Gleaners

Gleaners is a pivotal work in British painting in the 1880s. It is identified from Clausen's line drawing for illustration in Henry Blackburn's Grosvenor Notes, 1882 (Aberdeen Art Gallery). It reveals an important shift away from the limp aestheticism of the Grosvenor Gallery in which it was shown, towards a more challenging and rigorous recording of contemporary life in the countryside. Since it was founded in 1877, Sir Coutt Lindsay's Grosvenor Gallery has been popularly associated with the Aesthetic Movement. Within five years this project was beginning to run its course and The Illustrated London News critic was reporting that 'greeny yellery' seems 'under a cloud'1. At the same time, The Spectator was noticing that 'Pre-Raphaelitism is dying quickly, even in this, its latest retreat' and Lindsay's show in 1882 had been 'a sort of édition de luxe of the Royal Academy'2. By comparison to the current year's less good works by Burne-Jones, G.F. Watts and Holman Hunt, George Clausen's Gleaners signalled a new departure. It dismissed the sentimental idylls of Fred Morgan, Alice Havers and the followers of Fred Walker's 'Rustic School', and referred specifically to the more robust treatment of peasants in contemporary French painting. The Spectator wrote that 'A little, upright picture of George Clausen's called "Gleaners", should be noticed if only for its impressions of out-of-doors atmosphere. It is in that light key of colour that M. Bastien-Lepage generally affects'3.

This reorientation marks a fundamental change in the painter's circumstances. In 1881 George Clausen, newly married to Agnes Mary Webster, left the London suburb of Hampstead and took a house at Childwickbury, near St Albans. He later recalled that this move was a 'liberation' and that in the countryside 'One saw people doing simple things under good conditions of lighting ... Nothing was made easy for you: you had to dig out what you wanted'4. These remarks, although delivered with the benefit of hindsight, nevertheless express something of the sense of purpose in the move to Hertfordshire that Clausen confirmed in conversation at the close of the 1880s5. R.A.M. Stevenson, who interviewed the painter for an article in The Art Journal in 1890 noted that 'He thinks himself that it was not before 1881 that he began to do good work. That is to say, that only then did he begin to please himself and to express something of what he as an individual felt about the appearance of the world ... Like many French artists he thinks it necessary for the painter to live as much as possible as part of the life he paints, and to worry himself as little as he can with the politics and social conventions of other setes in society6.

His move to the country evidently gave Clausen the opportunity to overhaul the principles upon which he had been working. Factual accuracy, later supported by his own unposed photographs of fieldworkers, and consolidated by the experience of painting at the artists' colony at Quimperlé in the autumn of 1882, was the new criterion7. Arguably, even before he had moved to the countryside, Clausen's work had begun to change. He had gradually abandoned the Dutch scenes with which he had first come to the attention of the critics at the Royal Academy. The principal Hampstead canvases of 1880 and 1881 - A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, (Bury Art Gallery), Schoolgirls (Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven) and In the Street, (sold Christie's, London, 11 June 2003, lot 10) - all showed women in the recently constructed suburb, walking towards the spectator, engaging his or her eye. But this sham sophistication with its echoes of Tissot, began to pall in the light of Clausen's recent experience of French painting. Exhibiting at the Grosvenor back in 1880 he had the opportunity to study Bastien-Lepage's Les Foins (The Hay Harvest), 1878, (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

Nevertheless something of the directness of street encounters is retained in the present work, in the young woman who looks out from under the unwieldy bundle sheaves - one of his first in the new manner. Her kneeling companion in the immediate foreground is used for the prosaic purpose of explaining the activity. English gleaners wore stout felt hats to protect their heads and the sheaves were first tied and then wrapped in cloth to provide further protection, before being lifted on to the head or tucked under the arm. This was the work of a gang of women and children who would typically follow a row of male labourers with scythes8. Understanding the practice enables us to make distinctions and draw important conclusions about the fundamental changes in Clausen's work that Gleaners foretells.

