Sir. George Clausen
Sir George Clausen
Sir George Clausen,
Came to live in Widdington Village in 1891-1905,
He rented Bishop Farm House
George Clausen RA 1852-1944.
1920s
Sir George ClausenBy Jenifer Brooke-Smith of widdington
by Jenifer Brooke-Smith
SIR GEORGE CLAUSENt.
He was educated at St. Mark's College in Chelsea until the age of 14, when he joined the drawing office of a firm of decorators in Kensington.
He attended evening classes at the National Art Training School in Kensington, which became the Royal College of Art, and won a national scholarship there in 1873.
Three years later he travelled to Holland and Belgium, and one of his pictures from that visit was his first work accepted by the Royal Academy for their annual exhibition. He was working both in oils and watercolours, and beginning to achieve recognition in both.
He made regular visits to the continent from then onwards, gaining in confidence and being influenced by many con- temporary artists, particularly Bastien-Lepage in Paris. He was especially drawn to working out of doors, depicting rural scenes and people, characterised by their strong light effects.
George Clausen married in 1881, and after moves to Childwick Green in Sussex, and Cookham Dean, he came to Widdington in 1891,
Left: 'The Girl at the Gate'. Tate Gallery.
Newport News, Summer 1997
35
This page, top: 'The Boy and the Man', painted by George Clausen in 1908. Bradford Art Gallery.
This page, below: 'The Shepherd Boy', 1883.
Opposite page, top: 'Ploughing', 1889. Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum.
Opposite page, below: 'The Return from the Fields', 1882.
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as a tenant of the Smith family at Bishops. He was drawn to the farming landscapes and people, and to the dramatic effects of light particularly achieved in the great barns of the district. He had five children to support, three sons and two daughters. During his time at Widdington, between 1891 and 1905, his sons attended Newport Grammar Shool, where William Waterhouse was then headmaster, of whom Clausen painted the portrait which still hangs in the school library.
Clausen's years spent in Widdington were very important in his development as a painter. He travelled widely on the continent and began exhibiting again at the Royal Academy, after some years of dis- enchantment with its current policy. He taught at the RA Life School, and by 1904 was Professor of Painting at the RA. His lectures were enormously popular and overcrowded, because he gave such down-to-earth practical advice to his pupils. He was described as 'quiet, modest, kindly and of courtly manners'.
At Martins Farm in Widdington there is a room with a large north-facing window, and it is believed Clausen used that room as a studio. He also had a wooden studio in the garden opposite Bishops which in 1905, the year Clausen moved from Widdington, he donated to the village as a Reading Room. There had been a Men's Club in the front room of Brick Cottage, owned in those days by the Canning family, but at a ceremony on 15th November 1905, the new Reading Room was opened on a new site where the village Hall now stands. The green wooden Men's Club, as it became, is still remembered by residents in the village.
The Reverend James Court was the Rector of Widdington then, whose portrait was also painted by Clausen and remains in the village in private hands. Clausen used his family and other local figures as models for his portraits and rural scenes; Miss June Francis, who lives in Widdington, knows that her grandmother was one of his subjects, and it seems certain that Prior's Hall Barn was an inspiration for his many pictures of Essex barns.
Because of his increasing commitments in London, and his daughters' schooling, Clausen moved to St. John's Wood in 1905. By then he was exhibiting one-man shows in London, Chicago, Brussels, Vienna and Munich (he was elected RA in 1908). He nevertheless continued his visits to our district right up until the war, staying at Deer's Farm in Clavering and the Revd. James Court was a member of the Duodecimos, as was Sir George (then Mr) Clausen himself; although not a founder-member he was their President by 1901.-Ed.
Newport News Summer 1997 exploring on a bicycle. A fine picture of a Clavering landscape hangs in the National Museum of Wales, in Cardiff.
In 1917, when Clausen was pushing his bicycle up Duton Hill near Dunmow he noticed a house for sale, then called Hillside. Having recently sold some pictures profitably he bought the house, and spent as much time as possible there in the following years and became much more involved in watercolour painting. He exhibited annually at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours and gained great respect for his variety of technique and degree of finish.
In 1918 the Ministry of Information commissioned him to do a large commemorative war painting at the Woolwich Arsenal. His 'In the Gun Factory' was an outstanding result, depicting once more the dark cavernous interiors he had learnt from his twenty years developing his technique in 'gloomy barns' as they have been described. He was then 66. After this success he received other commissions on the grand scale. In 1927 he was invited by the House of Commons to paint a mural for a section of wall in St Stephen's Hall. His meticulously researched subjects was 'The English People Reading Wycliffe's Bible' which was regarded as Clausen's most successful achievement; he was knighted shortly after its unveiling in 1927.
