George Clausen – my daily art display

British Victorian Art and the Maas Gallery, London. Part 2.

My second blog continues to look at some of the Victorian paintings which were on show at the Maas Gallery in London.

*The Last Song of the Girondins by Claude Andrew Calthrop (1868)*

The first painting I am displaying in Part 2 is one by the English artist Claude Andrew Calthrop. Calthrop was born in Deeping St Nicholas, near Spalding, Lincolnshire, on December 20th 1844, the youngest son of James Thompson Calthrop, a farmer and grazier, and his wife, Edna (née Knowles). Calthrop attended the Merchant Taylors’ School, in the City of London, but, by 1861, had transferred to King’s College School. From there, he then studied art at Lambeth School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, where in December 1864, he was awarded a silver medal for the best drawing from life and a gold medal and a scholarship for £50 for the best historical painting, a biblical one, depicting a subject from the Book of Job. He went on to exhibit at the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy. At first, Claude Calthrop concentrated on history paintings depicting episodes of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Later he changed to depictions of contemporary life, portraiture and genre scenes.

Today’s painting, Last Song of the Girondins, was completed and submitted by Calthrop to the Royal Academy exhibition in 1868. It depicts a scene from the French Revolution and the Jacobins, an anti-Royalist grouping formed mainly of two prominent parliamentary factions, the Montagnards, lead by Robespierre and the Girondins lead by Jacques-Pierre Brissot. The Montagnards referred to those who occupied the higher benches in both the Jacobin club and the national legislature. Those who sat on these high benches were generally more radical in their ideology and their policies, while those who sat further down were usually more moderate. The conflict between the Girondins and Montagnards came to a head in the spring of 1793. The catalyst for this was the trial of Louis XVI

*Detail from* *The Last Song of the Girondins by Claude Andrew Calthrop*

The two factions fell out and in 1793, the Girondins were charged with conspiring against the Republic by the Montagnards. They were all immediately found guilty in a show trial, and just before midnight on the October 30th 1793, they were sentenced to death. The following morning, the twenty-one convicted men were taken by cart from the dungeons of the Conciergerie to the guillotine. Defiant to the end, the prisoners, led by Brissot, started to sing the Marseillaise and as each was beheaded, the sound of the song dwindled to silence, until the very last Girondin was executed. The twenty-one died in a space of thirty-six minutes and this heralded in the Reign of Terror.

Of Calthrop’s painting, the art critic for Bell’s Weekly Messenger, described it as:

“…a more difficult scene to portray could scarcely have been chosen; but he has given individuality to each character, whilst he has managed the processional grouping with an ease which says much for his appropriate idea of detail. The manner, too, in which the general scheme is worked out by means of a happy blending of colour, is also appropriate. The handling is minute, without being laboured; and the tone, kept down, to represent the vault from which the prisoners are about to emerge, is as sober as the scene is sad. We shall expect, after such a specimen as this, to note Mr C Calthrop’s rise in his profession…”

*Ruskin in his Turret Brantwood* *by William Collingwood*

William Gershom Collingwood, a writer and artist, was born in Liverpool in 1854. He had always liked the Lake District and had accompanied his father there on sketching tours. He received his early education at Liverpool College and at the age of eighteen went to University College, Oxford, where he first met John Ruskin. During the summer of 1873 Collingwood visited Ruskin at his Lake District house, Brantwood. Ruskin had bought the somewhat dilapidated house in Coniston in August 1871. Brantwood was Ruskin’s main home from 1872 until his death in 1900. Ruskin oversaw many renovations to Brantwood including adding a turret to his bedroom which gave him a panoramic view of the lake

Later Collingwood was working at Brantwood with Ruskin and his associates. Ruskin was impressed with Collingwood’s draughtsmanship, and so he influenced Collingwood to study at the Slade School of Art between 1876 and 1878. Collingwood exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1880. For many years Collingwood dedicated his life to helping Ruskin and lived at Branston, taking on the role as Ruskin’s personal assistant. In 1883 Collingwood married Edith Mary Isaac and the couple lived close to Ruskin in the Lake District. Collingwood went on to edit many of Ruskin’s texts and published a biography of Ruskin in 1893.

*Michelangelo Nursing his Dying Servant by Frederic, Lord Leighton* *(c.1862)*

In this 1857 watercolour painting by Frederic, Lord Leighton, we have a depiction a young man supporting and comforting an older man. It is a tender and compassionate scene. The old man, a servant, is Urbino and the benevolent person with his arm around the old man’s shoulder is his master, Michelangelo. Leighton has fashioned the depiction similar to many religious depictions of The Deposition, the cradling of the dead Christ after being brought down from the cross. A number of years later Leighton completed a copy of the work in oils.

