Sir George Clausen, RA, RWS (British, 1852-1944)


An Autumn Morning, Ploughing signed and dated 'G. CLAUSEN. 1897' (lower left); signed, inscribed and dated 'AN AUTUMN MORNING-/PLOUGHING/G CLAUSEN/1897' (on the reverse)oil on canvas51 x 61.5cm (20 1/16 x 24 3/16in).
|ProvenanceCaptain John Audley Harvey; Sale, Christie's, 30 March 1928 (to A Tooth).The Fine Art Society, London (circa 1985).Pyms Gallery, London.Private collection, UK (acquired from the above).ExhibitedLondon, Royal Academy, 1897, no. 790.London, Fine Art Society, Spring '85, 1985, no. 7 (illustrated in colour). LiteratureRoyal Academy Illustrated, 1897, p. 130.Pictures of the Year, 1897 Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', 1897, p. 7 (illustrated).The Royal Academy, The Art Journal, 1897, p. 166 (illustrated p. 170).The Chronicle of Art - May, The Magazine of Art, 1897, p. 47.Ysanne Holt, British Artists and the Modernist Landscape, 2003, fig. 1, p. 12 (illustrated in colour). Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, Edinburgh, 2012, p. 120, (illustrated in colour, pl. 194, p. 119).On a day in 1884 George Clausen stood at the end of a field near St Albans, sketchbook in hand. A rapid note was made as the plough team approached and another, a back view, as it retreated to the far edge of the field (fig 1).It was a subject that extended the range of his admired French predecessors, Jules Bastien-Lepage and Jean-François Millet whose field-workers were for the most part, sowers and gleaners.1 As he was currently looking for a new house, witnessing this important phase in the farmer's year must be saved for later treatment when he and his family had moved to Cookham Dean.2 At length the subject returned on an impressive scale in the monumental Ploughing 1889 (Aberdeen Art Gallery), a picture exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery.3 However it did not end there. With a growing family, he was contemplating another, and this time, hopefully more permanent move. He had also reached an impasse in his work and had begun to realize that with documentary Naturalism, of which ploughing was a prime example, left little room for development. In the precise, scientific observation it demanded, the swinging movement in horses and ploughman must somehow be frozen in time, and the only way to scale tone and colour with complete verisimilitude was under the reduced light levels of a grey day. As a result, he and many contemporaries were experimenting with the fugitive effects of the Impressionists.These reflections would accompany him to his new larger house at Widdington, near Saffron Walden, where two new attempts to capture the inherent drama of this seasonal activity would be made. The first, Turning the Plough, (unlocated), shows a boy struggling to turn his team at the edge of a field, and the second, the present picture, a back view of an older ploughman guiding his plough-share in a straight line up a slight incline, as in Peter Henry Emerson's 'naturalistic' photograph. Ten years before Autumn Morning, Ploughing the dogmatic Dr Emerson had set out to do for photography what Clausen what doing in painting and their correspondence in the later 1880s has much to tell us about the transition from Naturalism to Impressionism that has so clearly been accomplished in the present work. 'What strikes me as much as anything', Clausen wrote to Emerson, 'is, how few men see atmosphere or get it in their out of doors pictures: how everything is bathed in light and air and yet how seldom is this conveyed!'4He wanted 'to find out what is essential and vital and hold on to that and let the rest go'. The impact on Emerson was immediate. Later published prints of A Stiff Pull show that the trees on the horizon were removed and the sky dramatized with lowering clouds (fig 2 and present lot). What is missing of course is the atmosphere that Clausen talked about - the glowing colour, and early morning freshness that he was able to achieve in the present work. Landscape is denuded of incidental trees and cottages and what we have, according to The Art Journal are 'charming passages of colour, with bay and grey horses, the yellow of the ploughman, and here and there a poppy, the whole being bathed in atmosphere'.5 Reproducing a photograph in comparison to the present work is not to imply equivalence. By 1897, for the painter, the abandoned plough had almost become a symbolic implement – a subject in itself, to be treated in drawings, paintings and in a rare etching (fig 3).6 An ancient instrument, its design had barely changed since Tudor times. Coupled with man and beast in the crystalline coolness of an autumn morning it expressed something elemental and critics, when Autumn Moring, Ploughing appeared in the Academy, seemed prepared to bypass so-called 'problem' pictures in its favour. This painter who once employed '... the square touch with its halo of French wickedness', was now, according to DS MacColl, finding delight in the 'natural beauty of flowering hayfields and sunlight upon reapers'.7 In the glowing colours of Impressionism, J-F Millet's message and the objectivity of Bastien-Lepage had not been sacrificed. However they seemed less important now that Clausen had found both his message and his metier. Celebrating the purchase of one of his pictures for the Art Gallery of Western Australia at this time, a writer in The Art Journal noted that he had 'watched' his 'English rustics' in all aspects of their lives, in order to make us 'feel what he felt and share in the impressions he received'.8 But there was more than this. Across the globe, in one of 'our most distant colonies', the essential 'Englishness' conveyed in virtuous labour, exemplified the good husbandry that maintained the empire. Scoring the Essex field for spring planting, Clausen's ploughman was preparing for a new dawn. We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.1 For a fuller account of Clausen's early career, see McConkey 2012.2 Clausen moved to Grove House, Cookham Dean in May 1885.3 For a fuller account see McConkey 2012, pp. 90-1.4 Quoted in Veronica Sekules and Neil McWilliam, eds, Life and Landscape, PH Emerson, Art and Photography in East Anglia, Exhibition Catalogue, University of East Anglia, 1986, p. 10.5 'The Royal Academy', The Art Journal, 1897, p. 166.6 McConkey, 2012, p. 11, figs 176 and 178.7 DS MacColl, 'Painting at the Academy' The Saturday Review, 22 May 1897, p. 572.8 Anon, 'The End of a Long Day', The Art Journal, 1898, p. 149.