Tampilkan postingan dengan label George Clausen. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label George Clausen. Tampilkan semua postingan
Jumat, 04 Mei 2012
Senin, 23 Januari 2012
Minggu, 22 Januari 2012
Jumat, 13 Januari 2012
George Clausen - A moment's rest
Price Realized
£37,250
($57,551)
signed 'G. Clausen' (lower right), inscribed and dated 'G CLAUSEN./1882' (on the reverse) and inscribed and dated '...1882/Childwick Green ST. A...' (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
18 x 13 in. (45.7 x 33 cm.)
When Clausen moved to Childwick Green, near St Albans in the Autumn of 1881, his work changed fundamentally. The Hampstead street scenes and interiors ceased and his entire production was given over to recording the life of the fields. 'One saw people doing simple things', he later recalled, 'under good conditions of lighting... Nothing was made easy for you: you had to dig out what you wanted' ('Autobiographical Notes', Artwork, no. 25, Spring 1931, p. 19, quoted in K. McConkey, Sir George Clausen RA 1852-1944, 1980, ex. cat., Bradford and Tyne and Wear Museums, p. 29). The first results of this liberating experience appeared in the following Spring when Gleaners (sold in these Rooms, 24 November 2004, lot 40) was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery where it was seen for the first time that Clausen had joined the mainstream of European rural naturalism, led by Jules Bastien-Lepage and then considered avant-garde. His friend, Dewey Bates, recalled that after his arrival in Hertfordshire, the painter was able to hold;
"a mirror up to nature whether it be in the delineation of a ploughed field, a weather-beaten, wrinkled woman of the fields, a ploughboy or a country maiden. He puts them before you with all the infinitely delicate effects of atmosphere, with the reality of truth, with the simplicity of nature. He expresses plainly the poetry, the charm, which he himself has discovered in the subtle colour and modelling of a labourer's face, in the pearly greys of a fallow field or a bit of stubble, even in the tints and tones of a smock-frock or a corduroy trouser".
(D. Bates, 'George Clausen ARA', The Studio, V, 1895, p. 7).
In his reference to the 'weather-beaten... woman of the fields', Bates was undoubtedly recalling one of Clausen's favourite models - a peasant woman who first appears in A Moment's Rest. Not only did she pose for the painter's important pictures such as Winter Work, Day Dreams, Flora, A Woman of the Fields and Labourers after Dinner, but the artist also photographed her as an aide-memoire for other compositions (K. McConkey, 1980, pp. 29-39).
A Moment's Rest was painted at a time when the experience of Bastien-Lepage's Les Foins (1880, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was fresh in Clausen's mind (K. McConkey, 'Un petit cercle de thuriféraires, Bastien-Lepage et la Grande-Bretagne', 4814, La revue du Musée d'Orsay, no. 24, Printemps 2007, pp. 20-33).
Bastien-Lepage's resting labourers were regarded as degraded humanity. For the young Clausen however, impressed by the writings of William Morris, the true degradation occurred in the metropolis. He believed that it was the painter's mission to present objectively a rural underclass by whose toil human life was sustained. In this he had a second powerful visual source in Jean-François Millet who was ever reminded of physical toil as the common lot of the peasant. The first suggestion of this visual idea originates in A Moment's Rest.
Kamis, 22 Desember 2011
Rabu, 21 Desember 2011
Jumat, 09 Desember 2011
George Clausen - Study of a young boy
Price Realized
£8,750
signed 'G. CLAUSEN' (centre left)
coloured chalks on buff paper
13¾ x 10¼ in. (35 x 26 cm.)
The present pastel is a study of the boy holding a winnowing fan in Clausen's largest and most celebrated barn interior - The Golden Barn, 1901 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). Back in 1895 he had shown The Farmer's Boy (Tate Britain) at the Royal Academy and found that despite obvious comparisons with Jean-François Millet's The Winnower, 1853-7 (Museé d'Orsay, Paris), his Rembrandtesque interior was applauded and promptly purchased by his most important patron, Sharpley Bainbridge. Unlike the original winnower of 1895, the boy in The Golden Barn holds his fan to his right and looks down to the left, as in the present vigorous study. Other studies in the Walker Art Gallery, the Royal Academy and Plymouth Art Gallery are not fully signed and are less finished than the present example - suggesting perhaps that the painter hoped to exhibit it independently.
George Clausen - Haymakers
Price Realized
£61,250
signed 'G. Clausen' (lower left)
oil on canvas
14 x 18 in. (35.5 x 45.7 cm.)
George Clausen grew up in an age dominated by images of harvesters returning from the fields at sunset. One of the most popular prints of his day was Robert Walker Macbeth's engraving after George Heming Mason's Harvest Moon, 1872 (Tate), a picture of romantic field workers bearing scythes, returning to their cottages at nightfall. As a young man Clausen had studied treatments of this theme in the work of the great French painter of rural life, Jean-François Millet. He then graduated to contemporaries such as Léon L'hermitte and Jules Bastien-Lepage - painters for whom the elegaic poetry of the 1860s and 70s gave way to the naturalistic prose of the 1880s.