If for instance, we look back to Val Prinsep's Home from Gleaning, 1875 (private collection) we see a very different approach to the subject. Prinsep's gleaners are all statuesque young women who stand out against the evening sky forming a Greek temple frieze. Classical and Biblican allusions are ever present. The spectator's eye is that of Boaz, singling out the comely Ruth, working in the fields of corn. Clausen dismisses such intentions. Prinsep, trained in the atelier Gleyre, was of course, anglicizing earlier precedents in French art. Jules Breton and Jean-François Millet for example, had both made their reputations in the 1850s with paysanneries - pictures of peasants working in fields. Breton's first factual treatment of the subject, The Gleaners: Courri/eeres, Pas de Calais, 1854 (National Gallery of Ireland), gives way to the hugely popular Recall of the Gleaners, Artois, 1859 (fig. 1, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), a work in which the central group was famously described as 'beautiful rustic caryatids'. If this was not enough, Clausen would have had the opportunity to study Breton's monumental over life-size, single barefoot Gleaner (Musée des Beaux Arts, Arras) at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878. In these the monumental gleaner bears her wheatsheaf or gerbe on her head. Breton in particular succumbed to classicizing tendencies, but had avoided the smooth sentiment of William-Adolphe Bouguerea9. The international reputation of these fêted Bretons was augmented by the fame later accorded to Millet's The Gleaners, 1857 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)10. Clausen had been a consistent admirer of Millet. Newly arrived in St Albans, reading Alfred Sensier's J-F Millet, Peasant and Painter, published simultaneously, he was evidently inspired over the winter of 1881-2 to modernize what was becoming a classic theme.

In doing so he would have reflected upon the most recent trends in British and French painting, exemplified by the work of John Robertson Reid and Jules Bastien-Lepage11. Reid's Toil and Pleasure, 1879 (Tate Britain), highlighted the dilemma of labourers whose work was disrupted by the local hunt. Although a narrative, Reid was alive to the need to represent contemporary conditions. Like Clausen he had probably seen Bastien's controversial rendering of resting haymakers, Les Foins, (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) first shown at the Salon in 1878. Clausen had the opportunity to study this canvas in detail in the featured group of nine works by the French painter at the Grosvenor Gallery summer exhibition of 1880, where he was also an exhibitor. He is likely to have been one of the 'little knot of worshippers', reported by the press, who congregated in front of Les Foins12. Its placing in the gallery popularly associated with the aesthetic movement and Burne-Jones, signalled a new departure which was only confirmed when the present work was shown two years later. What separates Bastien-Lepage, and contemporaries like Léon Lhermitte and Julien Dupré, from the work of Breton and Millet's generation is factual accuracy. A new topography of the fields and wild meadows, of foreground details and simple spatial recessions has replaced familiar landmarks and classic story-telling. And crucially, in Clausen as in Bastien-Lepage, there is the profound sense of a live confrontation. In The Scottish Art Review in 1888, Clausen defended the modern demand for objective accuracy. He wrote 'All his personages are 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'.

This was put even more succinctly a few years later when he declared 'He (Bastien-Lepage) paints a man and the man stands before you and you ask yourself "What is he going to say?"'. Although Clausen later revised his opinions, there was, in 1882, a new and exciting way of thinking. Such was his rigour that Dewey Bates, who knew Clausen during the early 1880s, remarked that after his arrival in rural 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 labourers 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 corduroy trouser'13.

These were of course the very qualities that Clausen ascribed to Bastien-Lepage, and they lie behind the challenge posed for the first time in Gleaners. We can sense something of this in the extensive commentary on the picture which appeared in The Magazine of Art. Its reviewer noted that 'few painters have painted the truth about the English peasant as Mr George Clausen has done in his Gleaners'. While 'idyllic artists of our day' looked for 'daintily quaint sun-bonnets and white kerchiefs and neat shoes' in order to please 'London society', 'Mr Clausen has not allowed any pleasant fallacy to enter into his picture. In his work ... there are traces neither few nor insignificant of the ennobling influence of J-F Millet. It would seem to be his ambition ... to impart to his own treatment of motives of peasant life and peasant labour a something of eloquent sincerity, the dignified solemnity, the true heroic melancholy, which distinguish the work of the greatest modern painter ... In The Gleaners, he has produced an excellent picture - the earnest of which it is to be hoped, of still greater excellence to come. He shows us a little company of the poor, not in picturesque rags, but in garments of fact, gleaning the modern English fields. In this he has shown a true painter's instinct, and approved himself a worthy disciple of the prophet he elects to follow. Until gleaning is done by machinery - an improvement which may come to pass in the progessive future - it will remain one of the simple and elementary incidents of human life, and therefore one most fit for art'14.