Clausen continued to draw and paint into his old age, exhibiting watercolours at the RA in 1942 and 1943. He died at the age of 92 in November 1944, eight months after the death of his wife. A self-portrait, painted in 1918, is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and several other of his works can be seen at the Tate Gallery in London, including 'The Girl at the Gate' which is today perhaps the best known of his rural landscapes.
[I am indebted to Mr Alan Calver, Mr David Fuller and Mrs Judith Rich for material in this article.]
Newport News, Summer 1997
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C Henry Warren, Essex in 1950
Page 141
Widdington to where the main Cambridge-London railway line runs under a bridge. There he would stand, leaning over the parapet, watching the trains come rattling past. When they had disappeared round the corner, under their plumes of smoke, so purposeful in their errand, so energetic, he would mutter: “Well, thank goodness there’s somebody doesn’t have to spend all his time in this benighted hole!” Then he would tramp contentedly up the hill to home again. Like Constable, too, he had a rare ability in the painting of skies and was fond of quoting Corot’s saying that, as a young man painting from nature, he used to wish the clouds would stay still, so that he might draw their forms, until one day he realised how good it was that they did not stay still, for the thing to express in clouds was their sense of movement. Inevitably this later Academician had illuminating things to say about Constable. In his Six Lectures on Painting, for instance, I find the following: “The work of Constable touches on smaller things (than Turner’s) and the more homely aspects of nature. He sees things at close quarters: his range is not so great. He felt the beauty of everyday nature, of trees and fields under the sky, and painted them with a clearness and a freedom from convention which were then new in art.” And, since almost any Essex man must surely appreciate especially Constable’s most characteristic Elim Tree, where one almost has the feeling that the rough bark would graze one’s knuckles, | will quote Clausen’s remarks in this particular connection. “I think (he says) one of the most difficult things in painting is to paint a tree. ... It is not so very difficult to copy a tree, but to paint it so as to make it live, to give us the impression of life that the tree gives us when we look at it in passing, is a thing that few can do well.”
A PORTRAIT by Widdington artist George Clausen, which was expected to fetch up to £0.5m at auction today (Wednesday, June 15) failed to find a buyer.
The Victorian oil of farm girl Emily Wright, from the village, was part of a sale at Christie’s in London and estimated to fetch at least £300,000.
Clausen originally sold the work for just £26 and five shillings. In his account book for 1894, Clausen noted he had sold “the little head of Emmy Wright” to Vernon Wethered.
According to the 1891 Census, Emily, or Emmy as she was affectionately known, was the eldest child of Widdington-born bricklayer Frederick Wright and his Clavering-born wife, Isabel, who lived at Main Street in the village.
She was about 13-years-old when the picture was painted by Clausen in 1894. In 1891, the Wrights had five children: Emily, 10: Nellie aged eight: six-year-old James; John aged four: and Fred junior who was two. By 1901,the Wrights had five more children and in the same census Emily was listed as "an assistant school teacher".
The Times Friday November 4, 1944
Death Notice
CLAUSEN :- On November 22, 1944, at Cold Ash, Newbury, Sir George Clausen, RA., aged 92. Funeral private. Memorial Service at St Martin-in-the-Fields at 2.30 p m on Friday December 1.
Sir George Clausen RA, RWS died yesterday at Cold Ash near Newbury at the house of his son-in-law Mr Thomas Derrick.
Obituary
George Clausen was born in London in 1852. His father of Danish extraction was a decorative artist, and the boy at eighteen became a draughtsman in a builders office. Thence he passed to the National School of Art (now the Royal College of Art) at South Kensington, and a few pages of “Recollections” which he published forty year later gave an interesting picture of the art education of those days. The technical training was good, but limited. Leighton and Millais were the models to be chiefly admired, but young Clausen and a few more were aware of Whistler, whom they saw in Chelsea, but never dared address. It is curious to read that for a time Clausen worked in the studio of Edwin Long, and in Paris in that of Bouguereau, artists with whom his work had nothing in common. By Millet, Corot, Degas, and Manet, however, Clausen was permanently influenced. This was evident in the pictures which he began to exhibit at Burlington House, in the late 70s; pictures of country life and landscape which impressed not only the public, but the senior artists with their sincerity, and keenness of observation, and their grasp of life and movement. He did good work in the Academy schools, where he was formerly Professor of Painting, and published in 1906 as “Six Lectures on Painting,” the sound and interesting discourses which he had delivered to students. Then he brought out “Aims and Ideals in Art,” a book in which he showed a remarkably sympathetic understanding of the as yet confused aims of the younger generation.
