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

Captain John Edmund Audley Harvey
Lord Blanesborough
The Royal Caledonian Schools
Christie's, London, 18 July 1969, lot 2

London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, English Art, 1900 (as Twilight - October)
London, The Mall Galleries, This Land is Our Land: Aspects of Agriculture in English Art, January 1989, no.461c (as Digging Potatoes at Sunset)

‘English Art in 1900’, London Daily News, 12 November 1900, p.6;
AJ Finberg, ‘Captain Audley Harvey’s Collection’, The Art Journal, 1911, p. 99 (illus. as The Potato Patch: October Twilight);
The Duchess of Devonshire, Chatsworth, The House, London, 2002, p.161 (illustrated) and p. 165;
Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen, The Rustic Image, 2012 (exhibition catalogue, The Fine Art Society, London), p.50 (illus. as Twilight, October).

Original canvas. There are some areas of craquelure in areas of the lower half of the picture, and some in the branches of the tree in the sky. These appear stable. The surface also appears slightly dirty, otherwise the work is generally in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals an opaque varnish but no signs of retouching. Held in a simple gilt plaster frame.
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In the stillness of an autumn evening, a man is burning stubble while his companion turns the soil on a vegetable patch. Resting nearby a young woman has discarded her hoe. It falls at an angle to the potato drills, taking the eye into the space of the allotment in George Clausen’s The Potato Patch: October Twilight. Around 1900 Clausen’s paintings of country allotments were both topical and timeless. For one hundred years, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the population drift from country to city had been relentless – to the point when, in the 1890s, legislation was introduced to provide garden plots for rural workers on poor wages, in the hope that being able to grow much of their own food, they would be encouraged to remain on the land. As in Scotland and Ireland, there was a heavy reliance on potatoes and other root crops harvested in October.

Clausen was already familiar with this phase of the agricultural year, having moved to Widdington in Essex some ten years earlier. During these years, his reputation had steadily grown and he was now an Associate of the Royal Academy. As such he was one of thirty-eight painters invited to contribute to Thomas Agnew’s special survey exhibition of ‘English Art in 1900’ in November of that year – the proceeds of its admission charges being donated to the Artists’ General Benevolent Fund. Here critics commented on the ‘poetic side of rustic life’ represented in Twilight-October that was in stark contrast to the prosaic classicism of Lawrence Alma Tadema. This sense of field labour conducted in a well-conceived evening light had been evident to some degree in Allotment Gardens (Private Collection), Clausen’s major Royal Academy canvas of 1899, which describes the new social phenomenon. Closely related to this work and showing the same three figures, the present canvas confirms that tillage of their own soil was evening work conducted only when the rustic’s bonded labour for his master had been completed. It was thus, a marginal activity, in more senses than one.

Clausen’s first observation of the potato harvest had resulted in the naturalistic essay, Gathering Potatoes (Private Collection), painted on a trip to northern France in 1887. Being the principal apologist for Salon Naturalism in Britain, he was aware of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Saison d’octobre, récolte des pommes de terre, 1879 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), a definitive contemporary treatment of the subject in France. However, during the intervening years when home-grown produce became such an important issue for rural families, Clausen’s work had embraced Impressionism, with a stronger interest in ambient light and a more mature approach to the spatial envelope.

After its showing in Agnew’s, Twilight - October was placed in the important collection of Captain John Edmund Audley Harvey at Ickworth Bury in Bedfordshire. Harvey would go on to acquire Clausen’s Sons of the Soil (Private Collection) from the Royal Academy in 1901. When his collection was described in an essay by AJ Finberg, the writer singled out the present picture for special praise, finding that ‘beauty and glamour of the dying day are rendered with extraordinary power and eloquence’ and he concluded that,  

It is a picture that one could live with and would influence one only for good. Its quietness and sincerity call for absolute surrender on the part of the spectator; its deep-felt beauty of thought and emotion calls up an atmosphere of holy calm and humble piety. The title of this beautiful picture is The Potato Patch: October Twilight.

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