Five years later, critics remained divided over such records of the ordinary working conditions of English fields. Although Wilfrid Meynell found The Gleaners more 'commonplace' than Clausen's later A Field-Hand, 1883 (private collection), he admitted that 'the study of light is very beatiful, delicate and true'15. 'Beauty' occured randomly in nature. It was not the result of artistic formulae or conventions.

Clausen returned to the theme of The Gleaners in 1900 in a pastel shown at the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours (with the Fine Art Society, 1988). This gave rise to a series of canvases like Gleaners coming Home, 1904 (Tate Britain) and The Gleaners Returning, 1908 (fig.2, Tate Britain)16. By this time the painter had succumbed to the atmospherics of impressionism and abandoned the stark factual treatment of his earlier manner. These later gleaners are not seen in the even light of a grey day, but carry their wheatsheaves through the dappled evening sunlight of an English country lane. Although the edges are softened and the colour is more mellow, the tough commitment to the representation of English rural life, first experienced in the robust Gleaners of 1882, remains.

We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for providing the above catalogue entry.

1 Anonymous, 'The Grosvenor Gallery', The Illustrated London News, 6 May 1882, p. 438.
2 Anonymous, 'The Grosvenor Gallery', The Spectator, 13 May 1882, p. 626.
3 Anonymous, 'The Grosvenor Gallery - Second Notice', The Spectator, 24 June 1882, p. 831.
4 Sir George Clausen, R.A., 'Autobiographical Notes', Artwork, no. 25, Spring 1931, p. 19. quoted in K. McConkey, Sir George Clausen RA 1852-1944, 1980, Exhibition catalogue, Bradford and Tyne and Wear Museum, p. 29.
5 op. cit., pp. 34-41; for a consideration of Clausen's motives in the move to Childwick Green, see Anna Gruetzner Robins, 'Living the Simple Life: George Clausen at Childwick Green', in D.P. Corbett, Y. Holt and F. Russell (ed.), The Geographies of Englishness, Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940, Yale, 2002, pp. 1-27. See also K. McConkey, 'Figures in a Field: Winter Work by Sir George Clausen RA' in Art at Auction, The Year at Sotheby's 1982-3, 1983, pp. 72-7.
6 RAM Stevenson, 'George Clausen', The Art Journal, 1890, p. 292. 7 K. McConkey, 1980, pp. 38-9, 102.
8 Gangs, itinerant groups of harvesters, were, at this point, dying out in the home counties as rural labour became unionized and British farmers faced challenges from mechanization and cheap foreign imports of grain. These changing conditions have been extensively discussed in recent years. For further reference see G.E. Mingay, Rural Life in Victorian England, 1976 (William Heinemann) and Howard Newby, Country Life, A Social History of Rural England, 1987, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
9 For futher reference see Annette Bourrut Lacouture, Jules Breton, Painter of Peasant Life, Exhibition catalogue, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, 2002, pp.79-107.
10 For a full consideration of this work see, G. Hedberg (intro.), Millet's Gleaners, 1978, Exhibition catalogue, Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
11 For a full consideration of this work see K. McConkey, 'The Bouguereau of the Naturalists: Bastien-Lepage and British Art', Art History, Vol I, no. 3, 1978, pp. 371-82; see also K. McConkey, 'Rustic Naturalism in Britain', in GP Weisberg (ed.), The European Realist Tradition, Indiana, 1983, pp. 215-228; G.P. Weisberg, Beyond Impressionism, The Naturalist Impulse, New York, 1999, pp. 108-147.
12 The Spectator, 12 June 1880, p. 751.
13 D. Bates, 'George Clausen ARA', The Studio, Vol 5, 1895, p. 7.
14 Anonymous, 'Current Art', in The Magazine of Art, 1882, p. 438.
15 W. Meynell (ed.), The Modern School of Art, circa 1887, Vol IV, p. 131.
16 For further reference see K. McConkey, 1980, pp. 81-82.