This is an unfinished watercolour portrait of Kathleen Newton by the French painter James Tissot. She was his favourite model who also became his lover. The story of artist and model is fascinating and I covered it in my blog, James Tissot and Kathleen Newton ten years ago.

This watercolour is thought to be a preliminary sketch which Tissot used when he worked on his painting entitled Quiet. This was one of Tissot’s most famous pictures of Kathleen and it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881. Kathleen is depicted sitting on a bench in the garden at Tissot’s house in Grove End Road with one of her children and a pet dog. The depiction of Kathleen in Quiet shows her in a similar pose as in the unfinished watercolour sketch.

My next offerings were paintings by the prolific English Victorian painter William Lionel Wylie, an artist of maritime themes which he painted in both oils and watercolours.

William Lionel Wyllie, better known as W.L.Wylie, who was born on July 5th 1851 at 67 Albany Street, Camden Town, London. He was the elder of two sons of a prosperous minor-genre painter, French-born English William Morrison Wyllie, who at the time of the birth of his son, was living in London. His younger brother Charles William Wylie was also a talented painter. William Jnr. received a first-class artistic education, studying firstly at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, and then in 1866, when he was aged fifteen, at the Royal Academy Schools, where he studied under some of the great artists of the time like Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais and Frederic Leighton.

*Dawn After a Storm by W.L.Wylie (1869)*

His artistic talent showed through with his 1869 painting entitled Dawn After a Storm which won him the Turner Gold Medal. He was just eighteen years old.

*Landing the Catch, Portel Sands by W.L. Wylie (1875)*

William Wylie submitted his painting Landing the Catch, Portel Sands, in 1875. Wylie who had success at submitting his work to the Royal Academy’s Exhibitions the previous years was horrified and disillusioned to have his work rejected by the Exhibition jurists. It was the first time this had happened to him in seven years. He swore that he would give up painting and go off to sea.

His parents once had a summer home at Wimereux, a coastal town just north of Boulogne and just to the south was Portel Sands which is depicted in his painting. This painting depicts fishermen landing their catch on the beach at low tide. The scene is lit up by the blazing sun overhead.

*Shrimpers Hauling to Windward* *by W.L. Wylie*

Wylie’s painting entitled Shrimpers Hauling to Windward is a small work (58 x 71 cms) and is looked upon as one of Wylie’s masterpieces of maritime art. It appeared at the Royal Academy in 1905. It is a work full of movement, air, and light. It depicts a sea reach, which is the last bit of river before it meets the sea. To the right we see the submerged mud bank. The last of the shrimper fleet heads towards land, hard on the starboard tack in the channel, battling against both wind and the current, whilst the leading boats have already made it to the inner harbour and protection against the elements.

*The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 by W.L. Wylie*

Wylie’s small painting featuring the Shrimpers which was shown at the Royal Academy in 1905, was overshadowed by another of Wyllie’s works, the monumental (148 x 272 cms) painting of Trafalgar on the centenary of the battle. The art press and critics alike stated that this large maritime depiction ‘stole the show’.

*A Walk in the Country by John Ritchie (1863)*

Little is known about the artist who created the painting above, simply entitled A Day in the Country. The artist is John Ritchie and we know he is Scottish and was born around 1821. The difficulty in unearthing facts about his life is strange as he did exhibit his work at such hallowed establishments as the Scottish Academy, Liverpool Academy and the Royal Academy in London. He began to exhibit his work in 1840 when he was nineteen years old. One of the artists who influenced Ritchie was John Brett (see earlier painting in Part 1). His painting, A Day in the Country, was exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1863 and depicts a farmer taking a stroll on his land and checking on the forestry management with, in the middle-ground, some of his workers hauling away a felled tree. In the foreground we see the exposed roots of a large old oak tree. Rabbits have nibbled at the roots and the bark and have burrowed under the sandy bank beneath the tree. Besides checking on the tree-felling he is carrying a shotgun and is also hunting the rabbits that are damaging his trees. To the left we see one of his men collecting the body of a rabbit his boss has killed.

The painting above is by George Clausen, an artist I have dedicated two blogs to back in 2015. This work is his beautiful and sensitive portrait of a young woman which he completed in 1895 and originally it was entitled Pensive but later was given the name Cinderella on the behest of David Croal Thomson, an Edinburgh-born art dealer and critic, who was based mainly in London, managing the London branch of the prestigious Goupil Gallery. Thomson advised Clausen that such a change of name would add a touch of romanticism to the work. The painting was shown at the New Gallery in 1896 and the critic for the Pall Mall Gazette praised the work saying that Clausen had captured a creature exquisitely tender in nature. The girl who modelled for the painting was Lizzie Deller a girl from Widdington, Essex.