This was also a time when the old exploitative 'gang labour' system in the Home Counties was overtaken by the spread of agricultural unions. The accompanying unrest in the countryside coincided with the growing popularity of mechanized farming. Clausen had celebrated the old manual methods in his Mowers, 1891 (Usher Gallery, Lincoln), a formidable depiction of harvesters at work in a midsummer meadow.1 With this canvas he publicly declared his shift towards the broken colour and atmospheric effects of the Impressionists, achieved, in the first instance, in the rich textures of pastel (see lot 110). Monumental pictures of harvesters and reapers continued, but it was only in 1898, in A Farmyard, shown at the first International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers' exhibition, that he stepped back to give greater consideration to the working farms which surrounded his family home at Widdington in Essex.2
These ancient clusters of cottages, barns and byres came to represent the ideal social microcosm, at a time when radical thinkers were beginning to express doubts about the concentration of labour in cities, and its moral and physical effect on the health and strength of the nation. The neighbourliness and communal working found in the fields embody values that had been eroded. In this context the haymakers' farewell in the present work, takes on a significance that is more than incidental. It is late afternoon; evening light threading through the foliage, casts long shadows across the lane in the foreground; a reaper and his boy enter the sunlit farmyard; their companion, carrying his scythe across his shoulder and his cider-jar in his hand, turns to bid goodbye.
Clausen painted Haymakers around 1908. Its subject matter and technique suggest comparison with A Farmyard (fig. 1). In this instance a lone reaper looks back at the spectator as he heads for home.
Although formats differ, the mise-en-scène is essentially the same - with figures approaching from the right, sunlight striking the framing trees on the left and farm buildings in the background. The scale of the two canvases also indicates that Clausen was working for a new kind of patron and that the era of large Academy pieces, designed for municipal collections, was drawing to a close. These smaller works were destined for private collectors, those who might visit his third solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1909.3
1 See Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen RA, 1852-1944, 1980 (exhibition catalogue, Bradford and Tyne and Wear Museums), pp. 62-3.
2 The Farmyard, sold Christie's, London, 28 November 1996, lot 146, was to be Clausen's only exhibit at the International Society.
3 Clausen left the Goupil Gallery after his first solo exhibition in November 1902 and held his second solo show with the Leicester Galleries (Ernest, Brown and Phillips) two years later.
We are grateful to Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in the preparation of this catalogue entry.
Jumat, 04 November 2011
Sir George Clausen - Planting a Tree
Price Realized
£67,250
oil on canvas
14 x 11¾ in. (35.6 x 29.9 cm.)
Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen RA, 1852-1944, 1980 (exhibition catalogue, Bradford and Tyne and Wear Art Galleries and Museums), no 52 (illustrated in cat p. 49).
By the end of July 1887 Goupil and Co had successfully placed George Clausen's painting of woodcutters, The End of a Winter's Day, with Roland Knoedler's dealership in New York. The picture, a Grosvenor Gallery exhibit, showing an old man and boy returning heavily laden from the woods at dusk, was highly praised.1 A year later the request came for a further picture, this time showing men planting a tree. Clausen immediately started planning a composition in which three figures, ranged parallel to the picture plane are working to the rear of farm buildings. This highly satisfactory arrangement to some extent emulates Jean-François Millet's Le Greffeur of 1855 (Private Collection, USA) a picture showing a peasant grafting a fruit tree close to his rustic homestead, watched over by his wife and baby. A visual connection was established immediately between human fertility and arboreal husbandry. Although Clausen increasingly admired Millet's work, it was that of an earlier generation, more tolerant of obvious sentimentality.2
Modern representations of fieldworkers by his contemporaries, eschewed Millet's old master tonalities in favour of documentary accuracy. In Clausen's case the passive observer has become a man leaning on his spade, rather than a mother and child. On the right, an old rustic in a smock holds the sapling, while a boy wearing a vivid red scarf covers the roots with soil. It is an everyday event of no special significance. Eight years earlier, when he encountered the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Clausen had been among the first to realize that sentiment, if present at all, should emerge from the simulation of a real life encounter and, as he wrote in 1888, figures should be 'placed before us in the most satisfying completeness, without the appearance of artifice, but as they live: and without comment, as far as possible on the author's part'.3 The simplest of programmes therefore, guided the conception of Planting a Tree, from the present study to its final completion.
In an intermediate drawing (Royal Academy of Arts, London) Clausen dispensed with the background figure. While their positions were unaltered in the final canvas, the man on the right is younger and now holds a spade. However, the most dramatic alteration is to the setting. Farm buildings have been replaced by an open landscape in which spatial transitions from foreground to background are carefully managed (1888, Private Collection).4
As we might expect, a greater speed and shorthand characterizes the oil sketch. Indeed the subsequent alterations to setting and figures place it at some distance from the larger work. In this sense, it can almost be considered as an independent version of the subject. In an exciting way, it demonstrates a thought process. It lengthens the human chain from boy to man, to old man, taking its cue from The End of a Winter's Day. It also reminds us that nature in the fertile fields of Berkshire, must be managed, and that planting in the right place, for the rustic, was as important as thinning and cutting.
1 For further reference see Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen, RA, 1852-1944, 1980 (exhibition catalogue, Bradford and Tyne and Wear Museums), pp. 35-7. The picture, shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885, was entered in Goupil's stock book on 29 March 1887 and was sold to Knoedler four months later on 20 July. Knoedler's client, the eventual owner and present location of The End of a Winter's Day, remain obscure.
2 Around this time the painter acquired a series of etchings and prints after Millet's work.
3 George Clausen, 'Bastien-Lepage and Modern Realism', Scottish Art Review, vol 1, 1888, p. 114.
4 Planting a Tree was sold Sotheby's 11 December 2007. Clausen's account book and the Goupil stock book indicate that the picture was delivered on 29 December 1888.
K Mc
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