Sir George Clausen, R.A., R.W.S., R.I.

Sotheby's, New York, 28 February 1990, lot 122;
Private collection

Kenneth McConkey, George Glausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, 2012, pp.122-3 illustrated in colour;
Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen: The Rustic Image, 2012, (exhibition catalogue, The Fine Art Society, London), p.36

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd, 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, London, SW1Y 6BU. UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is inscribed on the reverse. There is some staining on the reverse of the canvas. Paint Surface The paint surface has a pattern of drying craquelure which are very typical of the artist and are structurally stable. These consist of fine lines of drying cracks which are slightly raised and most prominent in the upper left and upper right of the composition together with fine horizontal lines above the girl's head. There are also horizontal stretcher-bar lines. This pattern of craquelure could be considerably reduced with localised structural consolidation and treatment on the low-pressure conservation table, without having to resort to lining. I would be confident that this minimal treatment would ensure an even and secure surface. The paint surface fluoresces rather unevenly under ultra-violet light and there is clear evidence of discoloured varnish. There should be a great improvement in the overall appearance should the painting be cleaned. The only retouchings that I could identify under ultra-violet light are two very small spots on the right vertical framing edge. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good condition and should respond very well to cleaning, restoration and revarnishing. ******************************************************************** SIGNATURE The present work was sold at Sotheby's New York in 1990 as having a 'strengthened' signature. Recent off-site analysis of the signature has revealed this not to be the case and that it is autograph and contemporary with the painting. For further information please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 5718.
"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."

'...he [Clausen] has seldom painted anything more finely than these unsophisticated young country girls with their healthy pink faces glowing through their own shade. In this sort of natural study the best energies of some of our strongest young painters are now engaged.' (Cosmo Monkhouse, 'The Institute of Painters in Oil Colours', The Academy, 12 December 1885, p.399)

In one of the most arresting canvases produced during George Clausen’s years at Widdington in Essex, a girl in a white dress sits under the trees. She has removed a battered straw hat, revealing her auburn hair, tied back in a knot. The warm sunlight falls across her shoulder, highlighting wild flowers among the meadow grass on the right of the picture. Colour in the shadows on the front of her white dress subtly alternates between the palest blues, mauves and ochres. At some distance, labourers are at work, but for the moment, peace and tranquillity reign. Completed in 1898, Noon in the Hayfield marks the summation of Clausen’s lengthy deliberations on a favourite motif - its derivation stretching back to Day Dreams, 1883 and his earliest years working in the countryside.

In those days in Hertfordshire he was much impressed by the rural naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Léon Lhermitte, painters who dominated the Paris Salon. It was obvious that their documentary accuracy outclassed everything being done by his London contemporaries and in order to match them, a young painter must endure the hardship of working in the fields, en plein air, where ‘nothing was made easy for you [and] you had to dig out what you wanted’ (Sir George Clausen RA, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, Artwork, no 25, Spring 1931, p. 19; quoted in McConkey, 2012, p. 46.). The picture which redirected his thoughts was Lepage’s Les Foins, a graphic depiction of fieldworkers resting during the hay harvest. He noticed particularly the weary arms, bent back and hollow stare of the woman, and he wanted to achieve the same subtle sense of passive dreaming in his own pictures of resting rustics – Day Dreams and Labourers after Dinner (McConkey, 2012, pp. 60-4.). This ‘modern realism’ with its psychological intensity was firmly based on the principle of strict objectivity. A bucolic scene which originated in the work of Jean-François Millet, now challenged modernity and mechanization. Clausen and the French and British artists who treated this subject matter were not so much recording an occupation as celebrating a threatened way of life and in this instance he would agree with Richard Jefferies in the belief that beauty only emerged from honest labour, ‘good food … some degree of comfort … but most especially open air’ (Richard Jefferies, The Open Air, (1885), quoted in C Henry Warren, The Good Life, An Anthology of the Life and Work of the Countryside in prose and poetry, 1946, p. 109).

Mowers would begin their work at dawn when the grass was in flower and wet with dew, and could be cut more easily with scythes. Many farmers preferred this labour-intensive method to that of the horse-drawn mowing machines and swathe-turners (Arthur O Cooke, The Farmer’s Fields, n.d., c. 1905, pp. 49-57. Mowing machines were thought to tear the grass by many farmers, whereas a sharp scythe cut it cleanly). The hay was raked and turned by village girls who piled it into hay-cocks, before rick building commenced. Henry Williamson recalled that ‘they raked the harvest of the meadow into mound-like wakes, while the master haymaker, ever watching the clouds and the wind, urged them to greater endeavour, for rain meant a second rate crop …’  (Henry Williamson, The Lone Swallows and Other Essays of Boyhood and Youth, 1933, quoted in Eileen Buckle and Derek Lord, In the Country, 250 years of country life in paintings, prose and poetry, 1979, p. 84). This piece, originally written in 1920 is one of many contemporary accounts of a process that had remained unchanged for centuries). If rain was expected, hay-cocks would be placed under trees, if possible.

