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

Eric Asprey (1902-1988), circa 1950,

thence by descent to the present owner.

This delightfully direct study of a young girl embodies the rustic realism of Clausen’s art in which he represented the farm-workers and their children without sentimentalising them. It has a similar honesty to the portraits Clausen made of his own children in the 1880s and the studies of farm-girls of the 1890s painted in and around his home at Cookham Dene. This child, of perhaps twelve years of age, is dressed in a simple mauve smock, her hair drawn back casually and there is no artifice to her expression. She appears to be the same model depicted in the oil A Cottage Girl of 1893.¹ In 1892 Clausen had painted a half-length picture of a local girl named Rose Grimsdale, with the title Brown Eyes, now in the Tate, and although the model for the present sketch is not Rose, the watercolour is clearly a continuation of the theme of brown-eyed children painted at close-quarters as a celebration of youth.

1. K. McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Country Life, 2012, p. 109, plate 169