Although the exhibition at the Maas Gallery has finished by the time you read these two blogs, I just wanted to remind you of the benefits one gets when you call in and look around these private “selling” galleries.

Sir George Clausen. Part 1. Rustic Naturalism and the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage

Sir George Clausen (Self Portrait) — Sir George Clausen
(Self Portrait)

There is something very intriguing about “–isms” when talking about genres in art. We are all aware of them common ones such as realism, impressionism, cubism, etc. In fact I have an art history book about “-isms”. Today I want to introduce you to another “-ism” which is not mentioned in the knowledgeable tome. It is ruralism, often referred to as Rural Naturalism, an art genre through which artists pictorially champion life away from the grime of cities and, through their paintings, exalts life in the countryside. One of the great exponents of ruralism is the subject of my next two blogs, the English painter, Sir George Clausen.

George Clausen was born 8 William Street, Regents Park, London in April 1852, the son of Jorgen Johnsen and Elizabeth Clausen. His father, an artist and interior decorator, was of Danish extraction and his mother was of Scottish descent. Up until the age of fourteen and a half, George attended St Mark’s School in Kings Road Chelsea. In 1867, three months before his fifteenth birthday he started a five year apprenticeship in the Chelsea drawing office of Messrs. Trollope, a firm of interior decorators. During this period he was trained in drawing by John Cleghorn, whose job title was a copyist and limner, an old term for a painter of ornamental decoration, a book illustrator or somebody who illuminates manuscripts. Cleghorn had an artistic background having studied at The Royal Academy Schools. George Clausen had a thirst for artistic knowledge and to supplement Cleghorn’s tuition, also attended evening classes at the National Art Training School, South Kensington, which in 1896, would become the Royal College of Art. One of the jobs Clausen was involved in was to decorate the home of the English genre, history, biblical and portrait painter, Edwin Long. Clausen’s boss, an Irish man called Brophy, gave Clausen the task to paint some lilies on the panels of a door in Edwin Long’s house. Clausen remembered this time and it must have made an impression on him, for sixty years later in his Autobiographical Notes which appeared in the Spring 1931 edition of the Artwork magazine he recalled the time:

“…Long looked at my work and said ‘May I see your sketchbook?’ He gave it back to me and said ‘Did you ever think of becoming an artist?’ I said ‘Yes, but I saw no opportunity of getting the training.’ Long said ‘I think you’d have a chance. And if I were you I’d try for a scholarship at South Kensington.’ Brophy readily agreed. I had already taken medals in design, and I was worked up in my spare time, and obtained a two years’ scholarship in decorative painting at £50 a year!…”

Clausen was not enamoured by the training he received during the two year course at South Kensington School of Art. He believed that there was not enough teaching and lacked structure as students were left to get on with things themselves.

The Baylonian Marriage Market by Edwin Long (1875)

He did however keep in contact with Edwin Long and did a lot of research work for him with regards some of Long’s large biblical paintings. Long would pay Clausen for his help and also tutored him. Long realised that Clausen’s artistic ability needed to be carefully nurtured and believed, for Clausen to receive the best artistic tuition, he needed to leave England and move to Antwerp and attend the Antwerp Academy of Art.

George Clausen accepted the advice and travelled to Holland and Belgium and for a short period enrolled at the Antwerp Academy where he studied under the tutelage of Professor Joseph van Lerius. His sketches and paintings around this time were heavily influenced by Dutch subjects such as the coastal fishing villages and he exhibited a number of these at the Dudley Gallery, which was originally located in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London. It was completed in 1812 and financed by Earl of Dudley to house his valuable collection of pictures during the erection of his own gallery at Dudley House in Park Lane. It was known for its promotion of French and Dutch artists.

High Mass at a Fishing Village on the Zuyder Zee, Holland by George Clausen (1876)

One example of Clausen’s “Dutch period” was his small (47 x 84 cms) oil on canvas painting entitled High Mass at a Fishing Village on the Zuider Zee, which he completed in 1876 and is part of the Nottingham Castle Museum collection. The work was the result of a summer holiday Clausen had taken to the island of Marken, in the Zuider Zee, with his friend and fellow artist Dewey Bates. They had visited the village of Volendam on a Sunday, where there was a celebration of a High Mass. The mass was so well attended that the church was full and many parishioners were left outside. In the painting we see into the fully occupied church as well as a group of fishermen with their wives and children kneeling on the cobbled street outside the main entrance door.