The subject was briefly revisited when Clausen was living at Cookham Dean in 1886, in A Midsummer Day and Girl in an Orchard, modelled by the Baldwin sisters (McConkey 2012, pp. 81-4.).  However, by 1890 the painter was ready to return to the theme when his new model, Rose Grimsdale, began to pose for him (ibid, p. 96.). At this point he had begun to modify the mechanical ‘square’ brushwork of his early naturalist pictures and was thinking more about colour. A revival of interest in the use of pastel was under way and he was asked by Coutts Lindsay to sit on the organizing committee for a series of exhibitions focussing on the newly popular medium. Sundry references in letters indicate that he was looking critically at the work of Manet, Monet and Degas. At this point métier– how to paint – was more important than what to paint, and essentially the subject was a simple one: a girl resting in the shade of some apple trees at the edge of a field. In one springtime variant she becomes a shepherdess, and the sheep are unshorn and the trees are in blossom;while in another, autumn approaches and the grass where she sits is littered with windfalls. Throughout this fertile period, Clausen’s sketchbooks were filled with studies. A figure ranged to the left on one page would be turned to the right on another. He obtained brown paper sketchbooks in which to work directly in chalk and his handling of paint becomes more urgent. The model may be resting but she was not frozen – as in his friend Peter Henry Emerson’s ‘naturalistic’ photographs.

Head studies in pastel, and oil develop the ensemble and a fine watercolour entitled Idleness, to be shown at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours exhibition in the winter of 1891, was completed (A pastel, Study of a young girl leaning against a tree, dated 1891, was sold Christie’s 13 December 2012. For his oil sketch inscribed to Goscombe John in 1897, see Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen, RA, 1852-1944, 1980, exhibition catalogue, Bradford, Bristol, London and Newcastle, p. 67.  For reference to Idleness see Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen: The Rustic Image, 2012, exhibition catalogue, The Fine Art Society, London, p. 36). Here the girl is very clearly posing in an orchard and the high colour key reveals the degree to which new attitudes were informing his technique in all media.

Around this time it is likely that Clausen began Noon in the Hayfield, and equally possible that his progress on the picture was arrested by his move to Widdington in the early months of 1891. A large line drawing had been made in order to plan the present composition and here for the first time we see the rake leaning against the tree - but the background hay-cocks among the trees remained unresolved (Precise dating of this drawing remains problematic since its style – that of a cartoon – places it at some distance from Clausen’s other drawings of the period).

Fired by his new environment Clausen reworked an early watercolour of mowers in oil for the Academy of 1892 and painted a sweeping landscape of harvesters at work in the nearby fields – a new motif that would gradually emerge several years later. His only reference to Rose at this point was a small half-length, Brown Eyes, (Tate Britain), held over from Cookham days to be shown in 1892. Then six years later around 1898, his thoughts returned to her when he gave two of his earlier studies to friends (A Village Girl - Rose Grimsdale was inscribed to R Crafton Green in 1896 and the following year, Girl in a Field was inscribed to the sculptor, Goscombe John). Now Noon in the Hayfield was resumed, the background resolved and the viewpoint moves in closer to the figure (Noon in the Hayfield was completed at the point when Clausen terminated his contract with the Goupil Gallery and a gap occurs in his accounts). The sky is excluded and the figure placed at right angles to the shade of the trees, creates a zig-zag of space that dramatizes the girl’s healthy sun-burned complexion, while her dress cuts the right edge of the canvas. Clausen’s palette now reflects the full richness of midsummer. It had taken years - and the repeated narrative of a moment’s respite during the hay harvest to arrive at this summation. Other attempts to reach the high point of Noon in the Hayfield were less successful. Summer in the Fields, begun in 1898 remained unresolved and the setting revisited in In the Apple Orchard, perhaps designed as a companion piece, was treated more summarily than that in the present picture.

Clausen’s long gestation of the resting haymaker had, for all its suave naturalism, resulted in one of his most taut and tested compositions. Rest, reverie and the sunlit glow of field and wild flowers combine to produce one of the most satisfying visions of the English countryside at the end of the nineteenth century.

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