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Lot Essay
By the end of 1878 George Clausen had moved from Moore Park Road in Fulham to 4 The Mall, Hampstead and although he continued to produce Dutch-style genre pictures in the manner of the much-admired Hague School masters, new elements entered his work2. He now aspired to what one critic described as 'studio arrangements of decorative drapery', often depicting an elegant, unidentified model whose bone structure and dark eyes recall the facial type of James Tissot's Mrs Kathleen Newton, who lived nearby (see The Convalescent, The Warrior's Daughter, c. 1878-87, Manchester City Art Galleries). This young woman also appears in the work of Clausen's close friend in his student years, Fred Brown.3
Clausen deployed his model in two ways. She appears in a group of interiors that culminate in 1880 with La Pense (Glasgow Museums). Shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, this depicts the now familiar model, seated in a drawing room, wearing a fur cape and holding a 'knot' of violets. According to one contemporary reviewer, it revealed 'a decided French character in the treatment'.4
The influences of French art are, if anything, more obvious in the second series of canvases featuring Clausen's mysterious black-clad woman. These began in 1879 with a work entitled Trafalgar Square, (unlocated), showing the young woman approached by a ragged flower-seller, under the watchful eye of a policeman. This was followed by A Winter Afternoon, 1880 (unlocated), in which a young mother and her daughter, pass a hot chestnut vendor in a snowy London street. Within a short time, these London genre pictures give way to what are clearly recognizable as Hampstead street scenes.
Clausen's ambitions for this group of pictures was clear from the start. In an art world dominated by the grand manner classicism of Frederic Leighton, and Clausen's erstwhile teacher, Edwin Lumsden Long, he was striking out for modernity. He had witnessed the emergence of a second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism with the arrival of Edward Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, but this too was rejected in favour of a more audacious form of social recording which, in the first instance, was practiced by émigrés like Tissot and Guiseppe de Nittis. For these painters, the city was a kind of phantasmagoria in which all classes and conditions of humanity mixed. The passion for describing 'types' in a quasi-sociological manner descended ultimately from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861-5) and was translated into visual form by illustrators to The Graphic such as Frank Holl, Hubert von Herkomer and Luke Fildes.5 The documentarist sensibility which developed in these more sophisticated street scenes was to underscore Clausen's later allegiance to the rustic naturalism of Bastien-Lepage after 1881.
The sequence began with works like Schoolgirls, (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), continued with In the Street (fig. 1, sold in these Rooms, 11 June 2003, lot 10) and the present work, and culminated with A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, 1881 (Bury Art Gallery).6
This large canvas, destined for the Royal Academy, contains a variety of street characters, including a group of road builders - one of whom appears in the background of The Morning Walk. House building in the area around Hampstead Heath was to be famously portrayed in Alfred East's A New Neighbourhood, 1887 (unlocated).7 As Clausen's pictures make clear, labourers from the Hertfordshire fields, wearing smocks, were sometimes drawn into the city for this purpose. Respectable young mothers with their children make an uneasy pairing with these rough characters. Significantly, the present picture also contains an indication of the child who was to occupy centre-stage in the Academy canvas. While French contemporaries such as Jean-François Raffaelli would often represent the city's hinterland as a place of danger and depravity, the new London street in the present picture contains no such menace for Clausen's elegant young woman taking her morning walk.
1 A notable connoisseur, Kay's portrait was painted by Stanley Spencer (see Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer, catalogue raisonné, 1992, (Phaidon), no. 316), and his collection was exhibited at Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield in 1953.
2 Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen, RA 1852-1944, 1980 (exhibition catalogue, Tyne and Wear and Bradford Museums), pp. 15-22.
3 See for instance, Brown's Waiting for the Ferry, 1880 (unlocated, sold Sotheby's 13 November 1985).
4 The Magazine of Art, 1880, p. 398; quoted in McConkey 1980, p. 27. This picture for instance contains a print of Henri Gervex's Retour du Bal, 1879, framed on the wall in the background, as an obvious indication of its modern French sources.
5 For a fuller discussion of this phenomenon see Ronald Pickvance, English Influences on Vincent van Gogh, 1974-5 (Exhibition catalogue, Arts Council).
6 For A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, see McConkey 1980, pp. 27-8. In the Street (see Christie's, 11 December 2008, entry by Kenneth McConkey), may represent a wider, more crowded central London pavement, while the newly laid roads of Hampstead are devoid of traffic.
7 See Paul Johnson and Kenneth McConkey, Alfred East, Lyrical Landscape Painter, 2009 (Sansom and Co), pp. 43-4.
Clausen deployed his model in two ways. She appears in a group of interiors that culminate in 1880 with La Pense (Glasgow Museums). Shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, this depicts the now familiar model, seated in a drawing room, wearing a fur cape and holding a 'knot' of violets. According to one contemporary reviewer, it revealed 'a decided French character in the treatment'.
The influences of French art are, if anything, more obvious in the second series of canvases featuring Clausen's mysterious black-clad woman. These began in 1879 with a work entitled Trafalgar Square, (unlocated), showing the young woman approached by a ragged flower-seller, under the watchful eye of a policeman. This was followed by A Winter Afternoon, 1880 (unlocated), in which a young mother and her daughter, pass a hot chestnut vendor in a snowy London street. Within a short time, these London genre pictures give way to what are clearly recognizable as Hampstead street scenes.
Clausen's ambitions for this group of pictures was clear from the start. In an art world dominated by the grand manner classicism of Frederic Leighton, and Clausen's erstwhile teacher, Edwin Lumsden Long, he was striking out for modernity. He had witnessed the emergence of a second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism with the arrival of Edward Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, but this too was rejected in favour of a more audacious form of social recording which, in the first instance, was practiced by émigrés like Tissot and Guiseppe de Nittis. For these painters, the city was a kind of phantasmagoria in which all classes and conditions of humanity mixed. The passion for describing 'types' in a quasi-sociological manner descended ultimately from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861-5) and was translated into visual form by illustrators to The Graphic such as Frank Holl, Hubert von Herkomer and Luke Fildes.
The sequence began with works like Schoolgirls, (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), continued with In the Street (fig. 1, sold in these Rooms, 11 June 2003, lot 10) and the present work, and culminated with A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, 1881 (Bury Art Gallery).
This large canvas, destined for the Royal Academy, contains a variety of street characters, including a group of road builders - one of whom appears in the background of The Morning Walk. House building in the area around Hampstead Heath was to be famously portrayed in Alfred East's A New Neighbourhood, 1887 (unlocated).