The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy, the first work he had ever submitted to the prestigious establishment, and the art critic of The Times, seeing the work of art and Clausen’s name immediately believed he was a Dutch artist painting a scene from his homeland and wrote :

“…a very clever Dutch painter, hitherto only known in this country by two drawings exhibited at the Dudley Gallery…”

The art critic of the Spectator was full of praise writing:

“…a quiet thoughtful picture, in every sense of the word. A work of true art and deep feeling…”

Whilst in Europe George Clausen made many visits to Paris. His paintings around this time showed that he had been influenced by the likes of Whistler and William Quiller Orchardson, a well loved Scottish portraitist and painter of domestic and historical subjects. He was also very interested in the rustic natural depictions of the Scottish artist John Robertson Reid and Léon Augustine Lhermitte, a French realist painter, whose primary subject matter was of rural scenes depicting the peasant worker.

In 1880 Clausen exhibited his work La Pensée at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. It was a difficult depiction for an artist with the model seated in an interior. The figure is not seated parallel to the plane of the picture and the rear wall. It is a work of art full of detail. Look at the right background and you can see the edge of an elaborate chimney piece. In the left background there is a drop leaf table and on the floor a goat skin rug. The lady sits upright in the chair looking out at us whilst grasping a knot of violets in her right hand which rests in her lap. This is the key to the title of the painting (Thought). Here is a lady lost in thought about her lost love.

Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill by George Clausen (1881)

Clausen often used this model for his paintings and one I particularly like featuring her was completed in 1881 and entitled a Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill. It was exhibited at that year’s Royal Academy exhibition. This London street scene was an ambitious work featuring not just the main female model, who walks along the street accompanied by a small child, but a number of other characters some at rest, some at work, including labourers digging up the cobbles in the road and, directly behind the main character, a flower seller.

Les Foins by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1877)

When Clausen exhibited La Pensée at the Grosvenor Gallery amongst his fellow exhibitors was Jules Bastien-Lepage who was exhibiting nine paintings, including Les Foins (Haymaking), which depicts resting haymakers. This painting had been exhibited at the Salon in 1878. Clausen, like the critics, were enthralled by this work of rural or rustic naturalism. Clausen shortly after moved to the countryside and went to live in the Hertfordshire village of Childwick Green. He later wrote in his 1931 Autobiographical Notes about his new surroundings and the new opportunity and challenges it gave him as a painter

“…One saw people doing simple things under good conditions of lighting: and there was always a landscape. And nothing was made easy for you: you had to dig out what you wanted…”

Soon his sketchbooks were full of sketches and paintings depicting workers in the countryside surrounding his house. One of Clausen’s first works depicting labourers in the fields was completed in 1882 and was entitled The Gleaners. The work was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1882. It was greeted with great acclaim by the critics and art reviewers. In Vol. V 1881-2 of The Magazine of Art, the reviewer wrote about how Clausen sympathetically depicted the labourers:

“…He shows us a little company of the poor not in picturesque rags but in garments of fact, gleaning modern English fields…”

Pauvre Fauvette by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1881)

In 1881 Bastien-Lepage completed a work entitled Pauvre Fauvette. He often painted the peasants from the town he was living in at the time, Damvillers which is situated in north-eastern France. In his painting we see a very small young girl, the ‘little wild girl’ of the painting’s title. Her job is to patiently and quietly guard a cow, which we see on the other side of the tree. In a way it is a depiction of isolation in the way the artist has depicted the small child, even dwarfed by the tall thistles. She stands alone next to a leaf-less tree surrounded by a very barren landscape. It is a pitiful depiction and we note her haunted and sad eyes and the way she tries to cover herself up and keep herself warm in a threadbare blanket leads us to believe it could have been a cold winter’s day.

The Stone Pickers by George Clausen (1887)

The next work I am featuring was also probably influenced by Bastien-Lepage’s work above. It was one which Clausen began in the autumn of 1886 and completed in 1887. It was entitled The Stone Pickers. On completion Clausen sent it to Goupil, the art dealer and in 1887 it was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, London and also appeared at the second New English Art Club exhibition of 1887. It is now housed at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. The model for the painting was Polly Baldwin and the setting was at Cookham Dene. Look how in this work the girl has sacking wrapped around her lower body to keep her warm, similar to the attire of the child in Bastien-Lepage’s painting. Stone pickers were sent out into the fields to pick up loose stones prior to ploughing. In Clausen’s painting we see a young girl depositing stones, which she had picked up, on to a pile. In the background we see another woman bent down picking up stones from the field. One can only imagine what a backbreaking and tedious job the women had to endure. Many artists of the time liked to depict hard working labourers/peasants at work in the fields, This was the essence of rustic realism or rustic naturalism. Look at the expression on the young girl’s face as she looks down at the pile of stones. It is a sad and almost haunted expression. Behind her there is a can containing water and a wicker basket containing food for her lunch. Our eyes are drawn to this area because of the red colour of what could be a table cloth.

In my next blog I will complete Clausen’s life story and have a look at some more of his works of art.