Clausen’s best paintings were always the fruit of a profound study of country life, of landscapes in sun and shade, of flowers, of work on the farm. His most remarkable characteristic was his power of growth. No other painter of his age responded so freely to the spirit of the times - and that without injury to the strongly personal character of his work. His later developments may be described as starting with the careful naturalism of “The Girl at the Gate,” purchased by the Chantrey Bequest in 1890 and now in the Tate Gallery, in a decorative and atmospheric direction, Working mostly in Essex, but also making use of his immediate surroundings in St John’s Wood, he was more concerned with conditions of light, a favourite of his being the prismatic play of colour when objects are seen against the sun. Clausen, however, differed from the French Impressionists by retaining integrity of form. Nobody excelled him in the capacity to suggest bulk and solidity in conditions when the actual features of landscapes were almost obliterated. Of his landscapes in this manner “The Gleaners Returning” in the Academy of 1898, was also bought by the Chantrey Bequest.
Barn interiors, paintings of the nude, and still life compositions were other characteristic subjects; and in all his work Clausen showed a poetical appreciation akin to that of Thomas Hardy, but without the abiding sense of tragedy of the relation of man to nature. His portraits were distinguished by a peculiar gravity, and include the self-portrait in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It was in his water-colours, contributed to the exhibitions of the Royal Water-Colour Society, of which he became a member in 1898, and at which he continued to exhibit until quite recently, that he showed his extraordinary youthfulness of mind. Bold in design, and swift and summary in execution, a collection of them at the Grosvenor Gallery about twenty years ago, suggested less the work of one already a veteran, than that of a young man in the full vigour of his powers. Clausen had a scholarly understanding of the special problems of mural decoration, and also turned his attention to posters, being one of the most successful Academicians invited by the LMS in 1927 to contribute designs. Adaptability was, indeed, one of his most prominent characteristics. His enlightened sympathy with “modernism” in art was generally recognized, and when the Academy began to open its doors to work of a more experimental kind, it generally fell to Clausen to arrange the contents of Gallery 1X, reserved for the less orthodox contributions..
Clausen, who became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1895, and an Academician in 1906, was knighted in 1927. In 1881 he married Agnes, the daughter of George Webster of Kings Lynn. She died in March this year. He is survived by three sons and a daughter. Another daughter, Katherine, who was an accomplished painter, died some years ago.
TO THE MEMORY OF GEORGE CLAUSEN Kt. R.A.
BORN APRIL 18th 1852. DIED NOV 22nd 1944
AND OF HIS WIFE AGNES MARY
BORN NOV 27th 1856. DIED MARCH 4th 1944
They came to this village during the War and died here
He would have chosen to rest in the Essex countryside
that he loved and painted. She would have chosen to be
wherever he was.
MAY THEY REST IN PEACE
Picture kindly supplied by Diana Thorley
Your website states that you are still working on the "Sir George Clausen" page and welcomes information; the following may be of some use in this regard:
The 1901 census shows the Clausen residence as Wises Farm, Widdington. This conflicts with the general view that the family rented the Bishop house from the Smith family between 1891 and 1905 (the Royal Academy's records, Jenifer Brooke-Smith's article and David Derrick's on-line blog refer). Only Agnes Clausen and the youngest child, Raymond John Clausen are shown living at Wises, however, together with their maid Mary Coe, a local girl. The two daughters (Meg and Kitty) were at school in Skipton and presumably the two older boys were away at other schools; George was visiting a colleague in London on the day of the census.
I know that the artist painted a picture of Wises (he called it Winzes) in 1905 and that he was Professor of Painting at the RA Schools from 1903 to 1906, meaning that he would have spent much of his time in London. Perhaps the Bishop house was too large for the reduced Clausen family at this time.
I hope that this information may be of some use.
Regards,
David Rayner
Wises Farm, c 1905
Emily "Emmy" Wright is named by George Clausen as the model for the young girl in "Evening Song", painted at Widdington in 1893. I recently had the opportunity to examine many studies in pastels for this picture which are held in the Royal Academy's archives, including a very fine study of the girl's face.
Since I wrote to you I have traced the 1901 census record for Emily Wright and I was pleased to discover that she was still living at home (25, The Village, Widdington) and her occupation is given as Assistant School Teacher. Emily must therefore be the young lady standing on the far right of your 1900 Widdington school photograph and on the left of the 1901 picture. She was born in 1881, making her about 12 when she posed for "Evening Song"; her small stature makes her look younger in both the painting and your photographs, taken when she was about 19 and 20. The census shows that her grandfather James Wright, retired from his position as the village shoemaker, was also at the same address - there were then four adults (including Emily) and seven children living there. I wonder if this is the same property as "Wright's Cottage".
Ten years earlier, Emily and her parents Frederick and Isabel Wright were living at Woodend Cottage, which does not appear in the 1901 census and may be one of several houses which were demolished before that date.
Thanks again for your assistance,
Regards,
Dave Rayner
If you would like to see the interior and exterior of Bishops Farm House, Then please see the old photo pages
Widdington Village Green
Pond Mead
Widdington Barn