midday rest, and of the young one absorbed in her thoughts - which have a touch of romance in them - permit us to speak of the picture as truly dramatic, though no dramatic incident passes within the four walls of the frame.' (The Academy, 22 December 1883, pp. 421-2).

WE Henley, in The Magazine of Art reiterated some of these points noting that; 'His Day Dreams notwithstanding the obvious influence of Bastien-Lepage, is a work of rare distinction and original intention ... Here the interest is transient, the expression of truth evanescent, the value ephemeral. In Mr Clausen's work the truth is so graphic that the physical aspect is delineated with the same quiet masterly grasp as the mental process. The solitary figure in the hayfield, beyond the dozing woman and the dreaming girl, is involved in the subtle contrast between the visible realism of the scene and the inner abstraction of the girl's face.' (The Magazine of Art, vol vii, 1884, p. 162)

Not usually given to reverie Clausen may have been momentarily impressed by the work of romantic naturalists such as Frank O'Meara and William Stott of Oldham (The work of both painters, a prominent feature of the Salon of 1882 was shown at the Fine Art Society in London in summer of that year.) His resting fieldworkers embodied youth and age, and the girl, fingering a wild flower, was on the threshold of love and marriage. Both women featured prominently in other work: the girl in A Straw Plaiter 1883 (Fig. 5, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and her aged companion, a favourite model of Clausen's, as A Field Hand (sold in these rooms, 19 May 1982, lot 54).

Speculation on the girl's hidden thoughts in Day Dreams greatly appealed to contemporary viewers. It was this aspect of Day Dreams which was cited by a later writer reviewing the Lincoln food-retailer, Sharpley Bainbridge's collection, of which it was the centre-piece (Fig. 1). He wrote; 'The largest picture by Mr Clausen in the collection is the one over the mantelpiece, as dimly shown in our illustration of the dining-room. This painting, sometimes called, 'He loves me, he loves me not', but more prosaically 'Summer Afternoon', may be taken as an expression of the charm of the fields in fine weather. The young girl idly pulls petals which tell her of her lover's attitude, while the real charm of the picture lies in the rich colour of the landscape and the general beauty of the composition.' (Anon, 'The Collection of Sharpley Bainbridge Esq. JP, Lincoln', The Art Journal, 1898, p. 228)  

However the most revealing insight into the picture came from the artist himself in an interview with JM Gibbon, conducted for the journal, Black and White, in 1905. Gibbon, recalling this important early work, had taken with him a copy of the first ROI exhibition catalogue containing Clausen's a pen and ink sketch of Day Dreams, and their conversation went as follows: 'Clausen - "That was my second open-air picture and it took me a year to paint. The figures are under the shade of the tree, and the sunlight is behind. That at once shows you the problem to be faced in painting figures in the open air. Bastien-Lepage and the Newlyn men found that, for their first open-air attempts, at any rate, they required an even light. This they got by painting on grey days, or by some contrivance of shade such as this. But look at this portrait of my daughter on which I have just spent two days. These patches of sunlight on the foliage behind are constantly changing in position and intensity, and with every change the values and the colour in the shaded face change also. The problem at once becomes ten times more difficult. You know Manet's famous dictum?"
JM Gibbon - "That in a picture the principal person is the light?"
Clausen - "Yes. Well, the difficulty of painting in the open air is this, that the principal person is always moving. You see a beautiful effect of light one day, perhaps the next day also, but then not again for another year." '

By 1905 the artist was Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy. His lectures were the most popular since those of Joshua Reynolds and his work had been purchased for the National Gallery of British Art (the Tate Gallery). Within three years a sparkling study of light falling through trees upon a group of fieldworkers, The Gleaners Returning, became his second work to be bought for the Tate Gallery.
No one experienced the problems of plein air painting more profoundly than Clausen and this began with works such as Day Dreams. Critics and collectors may muse over the sentiment implied in the figures, but for the painter, 'the principal person is the light' and it was this convincing feeling of light and air which impressed The Times reporter when the picture was lent by its new owner, GB Blair, to the New English Art Club Retrospective Exhibition in 1925; '[It] might have been painted in the studio of Bastien-Lepage, or rather in the fields with him', he declared.' (Anon, 'New English Art Club - A Retrospective Exhibition', The Times, 3 January 1925, p. 8)

We are grateful to Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.